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Reversed O2O: Why Amazon Is Going Against The Current
While offline businesses are rushing to create their online presence, one giant online retailer is doing the exact opposite. What exactly is Amazon doing with Amazon Books and Amazon Go?
Since launched in 1995, Amazon.com has been strongly establishing its name and inarguably becoming a major contributor in the approaching demise of offline bookstores across the USA, crushing conventional offline bookstores such as Barnes & Nobles and bringing about phased roll-out of Borders.
Photo Courtesy of Amazon
On February 2015, the first of now half-dozen Amazon offline bookstores was opened. Since then they have doubled as gadget emporia, a score of campus bookstores that don’t sell books and convenience stores without cashiers. The conglomerate company is really gearing towards providing everything from A to Z, as their logo suggests.
Tapping into the advantages of offline shopping experience
It seems that Amazon realized about the offline shopping experience where people could actually touch and feel the book among other things they sell with their senses.
Photo Courtesy of Time Magazine
Not only people can actually touch, with Amazon’s bricks and mortar stores, people can save shipping expenses and pick the orders they made online instead.
Duplicating online benefits into offline
Jennifer Cast, the VP of Amazon Books told Business Insider that their special sauce is knowing the reading habits and passions of a city through their Amazon.com data. With the data they have, the offline stores sell only books with over 4.5 stars on Amazon.com and different book stocks according the reading habits and passions over cities. That action could bring out the efficiency in each store’s operational expenses.
Online customers review card is placed under each book for the offline customers. Photo courtesy of Amazon
Amazon’s ambitious physical retail plan is expanding to Amazon Go, new cashier-less convenience store. They’re developing so-called Just Walk Out technology for the same add-to-cart-and-check-out method as online stores where people could just take come to the store, scan the Amazon barcode from the application, take what they need and the receipt will be send to their Amazon account.
Photo courtesy of The Verge
The invention definitely saves time on grocery shopping and could manage inventories efficiently and accurately from the warehouse, to the end consumer. Amazon also might license its technology to other retailers.
