A couple of weekends ago, we were in Hangzhou for the Taobao Maker Festival, where we were inundated with plenty of weird, wonderful things available for purchase on the e-commerce site. At the festival, there was something else that was quite magical as well:
Yup, a Taobao cafe that incorporates F&B with retail, basically a hardcore Taobao shopper’s dreams come true. This Tao Cafe was actually a pop-up at the Taobao Maker Festival, created to showcase the Alibaba Group’s “cashier-less” retail experience.
How that translates into a shopping experience is this: the customer starts by opening the Taobao app on his smartphone and using it to scan a QR code at the Tao Cafe entrance, which then generates an electronic pass to grant him entry into the store. He can pick up whatever he wants to purchase in the store, and to check out, all he has to do is walk through a payment corridor that automatically detects the items, and deducts the cost from the customer’s Alipay account.
As for the cafe portion, Alibaba has removed the need for counter staff by basically powering the whole ordering process with voice and facial recognition. Order your food and drinks by just speaking what you want, and the fancy technology will process your order, deducting money from your Alipay account automatically.
Here, China’s People’s Daily put the Tao Cafe’s auto-checkout technologies to the test:
All of this probably feels a bit familiar – if you heard about Amazon Go at the end of 2016, Alibaba’s technologies on display at the Tao Cafe are very, very similar. While Amazon promised to roll out their cashier-less stores in the USA in early 2017, that has since been delayed, and news reports state that Amazon Go is reportedly still in the internal beta testing stage, and not ready to be launched to the public yet.
The Tao Cafe, on the other hand, was very much available for public testing during the Taobao Maker Festival earlier this month. While Taobao isn’t about to start opening a bunch of cafes and physical stores, the whole point of this pop up was to show the world that the company has figured out how to make shopping truly checkout-free, and they seem to be a lot ahead of the game as compared to the West.
What does this all mean? To us, it means that the future of retail is already found in China. From a few days’ worth of observation while we were in Hangzhou, cash or credit card is no longer the main mode of payment for Chinese citizens – most pay for their purchases with Alipay, Alibaba’s online payment platform that keeps the process to a quick scan of a QR code. There’s no longer any need to bring your wallet around.
Further digitising the retail process with these artificial intelligence and data technologies seems like the logical next step for Alibaba then – it’s just that the company has brought us all into the future a lot sooner than anticipated. Amazon better step up its game.
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