Amazon has seem to have gone full circle. After being an instrumental player in closing down old brick-and-mortar clothing stores, it has now opened its in-person retail shop Los Angeles, California. Called ‘Amazon Style,’ it is the latest addition to the company’s Whole Foods, cashier-less Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh grocery stores.
So, how is it different from your normal clothing stores? For starters, Amazon Style’s primary focus will be on “minimizing the hassle of trying on clothing.” Relying on AI tech, every piece of clothing with a QR code, which can be scanned by the customer in case they want to try it out. However, instead of shuffling through sizes and lugging an entire shopping cart to the trial room, the clothes will automatically appear in the designated trial room.
Another one of its convenient features includes the ability to order clothes online, have them delivered at the store and return them right there and then in case they’re not up to your liking. As far as options are concerned, customers have a whole array of brands to choose from including Levi’s, Tommy Hilfiger, Champion and more.
As mentioned earlier, the Amazon Style store will not feature the cashier-less walkout ability of an Amazon Go store. Instead, you’ll have regular employees there to assist you from beginning to end.
Coming back to the fitting rooms, each will come equipped with a touchscreen monitor that will not only suggest customers clothes to choose from, based on your algorithm, but will also ask you to rate your chosen items. And yes, you can use your Amazon Pay to check out your purchase.
The irony here, however, is the store will be open during normal business hours, like other retail shops, and unlike the website where you shop 24/7. For now, it seems like Amazon is creating a solution for a problem which doesn’t exist. The whole point of e-commerce websites was to move away from the traditional walk-in store for convenience’s sake. It now remains to be seen how this experiment will perform.
(Image credits: Amazon)
