Amazon has physical bookstores, physical grocery stores, it recently acquired Whole Foods — and it’s still not done finding new opportunities to extend its reach in the world of bricks-and-mortar retail. Next up: Amazon 4-star, a new physical store the e-commerce giant is opening in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood today, with the name of the concept telling you exactly how it works.
The store only carries items that are rated at least 4 stars on Amazon’s website, with the company explaining in a blog post that the average rating of all the products in the store is 4.4 stars. Collectively, the products that comprise the store’s inventory have garnered more than 1.8 million 5-star customer reviews on the web.
“We started with some of the most popular categories on Amazon.com including devices, consumer electronics, kitchen, home, toys, books, and games, and chose only the products that customers have rated 4 stars and above, or are top sellers, or are new and trending,” the company explains in the post. “Throughout the store there are features like ‘Most-Wished-For,’ a collection of products that are most added to Amazon.com Wish Lists; ‘Trending Around NYC,’ hot products that NYC-area customers are buying on Amazon.com; ‘Frequently Bought Together’; and ‘Amazon Exclusives.'”
Throughout, shoppers will also find customer review cards that display quotes from customer reviews. The product assortment includes everything from the card game Codenames, which boasts a 4.8-star rating from more than 2,000 customer reviews; a Lodge 3.5-inch Cast Iron Mini Skillet, with more than 10,900 reviews for a 4.4-star rating; and, of course, Amazon’s own products like the Echo Spot and the Fire TV Stick. Which boast 4.5-star and 4.4-star ratings, respectively.
Speaking of that, this new store is of course also a place where you can test drive dozens of Amazon devices and smart home accessories that work with the company’s Alexa digital assistant.
Among its other features, there’s a digital price tag displayed alongside every product in the store that shows the list price as well as the price for
Amazon has stressed that this store, at 72 Spring Street, is a permanent venture and not some kind of pop-up experiment. It opens today at 10 a.m. ET — the latest in a flurry of recent bricks-and-mortar retail news out of Amazon, which was also the subject of this report last week noting that the company is looking at opening as many as 3,000 of its cashier-free convenience stores across the country over the next two years.
