Last week’s biggest retail technology deals at a glance
RTIH rounds up the stand out retail systems deals, deployments and pilots from the past seven days. Featuring Marks and Spencer, Amazon Style, Instacart, McDonald’s, Aldi UK, and River Island.
Autonomous grocery store Nourish + Bloom Market has opened to the public in Fayetteville, Georgia, USA.
Nourish + Bloom Market is the first store of its kind with robotic delivery in the United States and the first African American owned autonomous grocery location in the world.
Husband and wife entrepreneurs Jamie and Jilea Hemmings started the venture to offer over 1,000 locally sourced, healthy food products, including produce, meats, baked goods, dairy and prepared meals.
The new store features Shekel's solutions for real-time identification of shelf products.
Shekel's technology will combine with Hitachi's consumer tracking technology.
Customers will use a N+B app, developed by UST, make their purchases, and be charged via their payment systems, eliminating the need for checkouts. An e-receipt will be sent to the app.
Online grocery platform, Instacart, and arts and crafts retailer, Michaels, have announced an expanded partnership to launch same-day delivery from more than 100 of the latter’s stores across Canada.
Amazon will open its first ever physical fashion store later this year, and it will be tech centric (natch).
"We wouldn't do anything in physical retail unless we felt we could significantly improve the customer experience," says Simoina Vasen, a Managing Director.
The 30,000 square feet Amazon Style store will be situated at The Americana at Brand, a shopping destination in greater Los Angeles.
Using the Amazon Shopping app, customers can send items to a fitting room, where they can use a touchscreen to browse more options, rate items, and request more sizes or styles that are delivered to the room.
Machine learning algorithms, meanwhile, produce tailored, real-time recommendations for each customer as they shop.
Beauty and fashion tech solutions provider, Perfect Corp., has partnered with M·A·C Cosmetics, and online product sampling platform, SoPost, for a personalised omnichannel shopping experience.
This combines AR virtual try-on and personalised AI shade matching, with physical product sampling delivered to shoppers’ door.
It will be accessed through a call to action that sits across multiple activation points across the consumer journey including social platforms (Facebook and Instagram), and retailer and brand websites.
The initiative will first launch for the M·A·C Cosmetics Studio Fix Fluid Foundation in the United Kingdom.
River Island has partnered with supply chain transparency platform Segura.
The retailer recently published its ‘12 Commitments for People and Planet’, each aligned to the United Nations ‘Sustainable Development Goals’.
Segura will support River Island in the delivery of its commitments with its SaaS solution, providing the ability to manage and track orders giving suppliers fewer opportunities to use unwanted third parties, or factories in lower tiers that may be sub-standard.
Pro-Direct Sport has partnered with One iota to launch the first native mobile shopper apps for its football, running, basketball, rugby, tennis, and cricket brands.
Having seen significant growth in consumers moving from shopping on desktop to tablet and mobile, Pro-Direct Sport will be working with One iota on iOS and Android apps.
Diebold Nixdorf has announced an update to its partnership with East of England Co-operative Society.
The retailer has deployed more than 180 DN Series EASY eXpress self-service solutions, powered by DN Vynamic Self-Service software, in over 80 stores across East Anglia.
Since the roll-out was completed, over 35% of transactions are being processed using self-service.
Żabka Group says that it now has the largest chain of autonomous stores in Europe after launching 25 Żabka Nano locations across Poland.
These operate in several formats such as standalone shipping container-based stores, traditional bricks and mortar and store within a store points of sale, each leveraging AI powered computer vision technology created in cooperation with AiFi.
McDonald's has enlisted Targomo as its new partner for expansion planning in Germany.
The fast food giant is using the TargomoLOOP platform to plan new restaurant locations in the country..
Discount retailer Aldi UK has launched its first checkout-free location.
The Aldi Shop&Go concept store in Greenwich, London opened last week for public testing, having been tested by staff members in recent months.
The system, provided by AiFi, uses specially positioned cameras.
Those people wishing to buy alcohol, or other Challenge 25 products, will be able to use facial age estimation technology, provided by Yoti, to authorise their purchase.
Robert Dyas, a UK-based garden, DIY, electricals and homewares retailer, has deployed Competera's Competitive Data solution.
Nisa has announced a UK wide roll-out of Jisp’s augmented reality vouchering system, Scan & Save, to independent retailers.
The move follows a pilot, which delivered 82,116 scans, 40,001 taps and 32,895 redemptions on Scan & Save branded AR vouchers from September to December.
Participating retailers accumulated a combined discount redemption value of £36,211 with over 2,300 unique shoppers, 81%, becoming repeat redeemers.
