Amazon To Open Convenience Store With No Lines

Customers will have to download the “Amazon Go” app and scan the same while going into the store. Moreover, it will subtract the cost of grocery to the shoppers’ Amazon account and send the receipt to their email. The Wall Street Journal says the retail giant is interested in starting a store that “combines in-store shopping with curbside pickups”.

Project Como, Amazon’s strategic plan to capture more of the USA groceries market, took another step forward this week when the e-commerce giant unveiled a new type of store that effectively eliminates the need for a checkout.

You can read and view more about Amazon’s Go here.

Amazon has since started opening pick-up centres where shoppers can fetch their web purchases.

Knowing who a customer is from the moment they walk through the door, and then tracking everything they do once inside, could be hugely useful to a company, said David Hewitt, an analyst with the consulting firm SapientRazorfish.

At the moment the store is only open to Amazon employees, but it is expected to open to the public in early 2017.

It’ll all be made possible through the company’s app called Amazon Go.

“We created the world’s most advanced shopping technology so you never have to wait in line”, the company said on its site.

The company will use computer vision, in-store sensors and machine learning to operate a smart store that tracks what users place in their shopping carts. You can simply pick up your purchases and walk out of the store. These cameras and sensors will then automatically detect when an item is taken off the shelves and added to the customer’s shopping cart.

In order for Amazon to actually know what you picked up from a shelf, how many items you got, and what things you put back, it needs to monitor you. You walk in with your smartphone, get the items you wanted, and walk out.

After all, Amazon is already building urban warehouses, including a 50,000-square-foot facility in midtown Manhattan, that handle same-day deliveries to local customers.

But Lempert doesn’t think Amazon will be keen to share its high-tech secrets with other retailers.

“Automatic checkout is absolutely a characteristic of the store of the future”, said Moorhead.

This is not Amazon’s first venture with retail.

However, if Amazon is not confident about how many items you took or what you took, they may end up confirming with you. But the high-tech, small-scale market could drastically change the way people shop and eventually eliminate the need for millions of workers, industry experts predict.