Amazon 4-star opened its first Dallas-Fort Worth store at Frisco's Stonebriar Centre mall Wednesday, bringing the internet retailer's capstone brick-and-mortar retail experience to North Texas.
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Amazon 4-star, which has six stores and three more in the works across the U.S., is growing in the competitive world of traditional retail while using less traditional retail methods.
What makes Amazon's retail concept unique is its ability to rely on one of the deepest pools of data from its e-commerce channel to curate the goods that consumers are most likely to resonate with on-site.
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"We use different information and data to pick the products in our stores," Amazon Director of Physical Stores Drew Sheriff said. "It's a highly curated selection from across the top categories across Amazon.com. It's a combination of what people are buying and engaging with and looking at online, as well as the judgment of our curators who are looking at what they think are going to be best-selling or beloved products."
The Frisco submarket in DFW won Amazon with its heavily trafficked Stonebriar Centre mall. Despite gloom-and-doom reports about retail, DFW retail — while in transition — is far from dead.
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A third-quarter 2019 report from CBRE showed DFW's retail occupancy rate held strong at 94.7%.
Nationwide retail also held its own in the third quarter of 2019 with average retail net asking rents increasing on both an annual and quarterly basis. Net absorption reached more than 9.7M SF in Q3, according to CBRE data. Total retail sales increased 3.5% year over year.
Sheriff said Amazon is well aware that even with e-commerce growing, many consumers still love visiting stores and finding merchandise situated in a manner where it is easy to find good deals and top finds out in the open.
"We really want to meet customers where they are," Sheriff said. "We know that a lot of customers love to shop offline in brick-and-mortar stores. There are a lot of products that just benefit from being able to see, touch and feel [them]. You can see the color. You can try out the device before you buy it, and so we believe that having stores like Amazon 4-star really complements Amazon.com, and it helps customers really find products that they'll love."
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