Amazon is expanding its brick-and-mortar footprint with a new kind of store, the company announced this afternoon. On Thursday, the retailer will open an “Amazon 4-Star” store in New York, where all the items it sells are rated 4 stars and above, are a top seller or are new and trending on Amazon. It’s effectively a real-world introduction to Amazon’s best products, in other words. The store will be located in SoHo, on Spring Street between Crosby and Lafayette Streets, and will be open 10 AM – 9 PM Monday through Saturday, and 11 AM – 8 PM on Sundays. The 4-Star store, Amazon explains in an announcement, is “a direct reflection of our customers—what they’re buying and what they’re loving.” Amazon, thanks to its massive e-commerce site, does know what sells. The average rating of all the products it stocks in the new store is 4.4 stars, and combined, the products have amassed more than 1.8 million 5-star customer reviews, the retailer says. The store is divided into sections like “Most Wished For” items, which represent those people are adding to their Amazon Wish Lists, as well as “Amazon Exclusives,” and “Frequently Bought Together,” which represents the Amazon algorithm come to life. It will also feature some locally popular products in its “Trending Around NYC” section. At launch, the store includes items like the card game Codenames (4.8 stars, with more than 2,000 customer reviews); a Lodge 3.5 Inch Cast Iron Mini Skillet (4.4 stars, with more than 10,900 customer reviews) and, naturally, Amazon’s own devices like the Echo Spot (4.5 stars, with more than 5,600 customer reviews) and the Fire TV Stick (4.4 stars, with more than 197,000 customer reviews). Both the Spot and Fire TV Stick were top sellers on Amazon Prime Day this year, and are among Amazon’s overall best sellers. What’s interesting about Amazon 4-Star is how the items are priced. Shoppers who are Prime members will pay the Amazon.com price for their purchases, while non-Prime members will pay the list price. The store will also work as a fairly expensive user acquisition strategy for Amazon, given the cost of real estate — non-Prime members will have the option to sign up for a free Prime trial in the store in order to get the Amazon.com discount. Amazon has been steadily expanding into real-world venues in recent years. It acquired a large brick-and-mortar footprint with its acquisition of green grocer Whole Foods, and has been steadily launching its new cashierless Amazon Go stores in select markets, as well. It also has some Amazon Books stores and other pop-ups focused on device sales around the U.S. The retailer didn’t say if it intends to bring 4-Star to other locations either in or outside NYC in the future.<doc-sep>In yet another foray into the brick-and-mortar world, Amazon opened a general merchandise store in New York City on Thursday, offering mostly new and trending items on the company’s website, items which have four or five star reviews or which are top sellers. “We’re always looking for more ways to engage our customers. A lot of customers like to shop online, but they also like to shop in stores,” said Cameron Janes, Amazon’s vice president for physical retail. The Amazon 4-star store will sell consumer electronics, kitchen, home, toys, books, and games, among other items. To leverage Amazon's deep knowledge of what Americans want, peppered throughout the store will be “Most-Wished-For” displays showing collections of products that are most frequently added to Amazon.com Wish Lists. There will also be a "Trending Around NYC” section. Perhaps most importantly, the store will also sell Amazon devices that run its smart assistant Alexa, as well as accessories that work with Alexa. It's located in New York's SoHo district. Items will feature two prices, the list price for regular buyers and the Amazon.com online price for those with Amazon Prime accounts. The price difference varies by product. For some, it might be as high as 40 percent or as low as 5 percent, for some the products will be the same price, Janes said. The one thing customers can’t do is buy in the store and have the product delivered to their homes, at least through the Amazon employees there. But they’re welcome to buy them on their phones and then have them shipped. “We’re really agnostic about how a customer gets the product,” said Janes. “Our real goal is to help customers to find product how they buy them is up to them.” The store joins Amazon's two other physical stores in New York City, both bookstores. One is near the Empire State Building, and the other is by Columbus Circle. It's part of a larger collection of physical stores that the once solely e-commerce company now runs nationwide. They include 17 Amazon bookstores nationwide, four Amazon Go cashier-free convenience stores, two Amazon Fresh grocery pickup and store sites, dozens of Amazon Pop-Up stores in malls and more than 470 Whole Foods grocery stores. More:Tour: the Amazon store with no cashiers All offer Amazon a way to introduce a non-online audience to its offerings and to give even current customers a chance to experience Alexa and the constantly multiplying array of devices the digital assistant is available on. The 4-star store will help expose more customers to digital assistants and the products that can run it, said Janes. Customers will be able to talk to Alexa, turn on lights and fans, lock and unlock doors. “Alexa and smart home products are something new in the world. Being able to play with these and see them is great,” he said. With voice-command believed to be an important part of the future of online sales, Amazon is pushing hard to get customers into its ecosystem early in the hopes that they'll stay true to Alexa as the technology develops.<doc-sep>Amazon later this week is opening a new store that sells items from its website rated 4 stars or above, the company said in a blog post on Wednesday, making a bigger push into bricks-and-mortar retail following its acquisition of Whole Foods and the gradual rollout of its cashier-less convenience stores. The store is set to open this Thursday in New York's SoHo neighborhood, on 72 Spring Street. The company said Amazon Prime members will pay "the Amazon.com price" when they shop there. An Amazon spokeswoman said the store is permanent, not a pop-up location, as some of its shops — including one that sold Calvin Klein merchandise in SoHo last year — have been before. tweet The new store in SoHo is unlike any shop the e-commerce giant has rolled out before. Amazon currently has a handful of bookstores across the U.S. and is starting to open more of its cashier-less convenience stores known as Amazon Go. Amazon said customers will find items like a mini skillet, card games and many of the company's own electronic devices including the Echo Spot and Fire TV Stick, in the new store, called Amazon 4-star. It said it will also include some "Trending Around NYC" items there, which Amazon is able to track on its website. Amazon said digital price tags in the new store will show how much Prime members are saving, the average star rating and how many ratings a product has received, similar to what shoppers can see on the website today. Just last week, it was reported Amazon was considering opening as many as 3,000 cashier-less convenience stores across the U.S. by 2020. Read the full blog post about Amazon's latest announcement here.<doc-sep>Amazon has a massive customer base. It also has endless amounts of data on what people buy. Now the e-commerce giant is leveraging the two with a new store concept, Amazon 4-Star, that opened in New York City on Thursday. Located in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, Amazon 4-Star is packed to the gills with products that are — you guessed it — rated 4 stars or more on the Amazon website. The store also sells items that are best-sellers or are trending on Amazon, with the idea being that the store mimics “not just what customers are buying but what customers are loving,” Cameron Janes, Amazon’s vice president of physical retail, tells me during an early store tour. The name of the store refers to Amazon’s rating system, which lets customers review a product from 1 to 5 stars. The company went with 4 and not 5, Janes says, because even the best-selling products on Amazon can garner complaints from disgruntled shoppers, and a 4-star review is actually a pretty high score. Amazon 4-Star is Amazon’s third store in New York City but its first with this new concept. It’s the latest example of Amazon’s eager efforts dive into retail; in addition to buying Whole Foods last summer and opening stores in other states since 2015, the company reportedly has plans to open 3,000 cashier-less stores by 2021. The sheer breadth of product and customer integration inside Amazon 4-Star speaks to Amazon’s dominance in shopping — and could provide a blueprint for how other retail companies can leverage data for brick-and-mortar. Amazon 4-Star sells tons of products — as well as Amazon itself The Amazon 4-Star store currently carries about 1,800 curated products. When you enter the store, the right wall has an assortment of office supplies, gift wrap, greeting cards, and books. The left wall holds travel essentials, like Herschel backpacks and Swell water bottles, gifts for dogs, and home decor like luxury candles and wall plant hangers. In #NYC? Visit Amazon 4-star, where everything is rated 4 stars and above, is a top seller, or new and trending. https://t.co/73We8AwlXS pic.twitter.com/FukWL726oH — Amazon News (@amazonnews) September 27, 2018 Further into the store, there are sections like bar essentials, quirky kitchen gifts, and small cooking appliances. The back of the store features a baby and kids’ section, with toys arranged by age group, and right around the corner are shelves of smart home devices and video games. Janes says the categories of product will rotate, but for now, they represent the most popular sections on the site — consumer electronics, kitchen, home, toys, books, and games. What makes this Amazon store different isn’t its number of products, or the store layout; rather, it’s Amazon’s ability to highlight shopping trends that it is uniquely qualified to spot, as it’s where 75 percent of Americans do most of their online shopping. At the entrance of the store, for example, is a table of products that appear most frequently on Amazon wish lists: on this table are products like the Fuji Instax Mini camera, the Crazy Rich Asians book, and a Harry Potter Lego set. There’s a Popular Home Gifts table that features sous vide gadgets, and a Trending Around New York City table featuring yoga mats, Fear by Bob Woodward, and the NutriBullet — items that are popular among New York City dwellers. But what Amazon 4-Star is really selling is Amazon itself. On the Deal of the Day table, for example, Amazon is offering its Fire TV and Fire tablets for almost half off. There’s also a table of Amazon Basics-brand baking supplies and a wall of Amazon-branded cables. There’s a long table dedicated entirely to Amazon tablets. Naturally, the store also shills for Amazon Prime, the company’s secret weapon that turns shoppers into Amazon evangelists and now has more than 100 million subscribers. Peppered throughout the store are products with discounts for Prime customers, and at the cash register, store associates offer you a quick and simple way to sign up and get you the savings. The store doesn’t take cash, but you can pay with a credit card or by using your Amazon Prime account info. Amazon leans on its customer base to do the selling Amazon 4-Star’s business model is rooted in the company’s massive customer base. The price tags, for example, are digital, and the number of their reviews and star ratings are updated in real time. Printed customer reviews also appear underneath many products. On the Fuji Instax: “This camera was an instant hit at my sister’s engagement party” from an Amazon customer named Mariana. Near a hanging planter is a review from Carla V., who says its “gold detail is very charming and the ceramic container is elegant and well made.” This technique works especially well in the kids’ section, which is where I beelined, eager to look around for new toys for my curious 10-month-old. Parents are a skeptical yet time-crunched shopping demographic, and when it comes to the sea of baby products available for purchase, we are constantly looking for things that other parents recommend. My strategy for shopping for my baby has been to buy Amazon best-sellers, and so it felt a little bit like the Twilight Zone to peer at the shelves of the baby section at Amazon 4-Star and spot nearly every product I already own, down to my baby’s favorite book (it’s Peek-a-Who, by the way). Upon browsing, I spotted a book we do not own, Baby Touch and Feel Animals. It was displayed with this review: “Designed to be very easy for baby to handle … pages are thicker than other board books and they don’t seem to stick together as much so that it’s easier to turn the pages, making it my baby’s favorite book to sit with and flip through.” Uh, sold! This display of customer reviews and ratings alongside the store’s inventory of top-rated products is the biggest value-add. Shopping online is convenient, but many people still prefer to look at products IRL to decipher details like quality and color.<doc-sep>
Amazon opened a new store in New York on Thursday morning that's unlike anything the company has ever done before. Located in the city's SoHo neighborhood, the shop, known as Amazon-4 star, sells what the e-commerce giant considers to be some of its most popular or best-rated merchandise on its website. The store is a longer-term real estate deal, compared with the pop-up shops and mall kiosks that Amazon has tested in the past. It shows the company is serious about investing in bricks-and-mortar retail after its acquisition of Whole Foods and the gradual rollout of its cashier-less convenience stores across the U.S. Inside the new shop in SoHo, one will find everything from quirky kitchen gifts like a triceratops taco holder to popular books, board games, laptops, Alexa-enabled devices and even items from Amazon's in-house brands, like Amazon Basics. The company will be rotating inventory out on a weekly basis, as items become more or less popular on its website, Cameron James, vice president of Amazon's physical retail division, told CNBC. James also said that he anticipates the shop, which is roughly 4,000 square feet in size and has a large portion of space dedicated to gifts and toys, will be buzzing with people this holiday season. "SoHo is not just one of the premier shopping areas in New York, it's also one of the premier shopping destinations in the country," James told CNBC from inside the store Thursday morning. "When opening a concept like this you want to be where there are a lot of shoppers who are super-engaged, and this is a great place to do it." James wouldn't comment on Amazon's plans to open more stores like this one across the U.S. "You'll have to wait and see," he said. Bringing Amazon's website to life, the store has digital price tags next to items that show how much Prime members would save on a purchase. Shoppers will also be able to see how many ratings an item has received, what the average rating is, along with certain reviews on display throughout the store. Amazon even has a table in the store that shows items "frequently bought together," something the company has always highlighted on its website. Specific to New York, the store in SoHo will bring in items trending in the city at any given time, which on Thursday included a cast-iron skillet, a new book by actress Reese Witherspoon and a portable Black & Decker vacuum cleaner. CNBC walked around the new store when it opened. Here's what it looks like: