Amazon Go Store Shakes up O2O Shopping

For years, the team at PBJ Marketing has tried to predict the future of physical retail and online commerce. Well folks, based on a recent announcement from Amazon, the future is now.The online retail giant is introducing the Amazon Go Store – an 1,800-square-foot retail center in Seattle that allows shoppers to grab the items they want, skip the checkout line (they don’t exist), and walk out the front door.Sounds too good to be true, right? Interestingly, there’s a bit more to it than that. Customers require a supported smartphone, an Amazon account, and the free Go app. Then, by utilizing technologies used in self-driving cars, including computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning, any items picked up is added to a customer’s virtual shopping cart and upon exiting the store, the balance is charged to the customer’s Amazon account.If successful, the Go Store model will make way for a new dimension to online-to-offline (O2O) shopping. Through the Amazon Go app, the retailer will not only be able to see what type of products a customer purchased but what competing products a customer examined beforehand. This sort of behavioral profiling is not easily obtained online.Read more about the future of O2O shopping at MarTech Today