According to media reports, the online retail giant is currently negotiating the purchase of hundreds of retail stores across the United States in order to showcase its own products, including the Kindle tablet and Fire smartphone. Apparently, the stores will also act as delivery points for online orders.

Amazon, which last week reported annual sales of $89 billion, is discussing the acquisition of a part of the 4,000 stores that used to belong to the collapsed electronics chain RadioShack. However, both RadioShack and Amazon did not comment on the rumors.

If happened, this deal would be the biggest push of the Seattle-based company into traditional retailing and would also be a great challenge to Apple, which has a network of its brand stores across the US and the rest of the world.

In the meantime, it is known that Amazon’s own products had different performance over the year: while the Kindle has been a sales success, the Fire has flopped. The latter was marketed as a rival to the iPhone, but the third-party sales figures that were revealed last year suggested that the company had only sold 35,000 of new phones. Amazon had to lower the price of the device several times, and it finally was dropped from $199 (on a two-year contract) to just 99 cents. Moreover, the failure to shift enough smartphones amounted to a $170 million writedown in the 3 quarter of 2014.