Amazon Expands Its ‘Just Walk Out’ Store Technology to College Campuses

In an expansion of the Just Walk Out technology that powers cashierless Amazon Go stores, Amazon.com Inc. is partnering with Transact Campus Inc., a provider of campus identification systems that enable student access to buildings and payments for such campus services as dining, laundry, and vending.

Under the terms of the deal, Transact Campus announced it will integrate Amazon.com Inc.’s Just Walk Out Technology to its platform to enable students and verified users to shop at stores on and off campus that deploy the technology.

Transact Campus provides a card-based system for payments, a mobile-ordering app for store entry, and a cloud point-of-sale service for product catalogs, inventory, and reporting.

To begin shopping at a merchant using Amazon’s Just Walk Out Technology, students and verified users with a university account first scan their unique QR code to enter the store. As consumers move through the store, Amazon’s technology detects what items are taken from the shelf and placed in the consumer’s shopping cart using cameras and sensors. When finished shopping, consumers simply walk out of the store past a scanner that charges or debits their payment credentials stored in their Transact Mobile Ordering account.

“Together, Transact Mobile Ordering and Just Walk Out technology will create a seamless student experience by eliminating checkout lines and increasing efficiency in transactions,” Laura Newell-McLaughlin, executive vice president, general manager, Integrated Payments and Campus Commerce, for Transact Campus, says in a prepared statement. “Utilizing Transact Mobile Ordering for store entry and payments unlocks several useful tools for universities and vendors, such as stored payment profiles, tender selection, tender discount and taxes, in-app receipts, user segmentation, and transaction recovery.”

The partnership with Transact Campus comes hard on the heels of news earlier this week that Amazon will be closing eight Amazon Go stores in Seattle, San Francisco, and New York. The closings will bring the total number of stores to 21. The eight stores will reportedly remain open until April 1. Amazon began testing its Amazon Go concept near its headquarters in 2016 and opened the location to the public in January 2018.

Since the launch of Amazon Go, other technology vendors, such as Standard Cognition Corp., a San Francisco-based provider of autonomous-checkout systems based on artificial intelligence, have debuted similar technology. Standard Cognition has partnered with convenience-store operator Circle K.