AWS for Industries

Uncover store opportunities, drive efficiencies, and improve the consumer experience with Amazon’s Just Walk Out Analytics

In-store shopping is on the rise. According to Mastercard SpendingPulse, in-store sales increased by 13.7 percent compared to pre-pandemic levels. As sales in physical retail environments grow, so does the complexity and the expectations that consumers have with the shopping experience.

Consumers are looking for stores that offer convenient, enjoyable shopping trips that allow them to easily find what they need and get back to their lives. So it’s no surprise that many organizational leaders plan to increase their store technology investments. Gartner’s 2023 CIO and Technology Executive Survey reveals that 65 percent of respondents will spend more in business intelligence and analytics, and 80 percent plan to increase funding in-store technology in 2023. These investments can help retailers identify buying trends to inform inventory, pricing, and customer service decisions.

Many retailers rely on point-of-sale data that tells them what products are purchased, but not how the products were discovered. While managers can spend time on the store floor to observe purchasing patterns, the process is time consuming and takes resources away from other activities. Retailers can also deploy consumer surveys or ethnographies to understand in-store behaviors, but those reports are self-reported and point-in-time. How can retailers go beyond sales information and gain a scalable, data-driven view on product interactions across the store?

Discover traffic and path-to-purchase trends with Amazon’s Just Walk Out Analytics

Powered by Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology, Just Walk Out Analytics provides retailers with new insights on how products are considered, picked up, returned to the shelf, and purchased across their Just Walk Out technology enabled stores—all this data is aggregated and anonymized

Just Walk Out technology by Amazon lets consumers enter a store, grab what they want, and go, all without stopping to check out. The technology uses a combination of computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning to give consumers a faster, checkout-free shopping experience by understanding who took what from the store. It is important to note, Just Walk Out technology doesn’t use or collect any biometric information of shoppers. Customer trust and privacy are paramount to the experience. Just Walk Out technology simply links a customer with their payment instrument. When shoppers enter the store, the technology assigns them a temporary numeric code, which serves as the shopper’s unique digital signature for that shopping trip. The system preserves the code throughout the shopper’s time in the store. When they exit, the code disappears, and if they come back, they get a new code.

With Just Walk Out Analytics, retail operators can learn useful insights from aggregated and anonymized traffic patterns and performance across the store and by shelf, fixture, and product category. This insight can help retailers improve product assortment and placements, drive operational efficiencies, and enhance the store experience for their consumers.

For example, Just Walk Out Analytics can help retailers identify how products are shopped, what types of items are picked up first, which items are frequently purchased together, and what items are returned to the shelf. Retailers can use this aggregated and anonymized insight to reduce low converting products, adjust the placement and number of products placed on the shelf, and identify items that should be placed or promoted together to build basket sizes.

The metrics and insights generated by Just Walk Out Analytics can also help retailers make decisions that boost store and labor efficiencies with traffic and consumer engagement trends. From here, retailers can determine when to restock shelves and how to improve staff scheduling to support high-traffic times. Analyzing traffic and performance trends across product categories and items also helps retailers manage decisions to refine inventory levels and shrink store waste. Having a store stocked with the right items, amounts, and at the right times can go a long way to improve the store experience and reduce operational costs.

The consumer experience flywheel

The physical store environment fosters a direct relationship between consumers and retailers. To be successful, retailers must put the consumer experience at the forefront, and harness insights on how products are found, considered, and purchased in-store. Such retailers will be able to better develop an understanding of their store’s shopping journey so they can improve merchandising, maximize space productivity, and focus staff on delivering a winning in-store experience.

With Just Walk Out technology by Amazon and Just Walk Out Analytics, retailers can deliver a frictionless consumer experience while gaining a scalable, data-driven view of their stores’ path-to-purchase insights in one place.

Interested in bringing Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology or Just Walk Out Analytics to your store? Contact us to learn how.