Retail Technology | SunMatrix Ramble

Robomart

A mobile grocery store pulls up outside your door. You unlock it with a code, step up to the vehicle, pick what you want from everyday items and meal kits, and you are done. This spring, Robomart, a California-based company, teams up with grocery chain Stop & Shop to trial what it positions as a driverless grocery store service in Boston, Massachusetts.

What Robomart is solving in grocery

Only a tiny fraction of the $1 trillion grocery market moves online. Two reasons dominate. On-demand delivery is prohibitively expensive for retailers. And for many shoppers, it matters to pick their own food.

How the Robomart experience works

The flow is designed to feel like the convenience of the old door-to-door model, updated with autonomous tech.

You summon the mobile store using a mobile app.
When it arrives outside your door, you tap in a code to unlock the doors.
You grab what you want from the on-board selection of everyday items and meal kits.

The bigger pattern. Autonomy makes “door-to-door” scalable

For decades, consumers have the convenience of a local greengrocer, milkman, or ice-cream vendor coming door to door. It rarely makes economic sense to scale. The claim here is that driverless technology changes the cost equation enough to make the model viable at scale.

A second proof point. Nuro and Kroger’s autonomous lockers

A similar model shows up in summer 2018, when Nuro teams up with supermarket giant Kroger for autonomous grocery delivery in Scottsdale, Arizona. The mechanics differ. It is not a roaming mini-store. It is pre-picked orders loaded into secure lockers. But the handoff is the same. A code unlocks your groceries.

Customers place an order with Kroger via a smartphone app.
Staff load the autonomous pod’s secure lockers with the customer order at the depot.
When the “R1” autonomous delivery pod arrives, the customer taps in a code to open the locker and access their groceries.

A few fast answers before you act

What is Robomart, in this post?
A driverless grocery store service you summon via app, then unlock with a code to pick items directly from the vehicle.

Where does the Stop & Shop trial take place?
Boston, Massachusetts.

Why has grocery been slow to move online?
On-demand delivery is expensive for retailers, and consumers often prefer to pick their own food.

What is the comparable example mentioned?
Nuro and Kroger’s autonomous grocery delivery service in Scottsdale, Arizona, using an “R1” pod with secure lockers opened by code.

Checkout-Free Stores: 2 Startups Shape Retail

In-store shopping changes when the phone becomes the checkout

With smartphone penetration crossing the halfway point, two new start-ups push to change how we shop in-store.

The shift is simple. The phone is no longer just a companion to shopping. It becomes the point-of-sale, the service layer, and the trigger for fulfillment inside the store.

In omnichannel retail operations, the biggest shopper experience gains often come from removing time sinks like queues and size-hunting, not from adding more screens.

QThru

QThru is a mobile point-of-sale platform that helps consumers at grocery and retail stores to shop, scan and check out using their Android and iOS smartphones…

The ambition is clear. Remove queues. Remove friction.

Shoppers move through the store with the same control they have online. Browse, scan, pay, and leave without the classic checkout bottleneck.

Hointer

Hointer automates jean shopping through QR codes.

When scanned using the store’s app, the jean is delivered in the chosen size to a fitting room in the store and the customer is alerted to which room to visit.

Once the jeans have been tried, customers can either send the jeans back into the system or swipe their card using a machine in each fitting room to make a purchase.

This approach removes two of the most frustrating in-store steps. Finding the right size and waiting to pay.

The store behaves like a responsive system rather than a manual process.

A few fast answers before you act

What is the common idea behind both examples?

They move checkout and fulfillment logic into the shopper’s hands. Scanning, sizing, and payment become distributed across the store journey instead of centralized at a cashier line.

How do QThru and Hointer differ in the problem they solve?

QThru focuses on scan-and-pay to reduce queues. Hointer focuses on discovery and fitting-room fulfillment to remove size-hunting, then completes payment in the fitting room.

What has to be true operationally for checkout-free to work?

The system has to be reliable under load: accurate inventory, fast in-store routing, dependable scanning, and a payment flow that stays simple even when the store is busy.

What is the biggest failure mode teams underestimate?

Edge cases. Mis-scans, out-of-stocks, returns, fraud handling, and staff override paths. If exceptions are painful, the “friction-free” promise collapses at the worst moment.

Adidas: adiVerse Virtual Footwear Wall

A footwear wall that behaves like ecommerce

The future of instore displays is here. With this example you will see how today’s instore displays are evolving to meet our online experiences.

Adidas has created an in-store digital experience that was described at the time as showcasing over 8,000 Adidas shoes. The technology can be easily deployed to allow almost any retailer to sell the entire Adidas product range without having to be a flagship store in a major city.

How the adiVerse wall runs in-store

The experience is defined by a large footwear wall, made of multiple LCD touch screens that use facial recognition to detect a customer’s gender on approach to the wall. The adiVerse virtual footwear wall then customizes the product experience for that gender, and helps guide them to the perfect shoe.

Alternatively it lets them browse the entire range of products, with each shoe rendered in real-time 3D.

Endless aisle is a retail setup where a store sells the full catalogue digitally, even if only a fraction of it is physically stocked on the shelf.

In multi-brand sporting goods retail, bridging endless-aisle breadth with guided discovery is the difference between “too much choice” and “the right choice”.

Why it feels like online shopping, only bigger

This is essentially ecommerce browsing translated into a shared physical surface. You can scan, filter, compare, and inspect details, but the store controls the pacing and the context.

The mechanism that matters is the blend of quick orientation plus depth on demand. The wall can help you narrow down, then let you dive into a single shoe in 3D with richer content when you care.

Content depth for the winners, speed for everything else

The most popular products in the range get the full content play, including videos, game stats, product specs and even twitter feeds. Everything else stays light, so browsing does not become slow or confusing.

This “tiered content” approach is a practical way to keep performance high while still making hero products feel premium.

The retail play hiding inside the screens

In the end customers can add their selected product into a virtual cart, and check out via an iPad that the store sales staff would have.

That last step is the business intent. Sell the long tail without expanding floor space, while keeping checkout and assistance inside the store experience.

The adiVerse Virtual Footwear Wall is an in-store touchscreen wall that lets shoppers browse a large adidas shoe catalogue, inspect products in real-time 3D, and hand selections to store staff for checkout via tablet.

What to steal for your own digital wall

Build an endless aisle that feels curated. Offer the full catalogue, but guide to a shortlist fast.
Use tiered content deliberately. Deep media for hero products. Lightweight data for everything else.
Make staff checkout the final bridge. Tablets in hand keep conversion human and immediate.
Design for “public browsing”. Big screens invite group decisions. The UI should support that.

A few fast answers before you act

What is the adiVerse Virtual Footwear Wall?

It is an in-store wall of touchscreen displays that lets shoppers browse a large adidas shoe catalogue, view shoes as real-time 3D models, and hand selections to staff for checkout via tablet.

How does it personalize the experience?

It uses facial recognition to detect a customer’s gender as they approach, then adapts the browsing and guidance flow to that mode, while still allowing full catalogue exploration.

What business problem does it solve for retailers?

It enables an endless aisle: stores can sell a much broader range without stocking every model, while keeping product discovery and checkout inside the physical store experience.