Though less than 3% of consumers have shopped at an autonomous store, three-quarters want to try the experience.

This is according to a retail shopping survey targeting primary household decision makers conducted over SurveyMonkey and sponsored by Shekel Brainweigh’s retail innovation division.

The goal of the survey was to gain an understanding of how consumers perceive autonomous stores and autonomous store technologies. Nearly 80% of survey respondents were between the ages of 18 and 60 years old and more than half were female.

Key findings of the survey include:

• Convenience and a frictionless experience were cited as the most important features of an autonomous store by a third of respondents with a quarter saying variety and selection of goods were most important.
• Nearly 13% of respondents prefer a fully autonomous store while 70% prefer a hybrid store with autonomous and human assistance options.
• Lack of assistance (37%) and leaving the store without knowing the amount charged (19%) were cited as the top two concerns of autonomous stores by survey respondents.
• For nearly 65% of respondents, privacy was a heightened concern, and they prefer an anonymous and privacy-protected shopping experience.
• In terms of ideal providers for autonomous stores, half said it should be best-of-breed regardless of the provider and that credible retail providers with innovative technology from the coolest start-ups were best.

“The results of our retail shopping survey demonstrate the need for retailers to quickly adopt autonomous store technologies to meet the major desires of consumers,” said Udi Wiesner, general manager of the Israel-based Shekel Brainweigh retail innovation division. “And knowing that for nearly 50% of respondents Covid-19 has not impacted their shopping habits, there is a massive opportunity for retailers to improve their autonomous shopping strategies to provide superior shopping experiences with more store availability and a greater variety of products, while also keeping their customers’ privacy.”

The division is capitalising on the global demand for retail store automation to provide enhanced consumer shopping experiences and improve retailers’ efficiencies. Shekel has developed its product aware technology, which digitally transforms a retail shelf into a source of actionable insights. With its ability to identify a product by its weight, using IoT load sensors, embedded smart shelf software and cloud-based artificial intelligence algorithms, it provides product recognition capabilities that enable store automation.

At this week’s NAMA show in New Orleans, Shekel Brainweigh and Hitachi Vantara will showcase an automated shop that enables retailers, vendors and operators to offer their customers a frictionless shopping experience in secure micro markets with a wide offering of fresh and healthy food at a lower cost of operation.

The technology behind the shop includes Shekel’s product aware smart shelves and Hitachi 3D lidar with shopper insights and analytics displayed on the Hitachi visualisation suite. This live experience will allow visitors to go through the shop as if it were their own customer journey.

As part of the automated shop, the stand will also feature a Hubz smart cooler, an unattended retail micro market offering that allows retailers and vending operators to offer consumers fresh and healthy food selections in a 100% frictionless vending machine experience, and a smart coffee machine, courtesy of UST.

The retail innovation division is a start-up that is part of Shekel Brainweigh, an established holding company that includes Shekel Scales, a technology firm providing more than 40 years of digital weighing products to the retail self-checkout market through companies such as Fujitsu, Toshiba and Diebold-Nixdorf.

The division provides product aware shelves for automated product recognition to scale up autonomous retail. Product aware technology can transform any retail shelf into a source of actionable insights using IoT load sensors and artificial intelligence to identify a product by its weight and location on the shelf.