It also recently emerged that Just Walk Out is being dropped from Amazon Fresh stores.
But in a LinkedIn post, Wood insisted: “From the department of myth busting: our Just Walk Out technology is not going anywhere but to even more locations worldwide.”
He added: “If you want to optimise any experience, a great place to start is with the biggest, most egregious, inefficient part of that experience. For physical shopping – you don’t have to look much further than waiting in line for a checkout.”
“It’s boring, and it’s a waste of time for both the shopper, and the store. So when we started to look at how to improve physical shopping – we started with the question: how do we take out the line?”
“This is a hard problem – but it led to inventions like Just Walk Out (an AI and sensor fusion system for checkout-free shopping), Amazon Dash Cart (where you scan items as you place them into your cart), and Amazon One (our palm-based payments and identity).”
These technologies are complementary, and serve a very different purpose depending on these store and shopping task, Wood noted.
Just Walk Out is good for really quick, mission driven shopping – like small format convenience stores for snacks, drinks, and so on. You know what you want, and you don’t want a lot. Enter. Grab. Just walk out.
“Even with relatively few items sold per visit, we have already sold over 18 million items in Just Walk Out stores, and there are now more than 140 third-party locations with Just Walk Out technology in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada,” he said.
“The response from shoppers to Just Walk Out in small format stores has been so strong that we will launch more small format third-party Just Walk Out stores in 2024 than any year prior, more than doubling the number of third-party stores with the technology this year.”
In larger grocery stores, meanwhile, where customers are making a big weekly trip and buy a greater number of items, customers so far prefer Amazon Dash Cart.
Dash Cart serves as a shopping companion that travels through the store with a customer, helping them locate items with an on-cart screen featuring maps and navigation, and receive personalised shopping experiences, all while tracking their savings and spending in real-time.
Wood continued: “Regardless of the size or format of the store, shoppers tell us they like the security and convenience of Amazon One. Amazon One is in 500+ Whole Foods stores, other Amazon stores, and 150 third-party locations like stadiums, airports, fitness centres, and more.”
He concluded: “Just Walk Out, Dash Cart, and Amazon One – together – let us remove these pesky lines in more places than we could in isolation. They are complements to one another – like The Beatles. Stronger than the sum of their parts.”
“So don’t believe the headlines. Just Walk Out isn’t going anywhere, except into more locations, in more countries, to help more shoppers, and more businesses.”