Soon, Whole Foods Market customers will no longer need their wallet or a phone to pay at checkout. Amazon announced last month that it will expand Amazon One palm-scanning service to all 500+ Whole Foods Market locations in the U.S. by the end of the year. Customers will be able to use their palm scan for payment and to apply their Prime membership benefits. “We are always looking for new ways to delight our customers and improve the shopping experience,” said Leandro Balbinot, Chief Technology Officer at Whole Foods Market. “Since we’ve introduced Amazon One at Whole Foods Market stores over the past two years, we’ve seen that customers love the convenience it provides, and we’re excited to bring Amazon One to all of our customers across the U.S.”
Amazon has expanded its palm recognition device to over 400 locations across the U.S., including over 200 Whole Foods Market stores. The palm scanning service can be used for identification, payment, loyalty membership, and venue entry. It recently reached a critical milestone with more than 3 million uses. Beyond Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market stores, Amazon One is being used in new ways by third-party merchants across the country, including restaurants, sports stadiums, entertainment venues, airport stores, and more. Panera Bread uses Amazon One’s loyalty linking capability to pull up guest loyalty account information, enabling servers to greet the guest by name and reference order history. At sporting venues like Coors Field in Colorado, Amazon One is being used to verify age to allow adult customers ages 21 and over to purchase alcoholic beverages.
Most major credit card companies and U.S. banks have already partnered with Amazon in support of the new technology that offers secure identification and payment in one, while offering the highest levels of customer privacy and data security. Amazon One is more secure than credit cards or passwords because the palm signature can’t be replicated to impersonate a customer. Instead of using raw palm images to identify a person, the scanner looks at both the palm and underlying vein structure to create a unique numerical, vector representation—called a “palm signature”—for identity matching. Customer data is held in the AWS cloud, which is backed by more than 300 cloud security tools and 100,000 security partners from around the world.
Whole Foods Market customers can pre-enroll online in less than one minute with their debit or credit card, Amazon account, and mobile number. The process is complete once they scan their palm at Whole Foods Market or another participating location. Once enrolled, Amazon Prime members will automatically see savings and other Prime member benefits applied to their Whole Foods Market store purchases. Alternatively, customers can also enroll in-store for Amazon One with their credit card and phone number.
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