Amazon Opening Fashion Store Where Machine Learning Algorithms Recommend Items to Customers

The Amazon logo is seen outside its JFK8 distribution center in Staten Island, N.Y., on Nov. 25, 2020. Brendan McDermid/Reuters

Amazon is opening a brick-and-mortar clothing store this year that provides customers with a high-tech shopping experience, the company announced Thursday.

The first Amazon Style store will open later this year at The Americana at Brand, a large shopping, dining, entertainment, and residential complex located in Glendale, California, the company said.

Customers will be able to get their hands on women’s and men’s clothing as well as shoes and other accessories.

In a blog post, the online retailer said, “Amazon Style brings together the best of shopping on Amazon—great prices, selection, and convenience—with an all-new in-store shopping experience built to inspire.”

The 30,000 square feet store puts a new spin on the traditional shopping experience, as customers can use the Amazon Shopping app to send items that they like to the fitting rooms.

Once there, they can use a touchscreen to browse more options, rate items, and request more sizes or styles that are then delivered directly to their fitting room “within minutes” thanks to Amazon Style’s “on-site operations, with advanced technologies and processes used in Amazon fulfillment centers.”

If customers don’t want to try the items on, they can simply send them directly to the pickup counter using the app.

What’s more, the app, which Amazon says is “built around personalization” uses machine learning algorithms to produce real-time recommendations for each customer as they shop, suggesting other items that they might like too.

Shoppers can enter more details into the application, such as their style and fit, to receive more tailored and refined recommendations on other items, the company says.

“Amazon Style offers more selection than a traditional store of its size—more than double the number of styles—without requiring customers to sift through racks to find the right color, size, and fit,” Amazon said. “Instead, Amazon Style features display items, bringing more looks and less clutter to in-store shopping.”

While the physical store will rely heavily on technology, Amazon says that employees will still be working in-store to deliver items to the fitting rooms and process customers’ payments at the tills, among other things.

However, customers can pay for their products using Amazon’s palm recognition service which is based on biometrics called Amazon One.

While Amazon Prime subscribers won’t receive any special discounts when shopping in the store, Simoina Vasen, managing director of Amazon Style, told CNBC that customers will have access to a wide range of budget-friendly items.

“You’ll find everything from the $10 basic to the designer jeans to the $400 timeless piece,” Vasen said. “We want to meet every budget and every price point.”

The Epoch Times has contacted Amazon for comment.

Seattle-based Amazon opened its first physical retail store, a bookstore, in 2015. Two years later in 2017, it acquired Whole Foods for $13.7 billion, and in September 2020, the multinational technology company launched an online shop called Luxury Stores.

However, the Amazon Style store is the first physical shopping experience for customers. The company is yet to provide an exact date as to when the Glendale store will be open to customers.

The announcement comes after Amazon cut COVID-19 paid leave for its workers in the United States in keeping with the new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines.

In a Jan. 7 notification to employees, Amazon said its COVID-19 paid leave for employees has been reduced to a maximum of 40 hours from its previous 10 days.