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Amazon recently launched their technology concept, Amazon Go in Seattle. What does this mean to the future of retail? Do Amazon have what it takes to quickly scale the technology? Find out in the latest episode of the One Minute Digital Podcast.
KEY TAKE AWAYS
- Amazon Go is Amazon’s future take on how retail could work.
- The store is intended to be check-out free and seamless. Just use the Amazon app and cameras in the ceiling will track what you are doing.
- Amazon Go is an interesting technology demonstration.
- Returns and ID-checks are not seamless.
- There are two ways for Amazon to put it to market, either by licensing or by rolling it out as their own stores.
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the One Minute Digital Podcast, with your host, Daniel Westerstål.
Hi everyone and welcome.
Today, I have some quick thoughts on Amazon Go. Amazon Go is Amazon’s store that was launched in Seattle a couple of weeks ago. It’s basically Amazon goes 7-Eleven.
The main concept of the store is that you download the Amazon app to your cell phone. When you enter the store you scan a barcode from the app, and grab basically the stuff you want and walk out.
So there is no special barcodes or RFID-chips and that kind of stuff, instead there are a lot of cameras in the ceiling that keeps track of everything. So they can actually track when you are picking up an item or putting it back, or when walking away with it.
All the tech journalists where trying to shop-lift and trick the system into things. But I don’t think that anyone really succeeded, so I guess the cameras are working.
If you have worked with online sales or online marketing for a while the question I usually ask first is how would you handle returns. In the Amazon Go-case you tap in the app that you want to return something, but you don’t have to actually return it in the store. You can, but you don’t have to.
That’s kind of interesting, it will obviously not be scalable to do this because if you buy more expensive items, obviously the store would like them returned.
The other thing that is a bit interesting with Amazon Go, is that it’s supposed to render personnel useless. You would only have a very limited number of staff in the store. Right now Amazon Go can’t handle ID-checks, for example if you are buying booze or cigarettes and need to verify your ID. You still need to contact staff in the store. So there are still some things that are not really seamless yet, but I guess that will come in the future.
The big question though is how Amazon wants to play this going forward. One of the problems they have is how to scale this technology. This was still a pretty small shop, if you really want to open hundreds or thousands of stores across the world with this concept it will take a lot. I think some people have also speculated in that they will actually license the technology to companies like 7-Eleven.
That might be a good idea because Amazon doesn’t have to own a lot of stores with a big store footprint. If you look at other retailers right now you will see that it’s not a great time to own a lot of retail stores.
I still think it’s a nice technology demonstration on what can be done, but in order to scale it I think it will take some time. It will also take some time before we see this type of technology out in the market at profitable levels for the companies that are using it.
Ok that’s it for today, I hope to see you next time. Have a nice day!
Thank you, bye bye!