Amazon Style is a new type of physical store from the online shopping giant that will focus on clothing, shoes and other fashion accessories, the company announced today. It is set to open at The Americana at Brand mall in Los Angeles later this year, where it will be Amazon’s “first-ever physical clothing store.”
In line with Amazon’s existing outlets, the new Amazon Style store is packed with shopping technology. Amazon says clothes racks will feature QR codes, which customers can scan to see available sizes, colors, customer ratings and product details. Then, with the push of a button, the selected items will be sent to a fitting room to be tried on without having to rummage through the shelves first. Amazon will also send additional items that its algorithms think you might like. A promotional video shows how Amazon’s app will alert customers when a fitting room is ready.
The fitting rooms will also be equipped with touch screens, so customers can request that more items be brought to them. Items can be purchased in-store or saved in the Amazon Shopping app to purchase later. Alternatively, customers at home can use the app to find the clothes they want, before having them delivered to the Amazon Style store to try on in person. The store will support Amazon One, a technology that lets you pay for items using the palm of your hand for identity verification.
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It is conspicuously absent from any mention of Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” technology, which it previously used in its own Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores, as well as a growing number of external stores, to allow customers to recover items and exit without needing to pay for them at a checkout.
Amazon says its new store is much more space-efficient, with Amazon Style able to offer “more than double the number of styles” than a traditional store of similar size. But if it works, it also looks like it could remove some of the pain points of in-store shopping, like having to awkwardly walk through a half-dressed store in search of a different size.
Although it appears to rely heavily on automation, Amazon says its new Style store will still have traditional employees, who will focus on customer service, delivering items to fitting rooms, assisting with customers at checkout, back office management and payment processing. .