Enabling Credit Card Entry with Amazon’s Just Walk Out Technology
As the retail sector continues to evolve, businesses are increasingly seeking innovative technologies to enhance the in-store shopping experience. Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology is at the forefront of this evolution, offering a seamless, cashier-less shopping experience. This technology appeals to evolving customer habits, offering options for shoppers who prefer the convenience of an app-based experience.
Cognizant, an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner, has developed the Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution for Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology. This solution directly addresses the needs of retailers seeking to implement this groundbreaking technology, especially for customers who prefer making purchases using their credit cards.
Credit Card Entry Fully Delegated Model
Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology provides retailers with flexible deployment options categorized into several retail integration models. This design lets retailers choose the functionalities that Just Walk Out will handle versus those that will be delegated to the retailer. These delegated functions can include aspects of shopper identification, fraud prevention, order and payment processing, and post-purchase tasks such as managing receipts and returns.
One such model, the Credit Card Entry Fully Delegated (CCE-FD) model, is the focus of this article. In this model, currently available in Australia, Just Walk Out provides the necessary entry and exit hardware, and builds a virtual cart. The system seamlessly integrates with external payment processors through APIs. This allows customers to simply tap or swipe their credit card for entry, shopping, and exit. The Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution facilitates the streamlined process of this model.
How Cognizant’s Solution Works
In the CCE-FD retail integration model, shoppers can use their credit cards or mobile wallets for entry. Cognizant’s Customer Concierge Solution integrates directly with Just Walk Out, offering various capabilities. These include fraud and abuse detection, order processing, payment processing, and receipt registration. The solution interacts with the retailer’s Point of Sale (POS) systems.
Figure 1 illustrates the high-level overview of Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution for Just Walk Out’s CCE-FD model.
Cognizant’s solution directs the communication to downstream applications, such as POS systems, to handle sales transactions. The solution offers options for communication, including publish/subscribe, CSV file interchange, and offers reporting and logging adapters optimized for retailer-specific needs.
Business Flow
With the CCE-FD integration model, the shopping journey is straightforward. Upon tapping a credit card at the entry gate, the shopper’s eligibility is verified and the gate opens. After shopping and exiting, the virtual basket data is sent to Cognizant connectors. These connectors interface with the existing POS system. Finally, payment is completed by calling the Amazon Payment APIs to complete the transaction.
Figure 2 shows the business flow of transaction processing with the Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution.
Key business functions are grouped together and include: Just Walk Out technology and Cognizant Business Logic Accelerator, Universal connectors, and Web portals for shoppers and merchants.
Architecture Overview
The Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution leverages over 25 AWS services to support the CCE-FD retail integration model. Amazon provides gates, pedestal hardware, in-store technology like sensors and cameras, builds the virtual cart, and manages payment using the retailer’s external payment processor. Cognizant handles the remaining functions.
Figure 3 shows the architecture for Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution for Just Walk Out’s CCE-FD model.
The solution’s architecture consists of microservices that encapsulate business functions. Each microservice addresses key domains like fraud and abuse, order management, POS connectivity, and user interactions through shopper and merchant portals. The following is a breakdown of Cognizant’s solution which handles seven main functions, each using various AWS services.
- Cognizant Fraud and Abuse Connector: This connector checks for outstanding balances upon entry, ensuring only eligible shoppers can enter. Amazon verifies the shopper credit card and invokes Cognizant’s fraud and abuse API Gateway service to check for any outstanding balance.
- Cognizant Ordering Connector: This connector handles virtual cart information, calculates totals, applies discounts, and calls payment services. The connector stores virtual cart information in an Amazon S3 bucket and cart information in the Amazon DynamoDB.
- Cognizant Point of Sale Connector: After successful order processing, transaction logs are published to Amazon SNS. An AWS Lambda function matches transaction details with additional data from Amazon DynamoDB. It generates a standard TLOG XML, stores it in an Amazon S3 bucket, and sends the XML to the retailer’s POS system for processing.
- Cognizant Shopper and Merchant Portal: The shopper portal offers receipt registration and lookup capabilities. The merchant portal allows retailers to manage employees, stores, and resolve bad debt issues. The merchant portal also retrieves the outstanding balance for specific transactions.
- Cognizant Item Pricing Connector: This connector provides options for retailers to feed item and price data, retaining a history of prices by location and date.
Continuous Delivery and Integration with AWS Services
The solution uses a CI/CD pipeline leveraging AWS services, including AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodePipeline. This allows for automated testing of new features and enhancements. AWS CodeBuild builds artifacts, while infrastructure is built using AWS CloudFormation templates and deployed through pipelines.
Security and Monitoring Notifications
The Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution is built with a focus on security. This involves adherence to the principle of least privilege with AWS IAM. A multi-layered security approach uses a suite of AWS services. Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon GuardDuty, and AWS WAF WebACL are incorporated. Data in DynamoDB is encrypted at rest, and AWS CloudTrail tracks all user activity and API usage.
Value Propositions for Retailers
The Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution can be adopted across formats and verticals such as travel and hospitality, specialty retail, university campus, sports and event venues, and grocery, along with value propositions for retailers.
- Offers an easily integrated option delivering advanced shopping technology from Amazon that implements Just Walk Out technology in a short timeframe.
- Provides API/microservices based integrations to POS and other systems.
- Powered by AWS, the platform incorporates an event-driven, serverless microservices architecture, offering a cost-optimized, scalable, and highly-available solution.
- Provides Pre-built connectors to bridge AWS and the retailer’s systems.
- Is offered as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model with both offline and stand-in processing.
- Includes in-built shopper add-on portals to help shoppers register for and look up digital receipts.
- Includes in-built merchant add-on portals to help retailers manage store supervisors, associates, and stores; and retrieve/remediate any bad debt issues of a shopper.
- Provides reconciliation reports that can reconcile the transactions between the payment provider and actual sales transactions.
Conclusion
For retailers seeking to implement Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology, the Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution streamlines integration with existing POS systems, offering options for credit card entry. It lowers costs, reduces risk, and improves time-to-market. Cognizant handles the complex integrations, allowing retailers to focus on providing a next-generation shopping experience. Contact Cognizant today to get started.
