Yesterday we reported that Amazon was planning to close all 68 of its physical book stores, pop up shops and 4-star locations in the United States and United Kingdom.

The e-commerce giant told Reuters that physical retail remains an important way for it to reach shoppers.

It will continue to work on other concepts, such as its recently announced fashion location in greater Los Angeles and checkout-free grocery stores.

Amazon only opened the doors to the first Amazon 4-star store outside of the US during October of last year.

So somewhat understandably the move has some scratching their heads, although others have stressed that this is Amazon playing a long game.

Richard Hammond, Uncrowd: “The 4-star stores don't work, the bookshops are good. But Amazon doesn't do inefficiency, so closing confusing extensions and going faster on Go is entirely rational.”

Andy Dawson, Curium Solutions: “The ability to test and learn, then act accordingly is a discipline many businesses find difficult to follow.

Both formats (books and 4-store) were an attempt to bring digital expertise to the retail format. They did not stack up, but the learnings will be rolled into new retail formats such as Amazon Style, leveraging digital and AI insights.

Progression is never a straight line, especially when you are testing new things.

It’s tempting to keep pushing on or simply give up. But the most effective route is to bank the learns and wins, then change accordingly.

The big question is whether you view poor results as a failure or an opportunity to leverage new insights and learnings?

Time, vested interest and healthy debate are some of the barriers to progression, when results aren’t as good as hoped for.”

Celia Van Wickel, Kantar: “These stores were never significant growth drivers and, given recent ambitions, they do not align with goals.

However, they are losing a massive store count in doing this. Many of these stores are in shopping malls.

I would encourage them to keep a few locations to try new formats such as a resale store or test other category focused formats as they are with Amazon Style.

I hope Amazon has an aggressive expansion plan for Fresh stores and Go suburban stores to maintain and ideally grow their physical footprint.”

Scott Thompson, Editor and Founder, RTIH: “Amazon are not the physical retail messiah. They’re just very naughty boys and girls with massive tech budgets.

The UK 4-star locations were all over the place and uninspiring. They won’t be missed, although obviously I hope that the employees find other jobs.

Far from Amazon representing the future of bricks and mortar retail, checkout-free tech etc etc, the jury is out as to whether the company actually gets stores at all.”

Faisal Masud, CEO, fabric: “Not entirely shocking. Amazon doesn’t understand the grocery business or physical retail. They continue to build solutions looking for problems that don’t exist.”