Amazon is currently beta testing a new type of brick-and-mortar store that replaces the traditional checkout lines and registers with a Just Walk Out Shopping experience. Shoppers simply load up the Amazon Go app upon entering the store, take the products they want and go.
“Our checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning,” Amazon explained in a company blog post.
“Our Just Walk Out technology automatically detects when products are taken from or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart. When you’re done shopping, you can just leave the store. Shortly after, we’ll charge your Amazon account and send you a receipt.”
As Wired’s Davey Alba reports, Amazon’s first Go location (currently open to employees) is an 1800 square foot space packed with perishable grocery goods such as bread, milk and cheese, as well as pre-made snacks and fresh meals.
“[Go] uses sensors throughout the store and artificial intelligence to tell which direction customers are looking, even in a crowd, and can identify partially blocked labels,” writes Alba. “Retail tech specialists and computer vision experts agree that Amazon’s advertised system is entirely plausible given the state of artificial intelligence, RFID, sensor and machine learning technologies today.”
As we’ve previously discussed on Rambus Press, mobile payments offer a plethora of benefits for both consumers and retailers. For consumers, mobile wallets provide a convenient, frictionless commerce experience that seamlessly integrates loyalty cards, boarding passes, ID cards, coupons, event tickets, alerts and notifications. For retailers, mobile wallets offer businesses the ability to engage users with an immersive, in-app experience that starts at the beginning of a retail journey and continues indefinitely with notifications, reminders of upcoming expiration dates, archived digital receipts and a real-time tally of current loyalty bonus points.
When combined with evolving technology such as augmented reality (AR), advanced beacons and biometrics, mobile payments will allow retailers to change an outdated brick-and-mortar paradigm and bolster their engagement with consumers. For example, shopping will become a truly interactive experience, with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi beacons scanning digital profiles, stored in the cloud and accessed on mobile devices and wearables, to generate recommendations in real time. Items can also be scanned with mobile AR apps that overlay information and display related items on top of existing products. Meanwhile, next-gen biometric authentication, such as iris scans, are evolving to meet industry expectations for quick, effortless and secure mobile payment transactions.
Interested in learning more about the future of mobile payments? You can check out our mobile payments page here, our eBook here:
Leave a Reply