The cashier-less technology implemented by Amazon Inc. helps customers speed up their shopping at convenience and grocery stores. The company will now use the tracking system to help advertisers and brands to figure out how to sell more items.
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In a blog post on Wednesday, Amazon Inc. announced its plans to commence sharing data collected by its cameras and sensors in the store that tracks shoppers. The tracking system will provide insights, including telling brands how items picked up from these shelves ended up in purchase, how many products were put back on the shelf, and how any purchased the product later from Amazon’s online platform. The new initiative called Store Analytics mines data attributes from physical stores to eCommerce platforms.
The “Just Walk Out” technology is installed in 50 retail stores of Amazon, including the Amazon Fresh grocery and Amazon Go convenience stores, after years of internal development of the technology that the company introduced in 2018. The network of sensors and overhead cameras automatically captures every item a customer picks from the shelves and bills them when they leave the store.
According to Bloomberg News, if found useful by brands, Amazon’s new data analytics initiative can help them recoup the investment costs incurred while developing the technology and using them to generate data.
People working on this project, including rival companies who are also building a cashier-less system, have long been wondering about the data for an item that shoppers consider and the navigation behavior of shoppers in stores that could be lucrative for brands. Cashier-less shopping is regarded as a technological marvel, but it is yet to become a commercial success.
Amazon did not reveal the pricing for the tracking system, and a spokesperson declined to share the details. According to the blog post, Amazon said that brands would have to access the details about how products are discovered, considered, and then purchased in the stores. This will help brands make informed decisions on selections, promotions, and advertisement campaigns.
The new cashier-less system could cause privacy concerns. In the blog post and the explainer accompanying them, Amazon said that individual data of shoppers would not be shared. The post uses terms like anonymized and aggregated around ten times.
Amazon clarified that images and videos of shoppers would not be shared with the brands and that individual shoppers can choose not to have their data included in-store analytics.
