Amazon opens first automated supermarket, Amazon Go, in Seattle

Amazon Go officially opens its first store in Seattle, but can sensors and cameras stop shoplifters?

Online retail giant Amazon has finally opened the doors of its first automated supermarket, Amazon Go, following a year of testing.

The store, which is located in Seattle, is part of the company's plans to expand from online-only into the traditional brick-and-mortar retail experience it has spent the last 20 years battering.

Using connected cameras and sensors, the store tracks the items customers take from shelves and which ones they put back as they go through the aisles.

Looking to shift away from the typical retail store, Amazon Go has no cash registers. Instead, customers are automatically charged for goods they take when they leave the store.

The shop, which is 1800-square-foot in size, is based at one of Amazon's office buildings. It offers a range of products, including everyday grocery items from meat to beer.

To shop in Amazon Go, customers must access the Amazon Go smartphone app, into which they scan their items. There's a turnstile at the entrance where customers identify themselves.

When a customer has finished shopping, they just have to walk back through the security gates with no queueing, while payment is taken automatically via their Amazon account.

Despite the lack of staff and a checkout process, Amazon Go should still be a familiar shopping experience. For instance, there are printed price labels (rather than electronic shelf-edge labelling).

Amazon has been shifting its focus to the physical retail, particularly since it acquired US supermarket chain Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in June last year.

While Amazon hasn't announced plans for new Go locations, the company has been testing its Seattle-based store for a while now. It first opened the convenience store in December 2016. It's also not clear when the company will take the idea overseas, if at all.

But according to sources, testing hasn't been easy. In particular, the company has had challenges with children, who are inclined to pick items off of the shelves without scanning and also put them back in the wrong places.

But Gianna Puerini, vice president of Amazon Go, declared the test phase a success: "This technology didn't exist. It was really advancing the state of the art of computer vision and machine learning."