Grabango released some stats this week about how customers have been using its cashierless checkout, including demographics, geographic reach and repeat usage.
Anytime a company releases stats about itself, the numbers should obviously be taken with a grain of salt. After all, Grabango isn’t going to share information that would make the company look bad. However, the entire cashierless checkout space is new, so any data helps us better understand how consumers are reacting to this nascent technology.
Grabango’s dataset is also limited. It’s taken from one GetGo market in Pittsburgh, PA, and only since September 2020 when Grabango launched there.
With all those caveats in mind, let’s take a look at what Grabango found:
- Initial demographics show acceptance Grabango’s tech across a wide range of age groups. Grabango said 58 percent of users were age 45 or older.
- People using Grabango also held a wide range of occupations, including “healthcare workers, students, construction workers, retirees, and delivery drivers.”
- The majority of Grabango users lived within 10 miles of the GetGo location.
- More than 80 percent of visits are repeat visits, and 45 percent of those are a tenth visit or more.
- Grabango shoppers spend 1.3 seconds checking out during peak hours, which is 97 percent less time than a shopper not using the app.
- Refund requests are less than 0.03 percent of total dollar volume, indicating high revenue accuracy.
Again, there are gaps in the data, such as how many people are actually using the app, the percentage of total shoppers at the store using the app, basket size, etc. But seeing the wide range of age adoption and repeat usage should be encouraging to other startups in the cashierless checkout space.
It’s also worth noting the speed of checkout for Grabango’s app users. This correlates with data released today from Zippin about its cashierless checkout deployment in Japan at the Green Leaves Plus store. Zippin found that shoppers there spent an average of just 113 second inside the store.
Total time spent shopping is actually an important metric for cashierless checkout companies and retailers looking to adopt that technology. Not only does it mean increased convenience for consumers (walk in, grab what you want, and leave), but an increased transaction speed means there are fewer people inside the store at a given time. With the pandemic still an issue across the globe, it’s better to not have a lot of people standing in checkout lines or packed together in the aisles.
Cashierless checkout is certainly gaining traction in the early months of 2021. In addition to the stats and news from Grabango and Zippin, IMAGR has launched at three locations across Japan, Berlin-based Nomitri came out of stealth mode, and Kroger started piloting Caper’s smart shopping carts.
We’re going to see a lot more cashierless checkout deployments in the coming months, and more data about if and how shoppers are using it.
