Amazon's Physical Stores Ambition Trails Expectations; Tigress Financial Sees 53% Upside

Amazon.com Inc's AMZN big bet on cashier-less technology is seeing less usage than expected, Insider reports.

Notably, the Dash Cart smart shopping cart at its Amazon Fresh physical stores has seen a steady decline in use as per internal data.

The Dash Cart accounted for only 11% to 15% of total shopping sessions at stores that have been open for longer than five weeks since last August, versus Amazon's goal of 30% of all sessions.

The team blamed the small size of the Dash Cart for the vehicle's difficulty scanning items for the slowing traction and inconvenience caused by not being able to take the cart outside.

Customers still like the Dash Cart's running tally feature that shows a live update of items picked up, and Amazon plans to roll it out in other apps more broadly.

Amazon has also continued to fall short of its projections for new stores, opening only six of its planned 26 stores in the U.K. in 2021 and only one of its planned hundreds of cashier-less Fresh stores. Still, it has ambitious plans to expand its physical stores and in-store technologies.

Analyst Rating: Tigress Financial analyst Ivan Feinseth raised the firm's price target on Amazon to $4,655 from $4,460 (53.1% upside) and kept a Buy. 

Amazon overcame fears that the company was headed for a slowdown by reporting "record results," driven by a strong holiday quarter, said Feinseth.

Feinseth sees the company continuing to benefit from "powerful growth drivers" that include Amazon Prime and AWS cloud growth and building on its strong growth momentum in 2022.

Price Action: AMZN shares traded lower by 2.14% at $3,026.82 on the last check Friday.