AmazonFresh Pickup : Amazon’s new itinerant retail element

Amazon has just launched, in its hometown Seattle, AmazonFresh Pickup, confirming its ambitions to increase its presence in the material world.

As a reminder, AmazonFresh is the delivery service that provides fresh, frozen and grocery products, active in the USA and the UK. AmazonFresh delivers to clients 7 days a week, between 7 am and 11 pm, in less than 2 hours.

The concept of AmazonFresh is the following: the client places an order on the AmazonFresh website, or app, after only 15 minutes, the client is able to collect their grocery order at the pick-up point, which has roughly 15 employees, with 3 to 5 of them working solely on loading the groceries into the cars.

At both pick-up points, “Shop online. Pick-up here” and even “Relax while we load your groceries” can be read on the signs, promising a slick and smooth customer journey.

An average wait of 5 minutes is expected when collecting the shopping. AmazonFresh Pickup is essentially reserved for Amazon Prime clients (package) that costs 99€/year.

This announcement follows the launch of AmazonGo at the end of 2016 (also in Seattle), a new store concept in which the client, having downloaded the dedicated app beforehand, picks-up all of the desired items and leaves, without having to make the slightest contact with a salesman, nor having to checkout. This is made possible tanks to advanced AI linked to highly efficient image recognition software.

Itinerant trade is in practice…

With Prime, Echo, Dash, AmazonGo, Alexa and AmazonFresh Pickup, it would seem that the American giant is transitioning from virtual to material. 

The Food market in the USA is estimated at 600 billion dollars. Amazon intends on establishing growth in this sector by gradually entering the material world, which is largely preempted by WalMart.

During the last couple of years, Amazon has created its own logistics service in order to eliminate intermediates such as Fedex and UPS, allowing the company to cut costs and reduce delivery time… Its code name is Amazon Flex.

Amazon Flex encompasses cargo aircraft (20 Boeings and 767 cargo planes), container–ships, drones… At the end of 2016, Amazon launched its own maritime carrier service. Since October 2016, more than 150 containers have been shipped from Chinese factories to Amazon warehouses in the United-States. Not to mention the numerous drone delivery efforts, the Amazon lockers deployment and even a flying warehouse (patent issued) in order to reign every last kilometer and cater to client’s needs.

Amazon pre-empts all interstices of our lives using under cover AI. Jeff Bezos’s brand wants to make our journey as fluid and as smooth as possible. Amazon Echo (Alexa) and Amazon Dash are the perfect example through their practical purpose. On the basis of the diagram below, Amazon fulfils all of the conditions leading to a transparent and ubiquitous buying journey, in the shortest delay possible with no tailoring needed! It’s all the more enlightening with Amazon asserting its digital ID by reinforcing authentication via biometric progress (image recognition) announced at the latest AWS forum, at the end of 2016.

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