Today we have Amazon Prime and Amazon Marketplace, and the company is still three steps ahead, inventing what is possible by both shaping and anticipating the needs of consumers. According to a recent CNBC article, Amazon was issued patents last year for augmented reality mirrors that would enable users to try on clothes virtually by projecting different outfits onto the user. They've also patented a "smart" sensor-studded package delivery air vehicle, an option that would mute the Amazon Echo's video mode for user privacy and even one that would detect hacked self-driving cars.

Details are limited at this stage, but the company suggests it will roll out a pilot test later this year. It's unknown where this will take place but it will utilize Kroger's pre-existing online ClickList ordering system and and Nuro's app. The process is pretty straightforward, place an order for groceries online and they are picked, packed and loaded onto a Nuro vehicle. These small autonomous vehicles will then navigate to their destination where customers meet it at the curb and take receipt of their groceries.

Spain-based AI-powered retail intelligence platform Nextail has landed $10 million in a Series A round led by KEEN Venture Partners LLP, with participation from Sonae IM and existing investor Nauta Capital. The company plans to use the capital injection to further develop its product and double the headcount to over 100 people. Nextail focuses on the sector of fast fashion, where process optimisation is important to bring the most current designs to a store as quickly as possible. It uses AI techniques and prescriptive analytics to provide actionable insights for inventory planning and merchandising. The company claims that its clients see their sales increasing between 5-10 percent, in-store stock coverage reduced by 30 percent and stockouts reduced by 60 percent within the first 30 days of using the platform.

Fashion preference is a fuzzy concept that depends on customer taste, prevailing norms in fashion product/style, henceforth used interchangeably, and a customer's perception of utility or fashionability, yet fashion e-retail relies on algorithmically generated search and recommendation systems that process structured data and images to best match customer preference. Retailers study tastes solely as a function of what sold vs what did not, and take it to represent customer preference. Such explicit modeling, however, belies the underlying user preference, which is a complicated interplay of preference and commercials such as brand, price point, promotions, other sale events, and competitor push/marketing. It is hard to infer a notion of utility or even customer preference by looking at sales data. In search and recommendation systems for fashion e-retail, customer preference is implicitly derived by user-user similarity or item-item similarity. In this work, we aim to derive a metric that separates the buying preferences of users from the commercials of the merchandise (price, promotions, etc). We extend our earlier work on explicit signals to gauge sellability or preference [5] with implicit signals from user behaviour.

Kroger and Nuro executives said delivering groceries without drivers--while still years away--would make such services cheaper and easier to introduce in less densely populated parts of the country. Nearly a third of 4,504 adults surveyed by Forrester Analytics earlier this year said they didn't do more grocery shopping online because of costs including delivery charges. "We are not trying to be a dollar cheaper than regular delivery. We are trying to be an order of magnitude cheaper," said Dave Ferguson, who helped lead Google parent Alphabet Inc.'s GOOGL 0.21% self-driving vehicle arm before co-founding Mountain View, Calif.-based Nuro in 2016. The Nuro partnership is the third deal Kroger has made in the past two months that aims to aid in how it sells to customers as competitors Amazon.com

Kroger, one of the country's largest grocery retailers, looks to bring its grocery delivery service into the future with plans to utilize autonomous vehicles to send goods to customers, the company announced Thursday. The partnership between the Ohio-based grocery chain and driverless car company Nuro means that customers can place same-day delivery orders through Kroger's ClickList ordering system and Nuro's fleet of self-driving vehicles will deliver those orders. Kroger, with 2,800 stores across the U.S, hopes that with the help of Nuro's technology it will "change the status quo of grocery delivery through convenience at a low price." It is the first time the tech company's hardware and software are being utilized, the company said. The rollout is slated for fall.

SEATTLE, WA - JANUARY 22: Shoppers enter and check out with purchases at the Amazon Go in Seattle, Washington. After more than a year in beta Amazon opened the cashier-less store to the public. Microsoft is working on autonomous-checkout technologies that could help retailers compete with Amazon's cashier-less stores. Sources told Reuters that, in tests, Microsoft is attaching cameras to shopping carts in order to track purchases as customers walk stores. Amazon Go's system requires that hundreds of cameras be installed in store ceilings.

Bossa Nova's shelf-scanning robot contains the same kind of sensors as a self-driving car. It's an unsettling time to be a major bricks-and-mortar retailer in the US. Retail corporate defaults hit an all-time high in the first quarter of this year as shoppers continue to abandon their local malls and embrace e-commerce. There's no denying that it's simpler to search for a product on Amazon than it is to march up and down aisles at the grocery store. But California-based robotics firm Bossa Nova is hoping to breathe new life into the bricks-and-mortar experience with the help of its shelf-scanning robot.

Kroger's efforts to play catch-up with Amazon in grocery delivery have taken it to the fringes of the "last mile" and a new partnership with an autonomous-driving startup that was hatched by guys who were involved in getting Google's driverless-car operation off the ground. It's the latest indication that the commercial logistics business is likely to have much more to do with shaping the early days of self-driven automotive transportation than the consumer side is. The Cincinnati-based supermarket chain, largest in the United States, said that it will begin piloting an "on-road, fully autonomous delivery experience" with Nuro, maker of the world's first unmanned road vehicle, in a city that the retailer hasn't yet announced, beginning this fall. The partnership will allow customers to place same-day delivery orders through Kroger's ClickList digital ordering system and Nuro's app. During the test, orders will be delivered by Nuro's fleet of autonomous vehicles, with human safety drivers to start out.

One of the most pressing concerns that keeps retail professionals up at night is how to combat fraud. Retailers could lose upwards of $71 billion from fraudulent online transactions over the next few years, yet some executives feel that publicly acknowledging a fraud issue would harm their brand. One of the most significant fraud concerns merchants face today are false positives -- i.e., transactions attempted by legitimate customers that are tagged as suspicious by fraud prevention systems, ultimately leaving money on the table. Because their effect is so difficult to accurately measure, false positives are often ignored, and their cost greatly underestimated. However, a majority of retailers say that fraudulent transactions that aren't detected cost more than a legitimate transaction that's inaccurately declined, despite some evidence that the opposite is true. What's more, relatively few companies track false positives.