Zippin shutters showcase store in San Francisco

US checkout free platform startup Zippin has closed its test store in San Francisco.

Opened in 2018, this was instrumental in the venture landing most of its initial customers, including Lojas Americanas, Lawson, Sacramento Kings and Sberbank.

Zippin pulled the plug when the lease ended on 30th June. “There is no longer a need to have an owned store, whose sole purpose is showcasing the tech for sales and marketing,” the company says in an online post.

“Three years ago, in the summer of 2018, we had already finished developing and testing the initial version of the Zippin checkout free platform. We were ready to take the technology to a live store with real shoppers, and we wanted to do it quickly,” it adds.

“Amazon had already launched their first store in Seattle a few months earlier, and it was going to be a matter of time before they opened one in San Francisco too.”

“We needed to be quick if we were going to be the first ones to launch a public store in San Francisco, which was something we really wanted.”

With store #30 powered by Zippin about to launch soon, it's finally time to sunset our showcase store in San Franciscohttps://t.co/dsXBbaGyM1
— Zippin (@GetZippin) June 27, 2021

It adds: “In order to save time, we decided to launch a Zippin owned store, instead of approaching a retailer to install Zippin tech.”

“After a fast paced real estate search, in a city that’s notoriously hard to find good retail space in, we lucked out and found this great location in the Financial District, just a block away from Sales Force Tower. We took possession of the space on 1st July and had a fully functioning store open and ready for business on 15th August 2018.”

“Those six weeks of building the store, getting all the permits, deploying the tech, were among the most fun and instructional times we had. We learned a lot about the myriad challenges retailers routinely face in store build outs, tech installations, cable runs, and securing permits.”

“This helped us develop a deep empathy for the retailers, which later led us to focus as strongly on our platform’s deployability as we did on the core AI capabilities.”

There are now 29 Zippin powered stores owned and operated by retailers in the US and around the world.

There will also soon be another location, owned and operated by an unnamed retailer, in San Francisco.