Amazon wants to give the good ol’ shopping cart a 21st-century upgrade. On Tuesday, July 14, the e-commerce giant introduced Dash Cart, a smarter pushcart that lets you skip the traditional cashier line.
Furnished with a mix of sensors, a weighing scale, and cameras, the Amazon Dash Cart can tell what you’re placing inside of it. Once you’re done picking out what you want, you can simply walk out of the store through a special checkout lane and Amazon will bill you automatically. The Dash Cart also has a touchscreen up front, through which you can access your Alexa shopping lists, view the items in your cart, or enter a coupon code.
The Amazon Dash Cart processes payments through an Amazon account. So when you first walk into a store, you will need to scan a code for connecting your cart with your Amazon account.
The Amazon Dash Cart relies exclusively on the tech it comes equipped with inside instead of sensors scattered across a cashier-free smart store, as in the case of Amazon Go. This enables Amazon Dash Cart to pretty much function as an Amazon Go store on wheels and works in standard brick-and-mortar facilities — as long as it houses a Dash Cart-compatible checkout lane. Because of that, Amazon is first debuting the Dash Cart first in its own traditional supermarket in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles (whenever it reopens).
“Our primary motivation for building this was to be able to save customers time,” Dilip Kumar, vice president of Amazon’s physical retail and technology told CNET. “The alternative solutions are standing in the express checkout lanes or fumbling through self-checkout stations.”
With the Dash Cart, Amazon is building upon its quest to bring its digital e-commerce chops to the offline shopping experience. Since the Dash Cart doesn’t need a full-fledged smart store, Amazon can roll them out with a quicker turnaround, and eventually rope more shoppers into its grocery and subscription services.
We’ve reached out to Amazon for more information about Dash Cart’s availability and we’ll update the story when we hear back.
