From Shopping Aids to Fully Autonomous Mobile Self-checkouts - A Field Study in Retail

Self-checkout terminals allow integrating customers as active coproducers into a retailer’s business processes. They have enjoyed increasing popularity in the past years since they allow saving costs and increasing customer satisfaction. Yet, they cannot be implemented in many retail settings, as the technology relies on retailer provided terminals and does not yet fully utilize the possibilities provided by mobile smartphones, which until recently have mostly served as decision or shopping aids. This paper presents steps towards and results from a field study of a purely mobile self-checkout solution that provides a more time efficient shopping experience to time-constrained users. We show that the time performance of app users is independent of store rush and that the time for a transaction is significantly lower for app users compared to regular shoppers during peak periods.