Analysis Of Amazon'S Business Secrets Of Offline Retail

With the epidemic, people are turning to online shopping. With the rapid decrease of offline store traffic, physical businesses have moved to online, while Amazon, the leader of e-commerce in the United States, has been doing the opposite, constantly increasing the number of offline retail.

According to reports, Amazon is expanding its online and offline retail network, and plans to continue adding 28 fresh retail stores to its existing 11 "Amazon fresh" retail stores.

Some people may wonder why Amazon, as an e-commerce giant, develops offline fresh retail at this node? This is because, after nearly 30 years of development, Amazon has reached the ceiling in the field of e-commerce and has become the e-commerce platform of the United States.

Amazon wants to gain more consumer share, and the volume of offline retail market is larger than that of online market. Amazon is now aiming offline.

In fact, in September last year, Amazon opened its first Amazon fresh chain store in California, and then its fresh food stores in cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago have also opened.

Before announcing the new store plan, it took only eight months for Amazon to open 11 fresh food stores. It is speculated that the new store opening plan is another large-scale expansion of Amazon in the U.S. fresh goods retail market, which hides Amazon's ambition to further expand its market share in physical retail.

The outside guess may be correct. Amazon's fresh retail business can be traced back. In 2017, Amazon spent 13.7 billion US dollars to acquire whole food, a physical supermarket in the United States, from which it obtained a large number of shop outlets and commodity supply chain, which also marks the official transition of Amazon to offline physical retail.

It is worth mentioning that Amazon owns a number of businesses involving physical retailing. In addition to Amazon fresh, there are smart shopping retail store Amazon go, self owned food brand wickedly prime and smart shopping cart dash chart.

Amazon's real retail ambition is not limited to the United States. A while ago, Amazon opened its first Amazon fresh food store in London, UK. The store adopts just walk out technology. Consumers can leave directly after selecting goods, and do not have to queue up at the cash register to pay. Bills will be processed automatically through Amazon app.

The smart technology in Amazon's retail stores can reduce consumer contact, which not only meets the requirements of epidemic prevention and control, but also further promotes Amazon towards the goal of physical retail.

On the other hand, supporting the development of retail business also includes supply chain. Relying on modern technologies such as artificial intelligence, Amazon is improving the logistics supply chain.

In order to match the demand of fresh food distribution, Amazon improved its logistics technology and intelligent logistics system, and successively launched prime now door-to-door distribution service, UAV intelligent distribution, "unmanned driving" intelligent supply chain, robot distribution and other services.

Interestingly, while Amazon is laying out offline retail, Wal Mart, an American offline retail giant, is vigorously developing e-commerce.

According to the Q4 financial report of fiscal year 2021 released by Wal Mart last month, Wal Mart's same store sales increased by 8.6%, e-commerce sales increased by 69%, same store sales of Sam's Club increased by 10.8%, and its e-commerce sales increased by 42%.

We can see that one is an e-commerce giant and the other is an offline retail leader. Both sides are trying to grab more market share in their respective fields from each other.

Last month, Amazon announced that Bezos would step down as Amazon's CEO in the third quarter of this year, to be replaced by Andy Jassy, the company's head of cloud computing. In this regard, the outside world speculates that Amazon CEO's change may be due to Amazon's imminent adjustment of strategy.

We don't know what the future of Amazon will be, but at present, Amazon's action shows us that it is ready to show its ambition in the offline retail market.