We’ve already seen Amazon bring a hybrid online/offline experience when grocery shopping but now they’re bringing a similar concept store for apparel. The online retail giant has announced they will soon be launching their first Amazon Style store at The Americana at Brand shopping mall in Los Angeles. This will let customers shop in a physical store for clothes, footwear, and fashion accessories but also let them use all kinds of shopping tech to still give it an Amazon feel.
When you shop around the store, you’ll see QR codes on the racks and on specific items. When you scan, you’ll see different available sizes, colors, product details, and customer ratings. If you want to try out the item, there’s a button there that will send it and other items you can add to a fitting room. Once the room is ready, you’ll get a notification that you can proceed to the fitting room to try on the stuff that you chose.
The fitting room themselves will have touchscreens where you can add other items they want to try on and we assume that actual staff will bring them to you. If you don’t want to try on the items, there’s also a button you can tap to directly send them to the pickup counter if you’re sure to buy already. There’s no mention if the store will also use “Just Walk Out” technology which their other physical stores like Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh use, where customers don’t need to go to a counter and can just walk out, with the items in their bags automatically charged to their Amazon account.
There are also other ways the hybrid style of shopping will work. You can go to the store and check out the items but then buy online later on. The items you scan in the store will be saved in your Amazon Shopping app. You can also shop online and then ask them to deliver to the Amazon Style store so you can fit them first and if it doesn’t fit, the return or exchange will be done in-store. The prices in-store and Amazon.com are the same.
They have not yet given an exact date when the Amazon Style store will open except for “later this year”. We’ll find out more details before then but you can now watch the video they released to see how it will look like.
