Is Amazon Fire Phone a Threat to Retailers?

The new phone’s built-in showrooming spells trouble for traditional retailers.

June 20, 2014

NEW YORK – With Amazon’s unveiling this week of its new smartphone, dubbed Amazon Fire Phone, the e-commerce giant will gain yet another piece of ammunition against retailers.

The phone includes a feature called Firefly that claims to recognize more than 100 million products. Firefly employs the phone’s camera to detect QR codes and Web links on packages, to drive traffic to Amazon items.

According to an article in Ad Week, Firefly claims to find products on Amazon within seconds, which Rich Guest, U.S. president of Tribal Worldwide, sees as a game-changer in how consumer-goods brands (many of which may have never seriously focused on e-commerce) merchandise on the shopping platform.

"It will rapidly accelerate showrooming that retailers are already trying to combat in different ways," Guest said in Ad Week.

To contest Amazon's encroachment, retailers should pack their own apps with in-store tracking technology like beacons that push consumers to shop in bricks-and-mortar stores, Hilmi Ozguc, CEO of Swirl told Ad Week. "With the majority of today's retailers experimenting with beacons, they will soon be well equipped to defend against Amazon’s advances in the retail store environment," he said.

Read more about Amazon’s expansion into new markets in NACS Magazine.

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