STUDENTS TRY OUT AMAZON’S INSTANT PICKUP
The online giant opens its version of a convenience store on college campuses, which allows users to order items from their smartphones for pickup within minutes of purchase.
BERKELEY, CALIF.» Amazon has been aggressively courting students as part of its experiment to bring its enormous online shopping operation into the bricksand-mortar world. Now, the company is launching Amazon Instant Pickup, a service that allows customers to order certain items from their smartphones for pickup within minutes of purchase.
Essentially, Amazon has launched its own version of the convenience store.
Five college campus locations introduced Instant Pickup last week, including the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland at College Park.
I tried out the new service at Berkeley’s student union, where Amazon already has a storefront where students can pick up their Amazon packages. The company said it plans to expand the service to non-campus locations by the end of the year, starting with Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood.
In Berkeley, Ripley MacDonald, director of Amazon student programs, lent me a phone for a few minutes to browse through the store’s collection of goods and then place an order through an Amazon.com account. I selected a bottle of San Pellegrino. While my order was processing, I added a bag of Hot Cheetos. Within three minutes, I received an alert that both were available for pickup.
I scanned a bar code on the phone’s screen at a scanner located on a bank of lockers, and one of the lockers popped open with my order inside. In a realworld situation, I could have placed the order from my phone before getting to the location so that I wouldn’t have to stand in front of the locker while waiting for my items.
The items came from the back of the store, where I saw workers fulfilling the orders. The store stocks several hundred other items, MacDonald said. In addition to snacks, the service also lets customers pick up home and office supplies, electronics such as charging cords and – of course – Amazon devices such as Fire TV set-top box.
Instant Pickup is a new area for Amazon, which has just entered the market for selling goods that people want immediately. But the move does seem to fit with Amazon’s grocery delivery service and its pending acquisition of Whole Foods. And it gives the company a new opportunity to reach consumers who already have accounts with them – and glean more information about their impulse purchases and daily needs, which some customers may balk at.