Dive Brief:

• Online mega retailer Amazon said it is shutting down its Amazon One tech payment tool, which lets customers pay by scanning their palm at some physical Amazon stores, along with other businesses such as the restaurant chain Panera Bread.
• All Amazon One palm readers will be removed by June 3, although some stores may remove them earlier, an undated FAQ page on Amazon's website says.
• The discontinuation is a “response to limited customer adoption,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

Dive Insight:

The announcement, which the company made on its website, comes as Amazon said this week it would shut down all of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores. The spokesperson said messages were sent to Amazon One users about the discontinuation on Tuesday. The Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores will close on Feb. 1, the spokesperson said, with the exception of some California locations.

The Amazon One devices let customers check in at Amazon stores and pay at checkout with the scan of a palm as long as they signed up for the service and entered their payment information ahead of time.

The palm readers were first introduced at two Seattle Amazon Go stores in 2020, and were eventually introduced at other Amazon properties such as Whole Foods. 

All data associated with the palm readers will be deleted “following the discontinuation of the services and after completion of any remaining transactions,” the company said on the web page announcing the discontinuation. 

Amazon Go stores have employed so-called cashierless checkout, in which a customer scans a credit card or other payment method when they enter a store and a system of cameras tracks what they take off the shelves and charges them for it. 

The online retailer already dropped its cashierless “Just Walk Out” technology at its own grocery stores in 2024, although the technology remains in some third party stores.

The online juggernaut did not explain why Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores are being shuttered, but said in a statement that an unspecified number of those stores would be converted to Whole Foods, an upscale grocery store chain Amazon owns.

Cashierless checkout has advanced in fits and starts in recent years, and experienced a major setback when the company Grabango, which provided the cashierless systems to retailers, went out of business in 2024.

However, analysts and consultants who follow the industry are confident that businesses will eventually be able to make cashierless checkout work at a larger scale as the underlying technology that powers it advances.