NEW YORK – Amazon.com has plans to open an actual store in New York City just ahead of this year’s holiday shopping season, the Wall Street Journal reports. The brick-and-mortar location will be the first in the online retailer’s 20 years in business.

The space, across from the Empire State Building, will essentially be a mini-warehouse with scaled down products for same-day delivery within New York. Also available at the store will be online order pickups and process of returns and exchanges. The store will likely also sell Kindle e-readers, Fire smartphones and Fire TV boxes.

A physical store will help to market the Amazon brand. “Same-day delivery, ordering online and picking up in store are ideas that are really catching on. Amazon needs to be at the center of that,” said Matt Nemer, an analyst with Wells Fargo.

Sources familiar with the plans stressed that the company is experimenting with the store, which might not last past this year, depending on how everything goes. If it does make it, the New York store might be the first of other locations scattered around the United States.

The option to order online and pickup in-store has been a popular feature of many retailers, such as Walmart, Macy’s and the Home Depot. Amazon has spent years investigating a physical store, while the company used to sell its Kindle at Target and Walmart locations before those retailers yanked the devices in 2012. Amazon also dabbled in pop-up stores run by subsidiaries, such as Kindle vending machines in malls. Its lockers in convenience stores and other retail locations have proven to be popular with customers, too.