Amazon is steadily looking to integrate technology into most of its experiences, the latest being augmented reality-equipped physical stores. The e-commerce giant now plans on expanding its reach beyond brick-and-mortar stores for just books and groceries. It aims to provide customers with an advanced furniture and appliances shopping experience, reports New York Times.
Citing a person briefed on the discussions, the publication further mentions that Amazon has considered using forms of virtual, as well as augmented reality to ease the choice-making process for individuals. Their new stores will most likely enable customers to just walk in and check out how certain items, such as stoves, couches or even a television set will look in their homes. And this is also important as most of the customers want a first-hand look at the products before pulling the trigger on the purchase.
The furniture store will be more focused on the homely aspect, while the electronics store will be inclined more towards the concept of Apple stores. Amazon is already trying to sell some of its devices, such as Kindles and Fire devices, in its physical bookstores but is now looking to separate the same as its product lineup grows. The electronics store, as NYT suggests, will lay “heavy emphasis” on the hardware and service aspect like Echo speakers and Prime Video or Music.
We’re all well aware that Amazon has already been killing competition in the online retail space, but it now looking to put several retail chains out of business as well. In the States, the company is fiercely competing with departmental store giant WalMart, who is looking to put an end to its monopoly in the online space. WalMart acquired Amazon-rival Jet.com for a whopping $3 billion just last year.
But, Amazon is not completely forgetting the essence of its business model and would continue to employing the services of its online platform to deliver the piece of furniture or appliance directly to their homes. This, however, shows that the e-commerce giant which once considered offline stores as obsolete is now opening their own but with a twinge of technology.
On the other hand, the e-commerce giant has already proposed the idea of automating the shopping experience using computer vision and artificial intelligence technologies. Called Amazon Go, the retail stores will enable the customer to just walk-in, pick up items you would like to purchase and walk out without having to interact with a cashier or anybody else.
Here, the primary objective is to simplify the daily shopping experience, especially be removing queues during the billing procedure. It uses a walk-out technology to automatically add items to your shopping cart and deduct the total shopping expense from your Amazon account, once you’ve exited the store. Such tech-packed stores will be opening for access to the public in the coming months.
