by Joanna Patsalis
I went shopping with just my phone. When personalized, fast and seamless experience becomes a norm, not the exception.
Ever since Amazon bought Whole Foods to experiment with a seamless shopping experience, I can’t stop thinking of the possibilities of customer interaction with the store, the products, the check out and delivery. Amazon Go is now available in Chicago, Illinois, San Fransisco having a slow expansion compared to Hema, Alibaba’s new superstore.
Amazon reported to open as many as 3,000 stores by 2021 but is now considering narrowing its focus even further to freshly prepared foods that would appeal to lunch-time crowds. While a more focused strategy of cashier-free stores might be wise, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is reimagining the whole retail experience with 80 outlets in China by the end of this year.
By the time Amazon started testing AI-enabled stores, Alibaba had already been experimenting with the technology 2 years ago. This gives some validation to the hypothesis that Western world is following the steps of Asia technologies, and not vise versa like a few years ago. I will go deeper into this matter in a different post.
What innovations, other than no check-out can someone expect when visiting Hema?
- Interactive, digital screens with product information.
- Instead of paper tags, pricing is displayed on the digital screens
- Self check-out kiosks use facial recognition to pull up a payment app leveraging Alipay technology.
- You turn your head up and conveyor belts with bags select items for a 30 minute delivery.
- Fresh produce can be prepared and delivered by robots in the in-store restaurant – no human interaction here either.
- Personalization and recommendations through the app
Scan digital screens for product info 
Robot waiters at restaurant 
pick-up and delivery system
What should we expect next? Are stores going to become just showrooms and we are just going to walk around with our phones adding to our digital cart? Is Hema considering to expand to the rest of the world? Is human labor going to be excluded from the shopping experience once and for all? And finally, are stores going to disappear in the future? Why do we still spent the time to go shopping if we can find everything online and delivered in a few minutes?