Amazon has opened seven cashierless Amazon Go stores across the U.S., and now the company is reportedly planning its first store across the pond. The e-Commerce giant is likely setting up shop in the UK in London’s West End shopping district, according to a report in The Telegraph, although Amazon has not commented on the report.
Amazon has been looking for sites between 3,000 to 5,000 square feet in size near London’s Oxford Circus. It is unclear whether the Go store would take up the entire space, but the estimated square footage would be much larger than that of any American Amazon Go location. The largest of its stores, the third location in Seattle, is 2,100 square feet.
The push to open the store in the West End, one of Europe’s busiest shopping areas, was being orchestrated by Amazon’s U.S. team and not the UK team, the report indicated.
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Although Amazon is reportedly considering a plan to open as many as 3,000 new Amazon Go stores by 2021, with more than 50 locations in major locations by 2019, growth has remained slow. The hardware alone for the original Amazon Go store in downtown Seattle is said to have cost the company $1 million.
That isn’t going to stop the e-Commerce giant from testing the technology any way it can, even if it isn’t made public. Amazon is reportedly working on adapting the “just walk out” technology deployed in Amazon Go to larger format stores, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.
The technology combines sensors, computer vision and deep learning to detect which items have been taken off and returned to shelves, keeping track inside a virtual cart. Once finished, shoppers leave the store and are automatically charged on their Amazon accounts. The store uses a variety of scanning technologies and algorithms to monitor patrons and verify purchases.
