Amazon in particular and ecommerce in general is good at search. Amazon, very obviously, is Google for products. It’s good at giving you the best-seller you’ve heard of or the water filter for your fridge (the long tail). It’s not so good at the things in the middle
.. Amazon is great at selling you what’s on the table in the front of the bookshop, and at selling one copy a year of a million or so obscure titles, but it’s not very good at showing you what’s on the shelves at the back of the bookshop. It’s not so good at selling the mid-list – things that you didn’t know existed, or didn’t know you wanted, before you saw them.
.. These are things where a lot of the role of a physical shop is curation, recommendation and demand generation rather than logistics: the shop shapes your choice but it also tells you about things you didn’t plan to buy, and you can’t search for things you hadn’t thought about.