Amazon 4-Star: Amazon's new store sells only its top rated products

Amazon has a massive customer base. It also has endless amounts of data on what people buy. Now, the e-commerce giant is exploiting both with a new store concept, Amazon 4-Star, which opened in New York on Thursday.

Located in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, Amazon 4-Star is packed with products – you guessed it – rated 4 stars or more on the Amazon site. Cameron Janes, vice president of physical distribution at Amazon, said the store also sells items that are bestsellers or trends on Amazon. during an early store visit.

The store name refers to Amazon's rating system, which allows customers to review a 1- to 5-star product. According to Janes, the company got 4 and not 5 because even the best-selling products on Amazon can cause complaints from disgruntled buyers, and a 4-star review is actually quite a high score.

Amazon 4-Star is the third Amazon store in New York, but the first with this new concept. This is the latest example of Amazon's relentless efforts to dive into retail; In addition to buying Whole Foods last summer and opening stores in other states since 2015, the company planned to open 3,000 stores without a cash register. here 2021.

The sheer scale of Amazon 4-Star's product and customer integration reflects Amazon's dominant position in purchasing – and could serve as a model for how other retail companies can leverage data for brick and mortar.

Amazon 4-Star sells tons of products – as well as Amazon itself

The Amazon 4-Star store currently offers approximately 1,800 products. When you enter the store, the wall on the right contains an assortment of office supplies, gift wrap, greeting cards and books. The left wall contains essential travel items, such as Herschel backpacks and Swell water bottles, dog gifts and decorative items such as luxury candles and wall hangers.

Further in the store, there are sections like the essentials of the bar, original kitchen gifts and small cooking appliances. The back of the store includes a section for babies and children, with toys sorted by age group, and around the corner are shelves for smart home appliances and video games.

Janes says the product categories will turn out, but for now, they represent the site's most popular sections – consumer electronics, cooking, home, toys, books and games.

What makes this Amazon store different is not the number of products or the layout of the store; It is Amazon's ability to highlight the shopping trends that it is perfectly qualified to spot because 75% of Americans do most of their shopping online.

At the entrance to the store, for example, is a chart of products that appear most often on Amazon's wish lists: on this table, there are products like the Fuji Instax Mini camera, the Rich Asian boobies book, and a Harry Potter Lego set. There is a popular gift table that includes vacuum gadgets and a New York City Trending Around table with yoga mats. Fear by Bob Woodward, and the NutriBullet – popular items among New York City residents.

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But Amazon actually sells Amazon 4-Star. On the Deal of the Day table, for example, Amazon offers its Fire TV and Fire tablets at almost half price. There is also a table of Amazon Basics brand bakery products and an Amazon brand cable wall. There is a long table entirely dedicated to Amazon tablets.

Naturally, the store also offers Amazon Prime, the company's secret weapon that turns buyers into Amazon evangelists and now has more than 100 million subscribers. Throughout the store, you'll find products with discounts for Prime customers, and at checkout partners offer you a quick and easy way to sign up and save money. The store does not take money, but you can pay with a credit card or using the information in your Amazon Prime account.

Amazon is relying on its customers to make the sale

Amazon 4-Star's business model is based on the company's huge customer base. Price tags, for example, are digital and the number of reviews and ratings is updated in real time. Printed customer reviews also appear under many products.

On the Fuji Instax: "This camera was an instant hit in my sister's engagement party" by an Amazon client named Mariana. A criticism of Carla V., who says that "the golden details are very charming and that the ceramic vessel is elegant and well made".

This technique works particularly well in the children's section, where I decided to look for new toys for my curious 10 months. Parents are a skeptical and time-consuming group of consumers, and for baby products available for sale, we are constantly looking for products that other parents recommend.

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My strategy for buying my baby was to buy the best sellers of Amazon, and I felt a bit like the Twilight Zone to look at the baby section rays at Amazon 4-Star and spot almost all the products that I already own. to my baby's favorite book (this is Peek-a-Who, by the way).

While browsing, I spotted a book that we do not have, Baby Touch and Feel Animals. It was posted with this magazine: "Designed to be very easy to handle for baby … the pages are thicker than other card books and do not seem to stick so much to facilitate the rotation of the pages, making it the favorite of my baby. book to sit and leaf through. "Uh, sold!

This presentation of customer reviews and ratings, along with the store's top-rated product inventory, is the most value-added. Online shopping is convenient, but many people still prefer to look at IRL products to decipher details such as quality and color.

Some baby books, for example, may be subject to excellent reviews, but they do not always have the best pages to resist the furious reversal of small creatures developing fine motor skills. Being able to see a successful baby book closely before denouncing it made it easier to choose.

Shopping here is an overload of products – which can be good or bad

The style of the Amazon 4-Star store is exactly the opposite of the sterile, minimalist Apple store concept that many fashion retailers like Nordstrom now mimic. Rather than opting for a sparse, airy and boutique-style atmosphere, Amazon decided to pack all its bestsellers – lined shelves, sitting on tables, stacked in bins – to mimic the feeling of overload that his website is so known. for.

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The chaotic navigation experience is something that Amazon needs to improve (which also explains why the company recently launched a visual search tool, Amazon Scout).

"We designed this store to create an experience where customers can have fun and discover the products they will love," says Janes. "In a store like this, it's impossible to get in and not discover something you do not know or find something you like."

Whether or not a pleasant shopping experience, however, we must debate. During the opening of the store, in the midst of a swarm of journalists and film crews, a few patrons who roamed the gallery had mixed reviews of the store.

A family of five was on holiday in London and, while the parents wanted their three children to look for toys, they were dismayed when the trio headed directly to the tablet, directly in front of the games and toys section. A couple of Swedes said they were thrilled to be able to test Alexa (although they were disappointed to learn he does not speak Swedish). An inhabitant of Soho, who was preparing to take a trip to Italy, said that the buying experience was overwhelming and left empty handed.

But whether people visit the new store or continue shopping in the convenience of their home, one thing is certain: Amazon will continue to rake in sales.