Today, 4-March, Amazon is opening its doors to Amazon Fresh, the first convenience grocery store to offer Just Walk Out Shopping in the UK. Amazon Fresh is Amazon’s first physical shop and first grocery store outside of the US. The first location is in Ealing, London.
To shop the Amazon Fresh store, customers simply use the Amazon app to enter and can put their phone away and shop for what they need like normal, bagging items as they go. At the end of their shopping trip, they can just walk out, no stopping to stand in a queue or check out.
The Amazon Fresh store will also offer customers a wide selection of its new private food brand, ‘by Amazon’. This new brand has hundreds of products, including meat, poultry and fish, dairy, fruit and veg, bakery, freshly prepared meals and everyday essentials. ‘by Amazon’ will also offer customers hot food throughout the day and offer on-the-go meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
The stores will be similar to the 20 Amazon Go stores the company runs in the US but will operate under the Fresh brand it uses for its UK online grocery operations. Amazon said the store will be the first of a number of planned openings in London.
Josep Alvarez, UK Head of Banking Practice at NTT DATA UK and everis, said: “Friction is slowly fading away from payments. Amazon Fresh is a perfect marriage of technology and convenience for customers. COVID-19 has been an unprecedented moment for tech-driven forms of payment, from contactless payments to the explosion of e-commerce activity. The QR code, as part of Amazon Fresh technology platform, has emerged from relative obscurity during the pandemic and become a genuinely viable way for businesses to support a seamless, convenient way to pay.
“Looking ahead, payment providers need to stay innovative, or they risk being crowded out of the market by tech players like Amazon and Google – who are increasingly keen to play a leading role in this space. Advancements in AI and data analytics have incredible potential here, rapidly and securely handling the vast data volumes generated by purchases and the wide array of goods in the retail environment. There is also a huge opportunity here for companies to scale up this contactless approach, so that one day we eventually see larger ‘checkout-free’ stores, and even whole shopping malls.”
The new store can be found at 59 The Broadway, Ealing, London, W5 5JN
