Amazon One, the system to pay with the palm of the hand, expands to supermarkets

In recent years, Amazon has experimented with different interaction systems for physical stores. Perhaps the most outstanding were the stores without Amazon Go cashiers, although it has also created smart carts or hairdressers. Now they have decided to expand their peculiar payment method to supermarkets: pay with the palm of your hand.

We heard about this payment system for the first time at the beginning of 2020 and we finally saw it come true in September 2020. It is a contactless payment method where a device scans the palm of the hand to use that data as biometric authentication .

These readers allow users to pay for purchases without having to use a phone, credit card or cash. To do this, Amazon records user information in its database and assigns your palm to your Amazon account. From there, whenever you want to pay, your hand is scanned and Amazon will automatically identify the user to charge you directly from your Amazon account.

According to Amazon, since they first launched the service in September 2020, thousands of users have signed up to use it. It is currently available in a small number of Amazon Go stores. The plan now is to expand its use to American Whole Foods supermarkets (a subdivision of Amazon).

In the future, perhaps the curious Amazon smart shopping cart that is also a cashier will also be added. The idea with all these changes is to minimize the friction between the buyer and the product. The easier the purchase is and the less noticeable that you are paying, the more you buy.

Depending on how the implementation of this payment system works, it is likely that we will see Amazon One in other supermarkets and stores in the future as well. The idea in the end is to make a service/product that can be sold to others as well, including competitors.

Amazon One is thus positioned as one of the payment methods to be used in the future. Palm reading competes with other methods such as facial recognition, fingerprint recognition, mobile phones, credit/debit cards or something as simple as QR codes.

By Amazon.com