Amazon announced Thursday it is opening a 30,000-square-foot brick-and-mortar retail location in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale later this year called Amazon Style. The company’s first-ever physical apparel store will offer clothing, footwear, and accessories, centered on a phone-first shopping experience.
Shopping from your smartphone
Amazon says that their mobile app will be the bedrock of the Amazon Style store experience, as the company attempts to blend online and instore shopping.
In order to maintain a decluttered and streamlined appearance, only individual clothing items will be displayed, with more inventory kept in the back. Customers can scan QR codes of the items they want using the Amazon mobile app to view product details including customer ratings, colors, and available sizes.
Using the Amazon Shopping app, customers can click a button and have items delivered to a fitting room or directly to the checkout counter. Amazon Style shoppers can also save their scanned items in the Amazon Shopping app to revisit or order at a later time.
Machine learning
Amazon Style will be tracking the feedback, likes and dislikes of each customer in an effort to personalize the shopping experience.
The items that customers rate and scan while they’re shopping will be analyzed by an algorithm, which will then recommend other items according to cost, style, and fit.
“Our machine learning algorithms produce tailored, real-time recommendations for each customer as they shop,” said Amazon Style managing director Simoina Vasen in her Thursday announcement. “As customers browse the store and scan items that catch their eye, we’ll recommend picks just for them.”
While store employees will be present to assist customers at checkout, individual shoppers can check out with Amazon One, a service that scans individual customers’ palm prints. The technology is being hailed by the company as a “contactless identity service that uses your palm – just hover to enter, identify, and pay.”
Futuristic fitting rooms
If a shopper is ready to try on clothes, they will enter a virtual queue for a dressing room that can be unlocked with their smartphone once it is available.
Rather than physically carrying items over, shoppers can add clothing to a fitting room using the Amazon Shopping app. An Amazon employee delivers the requested items to a fitting room.
In the fitting room, customers will find both the items they requested, along with recommended options chosen based on their browsing history and preferences.
Fitting rooms will feature touch screen displays where customers can browse additional options, and request different sizes and items that can be delivered within minutes.
Correction, January 20, 20 21: A previous version of this article misstated how Amazon One is used.
