NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Walmart Inc. has ended a trial of its Mobile Express Scan & Go app in its Walmart stores in the U.S., which had enabled shoppers to scan their items themselves and pay with a stored credit or debit card, then leave the store, after having a greeter scan a bar code in their apps to briefly check the receipt.
Scan & Go continues at Walmart’s warehouse stores, Sam’s Club, but the rather abrupt end of the trial targeting its much more numerous Walmart supercenters, or hypermarkets, shows the retail giant is holding back on implementing self-service shopping apps or the even more technology-intensive Amazon Go concept for most of its stores.
Walmart originally launched the trial of its Scan & Go app in its Walmart supercenters in five states in mid-2017, then announced in January of this year that it was expanding the “popular” app to 100 more stores, bringing the experiment to a total of 33 states in the U.S. It ended the test in April, with only a short statement, saying that it would “use what we’ve learned to improve this and other services in the future.”
