Amazon.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) stock was off and running out of the gate this morning, quickly getting on track for a sixth straight day of record highs. As of the time of this writing, Amazon stock hasn’t yet touched $1,600, but it’s looking like it could before the day is over. It seems the online retailer can do no wrong in the eyes of investors as its appetite for new markets continues to pay off with no barriers in site.
Deutsche Bank analyst Lloyd Walmsley issued a bullish note on Amazon stock today, including thoughts on a recent visit to an Amazon Go store and other aspects of the company’s business. The DB team recently took a tour of the Go store in Seattle, which opened to the public earlier this year. They feel the company has a good system and found that they were indeed only charged for the items they left the store with.
This has been a concern as the company prepares to add to its Amazon Go store chain, as there have been questions about how a cashier-less grocery store can accurately figure out what shoppers are picking up and charge them accordingly. Still, one has to wonder how they are to make sure that the company is charging them the listed price, as a human cashier can make an adjustment at the cash register if an item isn’t scanning at the appropriate price. Since everything in the Amazon Go store is done by computers and trackers, it’s virtually impossible to know whether you’re being charged the correct amount for every item.
The DB team also said after their visit to the Amazon Go store that there are some things the company can improve, but they still see it as the store of the future.
Of course, there’s much more to the story than the Amazon Go stores, as Walmsley also highlighted advertising, AWS and video as other key areas of growth for the company. He believes demand for ads on the company’s website is still “extremely high” among big brands and third-party sellers alike. As a result, he said Amazon has been building out more tools to address it, including a self-serve API which allows big brands to buy ads on the platform.
