Eric Ravenscraft
Amazon’s push into the retail space isn’t stopping at checkout-free stores. Today, Amazon is launching Amazon 4-Star, a new physical store in New York exclusively for items with a 4-star rating and up.
The new store, opening in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, is a showcase of the data Amazon has gathered on its products. All items in the store will have a rating on Amazon.com of over 4 stars, and Amazon says all the products in the store collectively have an average rating of 4.4. Many of the products are Amazon’s own—you can expect to find Echo products on every other shelf—but also third-party products ranging from card games to kitchen tools.
User ratings aren’t the only data that Amazon is pulling from for its store. Most Wished For collections will show off items that are frequently added to Amazon wish lists. Frequently Bought Together collections will mimic the feature from the site that suggests certain items that pair well together. Amazon collects and analyzes a lot of data about the products it sells, so it has a lot to pull from to build a store designed to optimize selling you stuff.
Amazon Prime members will get the online price for anything that they buy in the store, which presumably means non-Prime members may end up paying more. Naturally, Amazon will offer customers the chance to sign up for Prime in store and immediately get the discount.
It’s unclear just yet whether Amazon plans to roll this style of store out to more cities. After opening the company’s much more technically difficult Amazon Go store to the public earlier this year, Amazon is now planning to open up to 3,000 more of those stores. The 4-Star store model may follow suit if it proves similarly popular.
Source: Amazon
