In case you didn’t notice, an intriguing little development in retailing occurred last month. JustFab, the online-only store based in El Segundo, opened an actual shop in the Glendale Galleria shopping mall.

Oh, sure. There have been reports of other e-tailers opening or talking about opening brick-and-mortar stores. But maybe none more important than this one.

Why? For one, JustFab is doing just fine. It just acquired its competitor, ShoeDazzle, and raised a total of $149 million from investors, making it among L.A.’s best-funded tech companies. In other words, it’s plenty successful in its online space and doesn’t need to stretch itself into a traditional retailer for any apparent reason.

For another, online retailing is in JustFab’s DNA. When the company started in 2010, it was an early adopter of the subscription plan, which calls on women to pay a set amount each month in return for regular deliveries of shoes designed to fit her profile. It’s a business model built on and for the Internet for young, with-it customers.

So for this über e-tailer to open a regular retail shop – in Glendale! – and for its co-chief executive to declare that “JustFab is now an omnichannel brand,” well, that’s as shocking as dogs befriending cats or Nixon going to China, even if it’s not quite on the order of an Obama-negotiating-with-Boehner kind of rapprochement.

But the more I think about this, the more I like it. I hope we see a lot more of this kind of arrangement in which online retailers open physical stores. (We’ve already seen the opposite: Traditional retailers that push online sales.) In other words, we may start seeing many more hybrid retailers. JustFab may be in the vanguard of a movement again.

I don’t know about you, but my interest in online shopping has waned. Sure, the online inventory appears infinite; virtually any impossible-to-find object can be located with a few keystrokes. But that’s where the fun ends. I don’t like giving my credit card number to some strange company, especially if it’s in a country I can’t pronounce. And then you have to decide whether to have the item delivered to your work – where there’s a fair chance it will be stolen before or after it gets to you – or at home – where there’s an excellent chance it will be swiped from your doorstep.

And I presume you’ve had this experience: Full of anticipation, you slit open a delivered package, peer inside, pause and declare: “Well, if I had known it was going to look like this. …” That’s followed by an examination of the return policy.

Wouldn’t you like to shop like this?: You browse online and place an order from your home computer, then pick up that item from an actual store a day or two later as you’re driving home from work. (I’d hope the store was in a place more convenient than Glendale, but that’s another subject.) That way, you could refuse the item on the spot if it turned out that you didn’t like it.

Alternatively, you could shop in a physical store that’s part of an online store. It may be small (JustFab’s is only 3,000 square feet), but you could flip through a computer to see the myriad products. Then you could order in your color and size and have them delivered, perhaps to your home or at the store, whichever is more convenient. Best of all, if you’re buying shoes or apparel, you could try them on. There’s no good alternative for the dressing room.

In fact, that’s pretty much what JustFab’s co-chief, Adam Goldenberg, said in announcing the new store: “We’ve heard from our members that being able to see and try on products before they buy is still an important part of the shopping experience for them.”

The first wave of online stores kind of wowed us. They offered real advantages over physical stores. But now that we’ve gotten accustomed to them, we see that they have limitations and drawbacks – mainly because they are exclusively an online experience.

Likewise, the traditional shops may have well-known drawbacks, but they have advantages of their own. Some of those we’d like to retain.

That’s why it wouldn’t be surprising to see more retailers do something similar to what JustFab is doing: try to find a middle ground and offer the best of both.

Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].