Amazon Go has not opened yet, Ali's unmanned settlement coffee shop has been unveiled.

Amoy coffee

For professional baristas, please follow the coffee workshop (Wechat official account cafe_style)

Zhang Chen, a researcher at Wen / Xin Retail think Tank

Source / New Retail think Tank Wechat official account

Before the official opening of Amazon Go to the public, the retail industry has been more and more rich in exploring unmanned shopping solutions. You may have heard of all kinds of "unmanned convenience stores" and "self-clearing stores", but if you are going to attend the 2017 Taobao creation Festival on July 8-12, you will also have a chance to see the unmanned checkout version of Amoy Coffee, an offline flash store that eliminates queues, scans or even mobile phones.

From walking through the door to serving an iced latte in your hand, the only thing a consumer needs to cooperate with is Mobile Taobao, who opens him / her before entering the door. After knowing and signing the admission agreement, including the terms of the data use and privacy protection statement, Alipay withholding agreement, etc., you will get an electronic admission code, scan the code through the gate at the door, and the wonderful journey begins.

Enter Amoy Coffee

OK, now you can put away your phone and concentrate on choosing drinks and snacks. In the ordering area, what you say to the waiter, "I'll have an ice mocha and an Amoy macaron", will be quickly captured by the voice recognition system and displayed on the screen in front of you. Do you confirm the payment? If you answer "confirm", the coffee and macaron will automatically place the order, and the corresponding amount has been deducted from your Alipay account.

Voice order

And you don't have to huddle anxiously in the ordering area waiting for the waiter to call. The images of everyone in the coffee shop are projected onto a large public screen, with a corresponding pick-up time next to everyone. If the girl sitting opposite you has a little crown with a ruby on her head, it means she is a senior Apass member.

Waiting for calling number

Before you left the coffee shop, you took a fancy to a mug on the shelf? Just take it. Feel that someone is approaching the "chopped hand door" (that is, the payment door) automatically open to let you through. You can see the information about the purchase when you stand in the door, and within seconds, the mug will automatically place the order and complete the payment.

Amoy coffee payment door

This "brain" Amoy Coffee tries to make every experience fast and smooth enough through an integrated brick-and-mortar store unmanned settlement solution. At the same time, it infuses the core competence of Alibaba e-commerce plate into the offline consumption scene, giving physical stores the ability to create convenient and efficient experience and rely on data for intelligent operation, forming a closed loop connected online and offline.

Version 1.0 of Taobao Coffee is a Taobao IP restaurant launched by Aliyu at the first Taobao creation Festival in 2016. With the combination of "Amoy" culture, "eating earth cup", "chopped hand biscuits" and other products are in short supply, and on-site staff even frequently receive the demand for cooperation. Therefore, Aliyu feels that it is possible to try to launch version 2.0 to officially continue the project. When discussing business planning for 2017, it was suggested that Taomong's IP could be used to operate an offline lifestyle scene to explore new retail. Ali fish team and the new retail technology business group Tmall technical team hit it off.

"collecting offline consumer behavior and commodity footprints so that they can be identified, precipitated and operable is not only the direction of the company in the future, but also interesting and fun." Zhou Yan, head of the Amoy Coffee Project, said the idea made everyone feel "on fire".

Zhao Peng, technical director of the Amoy Coffee Project, said that the biometric autonomous perception and learning system in the Amoy coffee shop allows consumers to accurately identify real people through biometrics without having to cooperate with the camera, coupled with the IoT payment scheme provided by Ant Financial Services Group, creating an almost "senseless" settlement experience for users. In addition, the indoor target monitoring and tracking video analysis system can also become an auxiliary tool for businesses to optimize their operation strategies. For example, the expression and body language of consumers when they get a product can help merchants judge whether a product is enough to suit their wishes; by capturing the movement track of consumers in the store and the length of time they stay in front of the shelf, it can guide merchants to adjust the display of goods and service devices in the store according to their habits and needs. After accumulating a certain amount of operational data, these technologies can form a set of user behavior system offline, providing consumers with more personalized services and good experience.

"the new retail will perfectly integrate physical terminal technology and intelligent supply chain in the future. Next, our 'cool techs' will continue to appear. " Zhao Peng said.

Retail players are scrambling to introduce novel concepts to announce their determination to embrace unmanned shopping, but unmanned shopping looks novel, but it faces a lot of trouble in actual operation. Amazon Go, which was scheduled to finish testing and was officially opened in March 2017, has been delayed, according to the Wall Street Journal, because of technical problems. As of today, apart from the video released by Amazon in 2016, it is almost impossible to know what the real operation scene of Amazon Go is, but an anonymous person familiar with the incident told the Wall Street Journal that Amazon's cool techs cannot solve two problems for the time being: first, when the number of people to be tracked in the store exceeds 20, the system will malfunction. Second, when customers put the goods they have removed and put them back on the shelf, if the position moves too far, it will also affect the accuracy of tracking.

It is understood that Amazon's patent application for Amazon Go shows that the key technology of this unmanned convenience store idea lies in its special shelves. It calculates who took which item by sensing the relative position between the person and the shelf and the movement of the goods on the shelf. Therefore, when there are too many people, the amount of calculation of the system will increase rapidly, and the accuracy of goods purchase can not be guaranteed. For example, if two customers reach out at the same time in the same direction, the system may make an error in judging who takes the goods; if the goods taken from the shelves are placed in a non-shelf area of the store, they will also be settled when they walk out the door empty-handed.

These are common problems in offline stores, so the media believe that Amazon, which is rich online, is still inexperienced in managing the flow of customers and products in brick-and-mortar stores.

Considering the complexity of the real retail scene, Amoy Coffee tries its best to avoid such problems in the design of the settlement intention system. The beverage and food in the ordering area are settled in real time; the information captured in the shelf area is only used as the data to optimize the operation, and the goods identified through the payment door are used as the basis for settlement. During settlement, if consumers try to cheat, such as deliberately hiding goods, it may be regarded as a bad record, affecting their credit value and their next entry.

Different from the cold "cool techs", it is also reflected in a variety of considerations for the details of the actual consumption experience, as exemplified by the interactive table that can split the screen automatically according to the time hint formed by the identification. In order to avoid boredom, the special effect of facial cuteness is specially designed on the order screen; during the waiting time of just a few seconds inside the payment door, the screen inside the door will prompt the payment process to ease the guest's sense of unease as if he were in a narrow elevator.

Technicians also need to explore the expressions, word order and tone commonly used by consumers when ordering food, and determine the placement angle of the camera according to the person's height and posture. Retail, as the oldest business practice of mankind, seems to be logically simple, but in fact it is full of subtle and trivial tricks. Zhou Yan tirelessly beckoned everyone who visited her experimental site to try to buy a cup of coffee and a product. "isn't that the charm of the new retail?"