EXCLUSIVE: “The Till-Free Store?” in ‘The Paytech Magazine’

How far are we from using invisible payments for in-store grocery shopping? We take a look at progress on the high street

When Amazon entered the physical grocery store arena, first in the US and then in the UK, the key differentiator was the ability to ‘just walk out’ with your purchases. It heralded a bold and fresh new era of household shopping. Being able to simply grab what you need and leave, without once having to interact with a store assistant or go to a till, sounded like a godsend for busy shoppers back in 2018.

For merchants, it promised to free up (or reduce) staff and eradicate pinch points at the checkout. Such a radical rethink relied on mobile phones, clever weight-based technology, computer vision via a multitude of cameras and deep learning. Coming along swiftly behind it was Amazon One, a biometric checkout, using on a customer’s palm for verification. It even dispensed with the requirement for a phone.

Very soon, all we would need for a trip to the shops was… ourselves.

For a time, major supermarkets in the UK appeared to be in thrall to Just Walk Out and biometric payments technology, with a number trialling their own versions. Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Asda and Aldi all opened stores – usually for time-stressed shoppers in London where Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods chains continue to offer Just Walk Out and Amazon One checkout options. Consumer trends would suggest such technology is in demand, with a significant number of consumers now opting for contactless card payments as standard, and 79 per cent of Gen Z consumers ditching cards altogether in favour of digital wallets on their phones, according to PYMNTS Intelligence.

Research by takepayments found that 48 per cent of UK consumers prefer contactless payments over cash or Chip & PIN. But progress has been fitful and, in some cases, reversed. Even Amazon said in 2024 that it was stripping its US stores of Just Walk Out technology. One of the reasons given by the company at the time was that it believed shoppers wanted to review their receipt and savings while in the checkout line, instead of later in their Amazon app.

Meanwhile, Amazon One’s penetration in the UK has been slow. In 2024, the company said it expected it to be ‘in more than a dozen third-party stores’ by the end of the year, but many of these are in high footfall events and hospitality areas rather than supermarkets or isolated convenience stores.

Enthusiasm and delay

So, are invisible payments still the Holy Grail for grocery?

After that initial burst of enthusiastic investment in the late 2010s and early 2020s, most of the UK’s high street retailers appear to have shifted back to more familiar checkout procedures. There are a few major reasons why. For one, the technology doesn’t always deliver the seamless experience it promises. Customers have to load an app and scan in before they shop, and in the case of Aldi, they were even asked to pay an upfront fee before filling their trolley, to combat shoplifting (both accidental and intentional).

Then there’s decades of learned behaviour that’s difficult to break. As the UK’s The Grocer magazine has pointed out, there’s a ‘nagging unease’ among shoppers that they ‘may have been overcharged, or guilt that they may have been, in fact, undercharged’.

Just Walk Out and biometric checkout technology is also expensive and often requires stores to close for installation, presenting a significant initial outlay and lost revenue for any merchant. That said, when it comes to biometrics, there are many environments where the technology is now already in play, including facial recognition in airports for passport control, and in enclosed ecosystems, such as school canteens, where children pay for lunch using their thumbprint.

Biometric authentication is also used to validate digital wallet payments and digital banking transactions, and this area is predicted to grow. According to Global Market Insights, the biometric payment market, valued at $8.83billion in 2023, is expected to increase by around 17.1 per cent between 2024 and 2032. Major players including Mastercard have also been rolling out new biometric authentication services, which aim to make it easier for businesses to integrate biometric payments into their checkout process. JP Morgan last year announced a partnership with ID verification company PopID to deploy in-store biometric payments. The implication from PopID’s data is that the platform can minimise ordering and checkout times by nearly 90 seconds per transaction.

It doesn’t sound a lot, but multiply that by thousands of customers going through a major high street retailer’s checkouts in a day, and the operational benefits mount up. Biometric technology is already used extensively in Asia, of course, with palm payments being integrated into popular services such as AliPay and WeChat Pay in China. But customer cultures across the world are very different, and, given concerns around privacy, many in the West are cautious of adopting a similar approach.

So where are some of Europe’s leading retailers now with invisible payments?

Carrefour

The French supermarket is one of the few in Europe actively trialling biometric payment technology. In 2024, it partnered with Ingenico to launch a version of PalmPay, linking a customer’s hand to their payment card. It was rolled out in a single Paris store to coincide with the 2024 Olympic Games. Carrefour previously introduced pay by face to its outlets in the UAE.

Sainsbury’s

The UK’s second-biggest supermarket is regarded as the country’s grocery pioneer in till-free formats, trialling its first no-pay store in 2019. Customers were asked to scan and pay for their groceries as they moved around the London shop, using the retailer’s then-new SmartShop Scan, Pay & Go app, which they downloaded on their smartphone. After paying in the app, they scanned a QR code before leaving the store, which reassured them that they had indeed paid. But the retailer abandoned the format three months later following poor consumer feedback.

In 2021, Sainsbury’s revisited the idea, deploying SmartShop Pick & Go, which used Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology, in the same store. Earlier this year it was reported that it had again stripped the store of the system, instead reinstalling checkouts which operate alongside the grocer’s SmartShop app.

Tesco

European and UK retailer Tesco’s version of Just Walk Out, which it named GetGo, is currently available at stores in London, Birmingham and Welwyn Garden City in the UK. Using a very similar format to Amazon’s but developed with Israeli technology startup Trigo (in which the retailer is invested), GetGo requires customers to sign up in the Tesco app and scan a QR code to enter the stores via a GetGo gate.

Technology then tracks their shopping journey using a unique skeleton outline of each shopper but not facial recognition. Tesco has adopted a ‘hybrid’ format for all but one of its GetGo stores, also allowing customers the choice of self-serve or attended checkout.

Aldi

German retailer Aldi launched its first Shop & Go store with tech partner AiFi in 2022 in London, UK. It came under criticism for demanding a £10 ‘pre-authorisation’ payment before allowing shoppers in – counterintuitively adding extra friction to a process designed to be frictionless. If the purchase is less than this amount, the rest is refunded and if nothing is purchased, the full deposit is returned. In 2023, Aldi UK & Ireland CEO Giles Hurley indicated that the experiment hadn’t been an overwhelming success, telling The Grocer that a rollout of more self-checkouts, rather than more Shop & Go stores, was seen as the ‘right next step’.

Aldi Nord, meanwhile, has trialled the Shop & Go concept based on Trigo technology in Germany and the Netherlands since 2023.

Lidl

Aldi’s rival discounter in the UK, Lidl has been reported to be exploring ‘pay at trolley’ technology, having already started to install eGates at its stores. Smart trolleys tell the gate if the customer has successfully paid for their shopping, triggering them to open. The retailer is working with technology company Wanzl which says prototypes have been developed in Germany, using a trolley mounted AI-enabled camera and a contactless payment device with an interactive screen

This article was published in The Paytech Magazine Issue 16, Page 27 -28