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Originally Posted by SensualPoet
Indigo continues to be profitable -- barely -- which is in contrast to the Borders / Barnes & Noble situation in the US.
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Just FYI, B&N is still profitable, iirc -- or would be if they weren't investing heavily in ebooks. Borders is the one that's dead meat.
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Originally Posted by SensualPoet
But what is clear is the management really hasn't a formal strategy to improve the physical retailing business: add more toys, private label housewares, more food related items, cafés, bring back comfy chairs ....
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None of that solves the problem that physical stores, including mega-stores, can only carry a small fraction of the number of titles of an online site. Most ebook stores already carry 10x more titles than a typical mega-store.
Cafes might in some cases get people in the door, but that doesn't help if they just browse books there and buy them online -- or that it pits them against established coffee shops. As to selling toys and so forth, a) there are lots of other places to buy stuff like that, and b) the more junk you add, the more you dilute the brand.
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Originally Posted by SensualPoet
Remarkably, for the owner of Kobo, there isn't a peep on how to integrate offsite sales with onsite ones. Every Kobo sold in store ought to be tagged to the location and percentage of sales be earmarked back to that store.
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Uhh... Why?
Kobo almost certainly already gets general demographic and geographic data, e.g. they'll know that units sold in NYC and Toronto. They certainly know the addresses of the people buying ebooks through them. There is absolutely no reason to throw away revenues to a store that doesn't contribute to sales.
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Originally Posted by SensualPoet
...the wifi editions should be able to receive a Kobo / Indigo blog and report events at the local store. The cross-selling opportunities are intense, inexpensive to implement and apparently overlooked.
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No, I think we can overlook them, since these kinds of gimmicks are not going to produce nearly enough revenue to keep open a chain of megastores with massive overhead. Especially since the strongest competitors are online sites with lower overhead that can squeeze more revenue out of each sale.