Amazon slashes cost of Just Walk Out tech by 96% paving the way for wider roll out

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Amazon slashes cost of Just Walk Out tech by 96% paving the way for wider roll out - Latest Retail Technology News From Across The Globe - Charged

Amazon has managed to whittle down the cost of its 'Just Walk Out' technology by a staggering 96 per cent since 2017, according to Business Insider.

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Amazon has managed to whittle down the cost of its ‘Just Walk Out’ technology by a staggering 96 per cent since 2017, according to Business Insider.

Not only this, but internal documents shared with Business Insider indicate the company is planning on implementing further measures to slash even more costs through until 2023.

The ecommerce giant is planning on growing the sales and profitability on the stores while meanwhile putting pen-to-paper on a number of third-party partnerships.

The estimated operating cost of a 1,000 square-foot cashierless location has dropped to just $159,000 per store, each year.

This marks a 96 per cent decrease from the eye-watering $4 million it cost to run the store for a year in December 2017, a month before it opened its first ‘Go’ location.

The costs are spread out through the fees for using Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud technology and hiring remote employees to manually verify the accuracy of the checkouts in stores, as well as other tasks.

The fee also does not take into account marketing costs or merchandising fees.

Amazon’s first Go store, utilising the Just Walk Out tech cost the ecommerce behemoth over $10 million to operate, according to Brad Stone’s book “Amazon Unbound.”

“Our vision is to further reduce annualised Just Walk Out costs (Opex and Capex depreciated over 5 years) for all store sizes,” the document read.

The report comes just after Amazon opened its seventh Amazon Fresh store in the UK, in the south west London region of East Sheen, with a rumoured eighth to open in Chingford, Essex.

Amazon also opened its first and second ‘4-star’ stores in the UK, located in the Bluewater shopping centre near Dartford and London’s Westfield shopping centre.

The shop offers customers an array of around 2,000 top selling items from Amazon’s ecommerce marketplace that have a rating of four stars or above.