SAN FRANCISCO — Zippin has entered into a strategic partnership with Brazil’s largest retailer, Lojas Americanas SA, to deploy its checkout-free technology in stores across the country.
The Brazilian retailer made a strategic investment in Zippin in June 2019 to use the checkout-free shopping technology in Brazil exclusively and develop new technologies for its Ame Go retail stores. The first Zippin-powered store has already opened in Rio and has been operational for four months. The next store is expected to open in Sao Paulo soon.
The new checkout-free Ame Go stores will vary in size from 250 to 3,000 square feet and will be located in high-traffic, mostly urban locations, such as financial districts and housing complexes. Customers will access the stores through the company’s Ame Digital app, which already has more than 1 million active users. In addition, the company is 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,” said Joao Guerra, chief information officer for Lojas Americanas. “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.”
“When we first launched a concept store in San Francisco last year, we received inquiries from many of the largest retailers in the U.S., Europe and Asia,” said Krishna Motukuri, Zippin’s co-founder and CEO. “We chose to partner with Lojas Americanas not only because of their size and scope as a multibillion-dollar retailer, but also due to their ability to deploy our technology quickly. We were able to go from a signed contract to a launched pilot in three weeks, and then from pilot to a live public store within two months.”
San Francisco-based Zippin’s proprietary approach combines vision cognition, sensor fusion technology and machine learning to accurately account for both shopper behavior through overhead cameras and product tracking through smart shelf sensors for the highest level of accuracy even in crowded stores.
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