Lojas Americanas goes checkout-free with Zippin
Zippin has moved beyond pilot stage and announced its first public customer, with Brazilian retailer Lojas Americanas set to deploy its checkout-free technology in stores across the country.
The first store has opened in Rio and has been operational for four months. The next one is expected to go live in Sao Paulo in the near future, and ‘dozens more’ are set to follow over the next 18 months. The Ame Go stores will vary in size from 250 to 3,000 square feet and will be located in high-traffic, mostly urban locations with a largely captive customer base, from financial districts and housing complexes.
Customers will access the stores through the Ame Digital app. Lojas Americanas is also developing an automated Ame Box checkout-free store-within-a-store concept powered by Zippin.
“We see checkout-free shopping as the future. Nobody wants to waste time waiting in cashier lines, and with Zippin’s breakthrough technology no one will have to,” says Lojas Americanas CIO, Joao Guerra.
“Going checkout-free enables us to delight our customers with speedy and convenient shopping, while unlocking additional value in the form of higher sales per square foot, better margins, and in-store inventory tracking and forecasting.”
Guerra adds that the company evaluated different options before signing with Zippin, which was chosen primarily for its technology’s high accuracy and low total cost of ownership: “Its software fuses data from two independent sources: overhead cameras and smart shelf sensors, providing very high accuracy, a critical requirement in a retail world with typically low margins,” he comments.