Expanding a year-old alliance with Toys 'R' Us, Amazon.com on Monday launched Imaginarium.com, an online store for specialty and educational toys.
The store is the third Toys 'R' Us property to go online at Amazon, following the launches of Toysrus.com last fall and Babiesrus.com earlier this year.
The cobranded Imaginarium.com store will be equipped with a special search mechanism that will enable buyers to find educational toys according to the specific skills that the toys are designed to help develop.
"Imaginarium.com is designed to help parents find learning toys that are actually fun and suited to their child's personality and interests," said John Barbour, CEO of Toysrus.com, the online unit of Toys 'R' Us, in a statement.
As with the two earlier online stores, Toys 'R' Us-owned Imaginarium will oversee product selection, planning, buying and inventory management. Amazon, for its part, will manage the Web site and customer service, as well as the warehousing and product distribution.
Toys 'R' Us purchased Imaginarium, the largest specialty toy retailer in the U.S., in July 1999. The 42-store chain is slated to expand to more than 200 sites during the next few years. Imaginarium is also launching "stores within a store" at Toys 'R' Us locations nationwide.
The alliance with Toys 'R' Us, widely viewed as a success on Wall Street, was Amazon's first foray into a major effort to put its e-commerce infrastructure to work for other retailers. Since then, Amazon has signed agreements – each structured differently – with Borders, AOL Time Warner's online shopping malls, and British bookseller Waterstone's.
