E-commerce platform Lazada just held its WeCommerce 2019 summit earlier today. During the summit, the company also showcased a number of concepts under what it calls “new retail”. Essentially, the idea is to bring online experiences to offline stores. There are three ways that the company is promoting.
The first is what it calls the Fashion Mirror. To put it simply, this uses Augmented Reality to project items of clothing onto shoppers. Ideally, this aims to replace dressing rooms in clothing stores. This saves space that could be used for other things in the store itself, and saves shoppers the trouble of having to actually trying on multiple items of clothing.
Another variant of this mirror focuses on makeup instead of clothing. The idea is pretty similar – allowing shoppers to virtually apply the makeup on their faces. This saves them the trouble of having to actually do it, and then cleaning them off, or to guess what it will look like on their faces by applying them elsewhere first.
The final concept is one that’s pretty close to Amazon’s Go cashier-less stores. You walk into a convenience store, you pick the items you wish to buy, you scan their respective QR codes, and you walk out of the store. While it does really emphasise on convenience, it also relies a lot on the honesty of those who walk in.
At this point, as you can see, every QR code scanned still leads to the e-commerce site. It’s probably safe to say that still too early for actual implementation. Also, you might be thinking: when will all of this actually show up in Malaysian stores? Unfortunately, Lazada is unwilling to share any timeline for that just yet, so we’ll just have to wait for a future announcement from the e-commerce company.
