2 minute read
THE WEEK IN RETAIL ISSUE 46
EDITOR’S COMMENT
AMAZON FRESH IS JUST ANOTHER DATA PLAY
Having been lucky enough to visit the original Amazon Go store in Seattle with a bunch of retailers, I was just as interested as everyone else last week to see the global tech giant open its first Amazon Fresh store in London.
What fascinated me most about the new London store was exactly the same thing that fascinated me when I visited Seattle a few years back: the reaction the store provokes. Generalising enormously, most reactions were around how good or bad the store is when compared to other stores. How it looks, what the range is like, what the pricing’s like, that sort of thing. And, of course, the tech.
The tech works. We know that for a fact, and we also know that it is effectively unique in the UK – at least in terms of being applied on a commercial scale in the real world. There are some great cashierless solutions out there, but none as frictionless as Amazon’s ‘just walk out’ tech.
But the most fascinating thing about the reactions to the new store is that comparing the store with another store in these terms – range, merchandising, in-store tech and so on – is utterly beside the point. The point of Amazon Fresh is customer data. Which should hardly come as a surprise because the point of everything that Amazon does is data.
What Amazon’s bricks and mortar stores do is begin washing away the boundary that exists between online and offline sales channels. To put it in a slightly different way, walking into Amazon Fresh is basically like walking into the Amazon website. To even get into Amazon Fresh, you have to scan the app – thereby identifying yourself. That way Amazon can track everything you do in the store, just the way they can when you visit its website.
Stuff you bought, stuff you lingered over but didn’t buy, stuff you put in your basket but then took out, how long you looked at a certain fixture – all these things are standard fare in online analytics. But now Amazon is bringing those same principles to the real world. The implications are beyond enormous.
Amazon Fresh is just another data play, but it’s one with very significant ramifications for everyone competing with Amazon – which pretty much means everyone.
