Walmart’s Patent Application Hints at its Cashier-less Store

Walmart’s obsession with shopping carts can be seen clearly as the company filed yet another patent application to make a monopoly on these shopping carts. Further, the patent application shows another new feature that Walmart wants to embed in its smart shopping cart to make the customer experience better. 

Walmart’s strategy for quite sometimes is to be more than a retail company and using technologies to provide better services to its customer especially in physical stores. 

Walmart has been using Blockchain, AI, robots, etc. to be the best retailer and even researching drone to an extent that it surpassed Amazon in the drone patent race in the last year. 

But most importantly, the company has been filing non-stop for making smart shopping carts. And in the recent patent application, Walmart revealed a smart shopping cart that will make also make a transaction as you won’t have to go to a cashier in a Walmart store. 

Basically, the whole idea of doing a payment transaction will focus to make a cashier-less store similar to Amazon Go. 

While Amazon will add the items in the online shopping cart, Walmart is using its smart physical shopping cart to find picked items by a user and then sum it up to a final amount. 

As per the patent application, the shopping cart will have a camera that identifies your profile. Further, when you pick an item from a shelf, the camera on the shelf will find the picked item and send the information to the shopping cart which will send the information to you via a mobile app. Further, the cart will also have sensors to find what item gets added or removed. 

Moreover, for a failsafe that the number of picked items could be mismatched, a notification to do a manual check will be sent to the user. After checking, the users will get a final sum for the purchases which s/he will conclude through a device attached to the shopping cart.

Walmart’s idea to make a cashier-less store is certainly doable but how exactly it will work would be found when they open a store with such smart shopping carts. 

Last month, it’s been found that Walmart is testing a cashier-less store in its home state Arkansas. But the time it will take to be fully functional is uncertain. As for now, it is certain that Amazon got quite an upper hand as its stores are functional.

Walmart is trying to be in the shoes of Amazon as its new strategy broadly influenced by Amazon. But being the top Fortune 500 company, Walmart surely has a reputation and resources to stand out among its competitors.