Amazon Go-style cashier-less stores open up in India

A customer at a HyperCity cashier-less store in Hyderabad uses the Perpule app to scan the barcode on a packet of carrots. Photo credit: Perpule.

Amazon got attention around the world when it opened a cashier-less store in Seattle at the end of last year. But while the automated Amazon Go grocery store is still in trial mode, variations on the theme are springing up elsewhere.

A few months ago, Chinese startup Bingobox opened small, staffless convenience stores in Shanghai. Here, a customer scans a QR code to open the door and walk in, scans items to buy, and pays up on the app. A camera checks to make sure only what’s paid for is taken out. A customer support video line is available to sort out problems.

This is now happening on a larger scale in India. One of the leading supermarket chains, HyperCity, has opened up two cashier-less stores in the southern tech hub of Hyderabad.

They’re not fully unmanned. Some customer support and fulfilment staff are on the premises, but there are no cashiers.

The simplicity of Perpule makes it more feasible for deployment in a range of brick-and-mortar stores – and not just a few hi-tech stores like Amazon Go.

HyperCity has been trialing a self-checkout app built by Bangalore-based startup Perpule for several months now in some of its stores in Indian cities. Self-checkout is available for its customers if they choose to use the app.

Two fully cashier-less stores powered by Perpule, which opened a few weeks back, take this a step forward. These new stores are in the two Hyderabad campuses of IT giant Infosys. Being new helps the store use the cashier-less system from the outset instead of trying to integrate it with legacy systems and processes. Also, the tech-savvy crowd in the Infosys campus helps with adoption of a mobile app for offline shopping.

Here’s how it works:

• Users scan the barcode of any item to see the product details, price, and deals.
• The app supports multiple digital payment gateways and cards for a self-checkout. At the end, the app generates an invoice.
• To verify payment, a weighing machine coupled with a camera and computer vision can check up to five items. For larger carts, a human doorman does the verification.

The 3,000-square-foot cashier-less stores are about one-tenth the size of a typical HyperCity supermarket store. It mostly stocks groceries, but there are ongoing “splash sales” of apparel and convenience products.

Adoption and monetization challenges

I met Perpule co-founder Abhinav Pathak at the beginning of this year when the bootstrapped startup was on the verge of raising US$650,000 from Kstart, the seed funding arm of Indian VC firm Kalaari Capital. Pathak graduated from the National Institute of Technology, Suratkal, and worked for Goldman Sachs in the US, where he saved up money to become an entrepreneur.

Two co-founders, Saketh BSV, and Yogesh Ghaturle, are graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. Saketh worked with Pathak at Goldman Sachs, while Ghaturle was with the Samsung Research Institute in Bangalore. Another co-founder, Sathyanarayanan R, was with an aerospace tech firm in the US before joining Perpule.

Tech for offline retail, which still accounts for over 95 percent of retail sales in India despite the rapid growth of ecommerce in recent years, seemed like a huge opportunity to them. But they soon ran into challenges of execution on the ground and monetization.

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