Amazon Fresh is set to ditch its “just walk out” checkout-free feature in stores as its senior vice president revealed the retailer is looking to prioritise new technology.
The tech will be replaced with “smart trolley technology”, Tony Hoggett told The Information.
The move, which is understood to currently only impact the US, will bring an end to the checkout-less technology that has allowed customers to pick up items and be charged their Amazon accounts – rather than pay at a physical checkout.
The “smart trolley technology” – also known as Amazon’s Dash Cart feature – was launched in 2020 and tracks the items in a shopper’s trolley.
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The feature allows for real-time receipts, which enables customers to monitor their spending as they shop, rather than at the end, as with the previous technology.
An Amazon spokesman told The Telegraph that the retailer had spent “a lot of time redesigning a number of our Amazon Fresh stores over the last year”.
They added: “We’ve also heard from customers that while they enjoyed the benefit of skipping the checkout line with just walk out, they also wanted the ability to easily find nearby products and deals, view their receipt as they shop, and know how much money they saved while shopping throughout the store.”
The ditching of the technology in the US comes amid the tech giant pausing the implementation of some of its checkout-less stores in the UK, before last year revealing it would be closing its sites.
Since Amazon Fresh launched in its first cashier-less 2021, other grocery retailers have followed suit with both Aldi and Tesco trialling the contactless grocery shop experience in recent years.
