A new form of self-checkout that enables shoppers to pay and retailers to gather data without a point of sale terminal is starting to make steps toward the mainstream. Zippin, a company that builds checkout-free retail, has deployed its technology at 15 stores in the past two months, including a concession location at the Capital One Arena. Zippin’s technology allows shoppers to scan an app or swipe a credit card to enter a store and pick up what they need. The purchases are automatically charged when the shopper leaves the store. If checkout-free retail like Zippin’s can become widely used, it could radically change more than just payments. In addition to the line-busting benefits of self-checkout, checkout-free retail uses technology that can inform dozens of functions for mobile wallets and other banking or financial services apps, fueling cross-sales, customer service, personalized marketing and even artificial intelligence-powered commerce. “The technology for such ‘shop and go’ solutions is always improving,” Zil Bareisis, head of retail banking and payments research at Celent, now part of GlobalData, told. “However, it can still be expensive to install and operate, particularly for larger stores selling a broad range of items.” Checkout-free retail has struggled in larger stores with a broad range of products, due to factors such as the sensor cameras’ inability to identify a varied inventory or operate in a large structure. Sports facilities represent a progression to an incrementally larger format than a small pilot store. “This technology can be highly suitable in locations with limited product range and significant foot traffic, like stadiums, hospitals, academic campuses, airports, etc.,” Bareisis said. There are about 15 Amazon Go stores in the U.S., and there are about 700 checkout-free stores around the world, with 200 in the U.S., according to Datos Insights. “There is growth in this market, we’re seeing this in very specific use cases,” Alan Burt, senior manager and retail product lead for Datos Insights, told. While the technology that supports checkout-free stores is difficult to deploy, there is ample incentive. “Autonomous checkout isn’t about checkout,” Richard Crone, a payments consultant, told. “It’s about capturing first-party behavioral and [stock-keeping-level] purchase data.” The sensor technology can measure the amount of time consumers spend looking at items, what items they did and didn’t purchase, how they responded to special offers, and how much overall time they spent in a store. This can provide data that can be fed into an artificial intelligence algorithm and can produce messaging for cross-selling or marketing, or to enhance payment capabilities for a bank’s mobile app. Google traditionally owns this type of digital shopping data but is now being re-anchored in retail and digital wallet-linked credentials, setting the foundation for agentic commerce, Crone said. This puts Amazon, which operates the Amazon Rufus agentic commerce platform, in competition with similar agentic technology from Visa and Mastercard. A key advantage for Amazon will be Rufus’ integration of offline-to-online behavioral data from its Just Walk Out technology, which will be licensed to third-party retailers and e-commerce platforms to make Amazon’s agentic algorithms more powerful, Crone said. Another key element for checkout-free retail is consumer appetite. While checkout-free retail is mostly not available, its predecessor, self-checkout, is steadily expanding. The number of retailers with self-checkout grew from about 3,000 in 2021 to 10,000 in 2024 and is expanding at a rate to reach 24,000 by 2030, according to Capital One. “We tend to forget that the checkout process is a friction in the shopping experience. Most merchants would likely prefer that purchases be made without a checkout process to save on costs and improve the customer experience,” Tony DeSanctis, a senior director at Cornerstone Advisors, told.