Leveraging Big Data for Enhancing Decision Making and Creating New Business Model for Amazon Go

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RESEARCH REPORT
ON
LEVERAGING BIG DATA FOR
ENHANCING DECISION MAKING AND
CREATING NEW BUSINESS MODEL
For
AMAZON GO
Course Title/Name:
Student Number/Name:
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Contents
Page
Introduction............................................................................................................ 2-2
Business Use Case................................................................................................... 2-2
Business Strategy.................................................................................................... 3-4
Business Initiatives & Objectives.......................................................................... 4-5
Data Sources............................................................................................................ 6-6
Technology Stack .................................................................................................... 5-6
Data Analytics and MDM ....................................................................................... 6-7
Role of NoSQL .......................................................................................................... 7-9
Role of Social Media in decision making............................................................... 9-9
Critical Success Factors............................................................................................ 9-10
Reflections & Conclusion.......................................................................................... 10-10
References.................................................................................................................. 11-12

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Introduction:
Amazon manages a marketplace platform that leverages big data and customer-centric approach to
improve customer experience.
In this research study, the focus is to understand how “Amazon Go” uses the vast variety of data,
derives useful information from the data and uses data-driven approach to enhance customer
experience using predictive models to recommend products to customers. This study also aims to
understand the importance of big data, how it helps in driving growth in business and improving
business model from online portal to automated physical store (amazon go).
Big Data Use Case
Seattle-based e-commerce giant Amazon, is leveraging big data on its 200 million customer accounts
by hosting their 1,000,000,000 GB of data on more than 1,400,000 servers to increase sales through
predictive analytics. Amazon’s concept of convenience store “Amazon Go” opened to public in
January 2018. The store has an array of cameras which track purchases and automatically charge
customer through a smartphone app.
Features of Amazon Go Store:
 Small Store, Big Impact
The “Amazon Go” store is only 1,800 square feet. Amazon Go has prices printed on the shelf
tags. The shopping experience is amazing, one can just browse around, place items into the
bag and just walk out. But in reality, customer gets charged automatically from their Amazon
account for what all they take out the door. The deep learning technology is able to
recognize every item in the store without any special tags like RFID chips.
The entire store can be accessed with an account on Amazon and Amazon Go app that can
be easily installed.
 No Barcode Needed
Amazon Go eliminates the need for barcodes by using sensors and cameras to track which
items leaves shelves with customers. Cameras and sensors are meant to tract inventory.
Amazon Go used artificial intelligence to track inventory
 Fewer Cash Registers, More Data
Amazon Go store facilitates automated checkout process. It is a convenience to customers of
simply walking out with purchases without any queue for checkout.
Amazon Go aims to deliver better customer experience. The idea is simple but there are layers of
complexity to figure out what products people buy at what times of day, when to reorder and
restock the shelves, how to present merchandise to capture customer attention and optimize traffic
flow around the store.
Amazon has plans of opening 20,000+ stores in the coming days. “Amazon Go” is the combination of
artificial intelligence, computer vision (cameras to track a user’s action in the store) and data pulled
from multiple sensors.

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Business Strategy
Amazon as a company understands the value of data from long time (around 17 years) and uses
various data mining techniques to study online consumer purchasing behaviour with the help of data
provided by customer during their online purchasing activities. All this data mining is done with the
help of its 200 million customer accounts.
In 2013, Amazon used item-item similarity methods from collaborative filtering engine(CFE). It
analyses what items customer purchased previously, what is in online shopping cart, on wish list,
which products were reviewed and rated and what items which customer search the most. This
information is used to recommend additional products that other customers purchased when
busying those same items. Since them Amazon has improved its recommender system and today
they and ruling the marketplace. They use customer click-stream (online data collected by each click
done by customer) data and historical purchase data of all customers and it provides customized
results for each customer.
Amazon Go, the retail outlet known to be the experimental outlet is a bold move that transform
retail by the help of deep learning technology (a part of machine learning that enables computers to
learn by continuously collecting and analysing digital data), specifically image recognition algorithms
used to identify the products picked by customers for purchase or for removal from the cart if its
kept back on the shelf. “Amazon Go aims to provide enhanced customer experience with the help
of data-driven decision.”
Business Initiatives & Objectives:
The growing challenge faced by the retail industry is the management of larger datasets, databases,
in just no time. Insights from data needed in milliseconds and if it takes minutes or even hour, the
value that the information could have provided will change. The modern retailer needs to process
large amounts of retail data in real time in order to encash the insights discovered in their retail
analytics.
Big data technology focusses on speed. Amazon is leveraging big data on its 200 million customer
accounts by hosting their 1,000,000,000 GB of data on more than 1,400,000 servers to increase sales
through predictive analytics. Big data analytics is the backbone for Amazon that helps form better
customer relationships.
Amazon Go tracks everything customers do at their store, to collect as much data as it can. Amazon
have a very good account management, to collect data from its customers. On the customer home
page, they track customer activity at various sections of homepage like- “Inspired by Your Wish List”,
“Recommendations for You”, “Inspired by your browsing History”, “Related to items you have
viewed”, “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought”.
For example: If a customer selects to buy a hard drive in Amazon.com, customer will also be shown
products that are frequently bought with hard drive and other choices besides the hard drive that
customer would like to purchase.