Potential Risks and Alternatives for Amazon Go

Running head: BUSINESS STRATEGY
BUSINESS STRATEGY
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Author’s Note

Potential risks
The idea of Amazon Go that had been introduced by Amazon might not be successful
because it had started its business in e commerce platforms and the organisation had been
very successful in this aspect, but the concept of physical stores might not prove to be
successful for the organization. One of the risks to the Amazon Go might face include the
introduction of further technologies, these technologies were introduced to aim in verification
of the purchases made. One of the technologies that are introduced include RFID tags, it
helps in tracking the customers; movement within the store and provides a standard level of
personal surveillance (Ives, Cossick and Adams 2019). The risk associated with the
collaboration of technologies is the fact that Amazon would be able to use the data collected,
for the purpose of manipulating the purchasing impulses of the customers on a certain
granular level. One more risk is that the organization can sell this data including their
consumption habits and the location. They can also integrate the data with many more aspects
of the business of Amazon like anticipatory shipping model which is responsible for
predicting the products that a certain customer is likely to purchase.
The risks that sustained in Amazon Go included the fact that how the organization
would manage to run the business in an online format. This is because the market had been
very competitive along with the requirement of more amount of investments (Smith, Rupp
and Offodile 2017). One more risks that existed within this attempt of the organization is that
it might fail due to lack of experience in management of stores that are physical in nature.
The next threat can be obtained from the competitors of the organization who had been in this
business since a long time. This might prove to be a challenge for Amazon because it would
be a latecomer with no proper knowledge regarding brick as well as mortar retail markets
(Grewal, Roggeveen and Nordfält 2017). This would be challenging because the concept of
delivery systems had allowed the customers to purchase more products from online platform.

One more potential issues that is faced by Amazon Go includes the fact that no all he
customers would use smartphones, which is most important factor while using Amazon Go.
According to findings around 19% of adults in United States do not make use of
smartphones. The stores of Amazon Go do not have registers or any cashier (Johnston 2018).
When an individual enters the store, his code is scanned but the people who do not have
smart phones would not be allowed to enter the stores. Customers who want to purchase
items with cash would be unable to do so because there would be no cashiers. Cameras would
follow the customer but they cannot be linked to a certain account. Besides this they would
not be allowed to walk out of the store because they would require to pay the cash to
someone. This wastes ample amount of time of the customers and hence make the process
inconvenient instead of making it more comfortable.
Alternatives
Amazon can use various alternatives that can help the organization in moving its
business from only online oriented business to offline business as well. The alternative that
could be used include online to offline marketing. This strategy would help the organization
in reaching out to their customers at every touch point for driving the sales as well as
engagement. The aspects that are included in this alternative include click and collect, in this
concept the customers would purchase products online but pick up from a store that is present
nearby (Marron 2017). This particular strategy can be optimized with the use of numerous
steps. The steps are as follows
Permitting online activities to occur offline: click and collect shopping is considered
as one of the most popular trend where customer order their desired products from the online
website but collect the product from a certain store that is situated nearby. This strategy can
used by Amazon such that customers who would have to pay a high rate of delivery charge
due to their geographical location from the store, would be allowed to order the products
online but will be provided with the name of a retail store where the product would be