Amazon Style Store Full of Technologies: A Trend for the Future?

June 3, 2022 Staff

By: Heekyeong Jo and B. Ellie Jin

Amazon plans to open its first physical fashion store, Amazon Style store, in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, California. The store consists of women’s and men’s apparel, shoes, and accessories from a mix of well-known and emerging fashion brands at the same prices as Amazon’s online prices. This store constitutes an innovative technology-based store environment to provide consumers with a convenient in-store shopping experience. There are key developments Amazon style stores utilize to provide high-tech shopping experiences to consumers.

Connection of mobile app and physical store in one dimension

Consumers can experience shopping without boundaries between online and offline using Amazon’s shopping mobile app. By scanning the QR code of the product, customers can check the product details such as the color, size, and customer ratings of the available product. Then, they can order the product to the fitting room to try it on or to the checkout counter to pick it up immediately. Even after they leave the store, customers can continue shopping online and purchase products that they have selected in-store through the online website or Amazon mobile application. Also, if they find a product that they like online, they can visit the physical store to try it on.

Real-time recommendation via fitting room screen

Amazon Style store actualizes an automated store environment. This store provides real-time recommendations of products to customers. This is accomplished through customized personalization based on consumers’ browsing history and preferences via the development of its machine learning algorithms. By using a touchscreen in the fitting room, shoppers can check other recommended products for similar style, fit, and budget to their preferred product, and they can select additional products with a single touch.

Technology interactive fitting room

Amazon’s reimagined fitting room relieves consumers of the agony experienced offline. Shoppers do not have to carry products themselves, and if they want to wear different size or color products in the fitting room, they can order other products to the fitting room through the touchscreen. Consumers don’t have to leave the fitting room until they’re satisfied. The product they want to finally purchase can then be moved to the pick-up counter with one touch. Even at the moment of checkout, customers can experience convenient payment. Fast checkout is possible by a simple wave of the hand through Amazon One, a palm recognition payment system.

If the entire store environment is automated, there may be concerns that the existing clerk positions will disappear. However, Amazon assures that they’ll still offer many jobs. The store will employ hundreds of employees to provide effective customer service, deliver items to fitting rooms, merchandise the store to induce effective discovery, keep the inventory system correct, help consumers at checkout, and manage back-of-house operations. Through this physical apparel store, we can see an opportunity to create jobs.

Amazon recently announced that it plans to close 68 brick-and-mortar retail stores across the U.S. and U.K. such as Amazon Book, Amazon 4-star, and Amazon Pop Up shop because of the lagging sales growth of the physical stores. Instead, it will concentrate on this Amazon Style store as well as grocery stores such as Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods, and Amazon Go convenience stores. The Amazon Style store is a new experiment in the apparel field that attempts to blend online and offline shopping experiences by leveraging technology. Given that about half of Amazon’s physical stores – Amazon Book, Amazon 4-star, and Amazon Pop Up shop- will be closed, it will be interesting to see how this new experiment will unfold.

Reference

Vasen, S. (2022, January 20). Amazon reimagines in-store shopping with Amazon Style. Amazon. https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-reimagines-in-store-shopping-with-amazon-style

Meyersohn, N. (2022, January 20). Amazon is opening a clothing store next to Nordstrom and JC Penney. CNN Business. https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/20/business/amazon-clothing-store-retail/index.html

Kraus, R. (2022, January 21). Amazon’s high-tech clothing store concept: Just turn retail workers into warehouse gophers. Mashable. https://mashable.com/article/amazon-styles-clothing-store