How would you design a contactless checkout experience for a store selling groceries and garments?

How would you design a contact less checkout experience for a store selling groceries and garments

Clarifying Questions 

• Do you have any budget constraints ?  No
• Do you want to design a software solution as well along with some hardware solution? Yes
• What is the goal of designing a contact less checkout experience? Is it just to reduce contact or is it to make the process faster and involving less people ?   Both because both will help the same cause if the checkout process Is faster, people will spent less time inside the store and at the same time, less staff will be required inside the store.

To summarise, my assumptions are : it is not just about making the experience contactless, it is also about making the process more easy and fast while involving less people. 

Goal :  To provide a contact-less and fast checkout experience to the user while involving less people 

Users : 

• Shoppers 
• Store Manager/Staff

We will choose Shoppers because we are designing the experience for the shopper and essentially we want to reduce the working staff inside the store and making the checkout process as contact less and fast as possible.

Pain-points / Use Cases 

1. Users have to get billing done for each item they purchase (person at the billing counter scans each item and enters it into the billing software to generate the bill)
2. Apply any discounts if applicable on the items 
3. Users have to make the payment for the bill
4. Users need to get extra shopping bags to store the items 
5. Verify that user has paid for each item before checkout/exit

Lets prioritise use cases 1, 3 and 5 since these are highly important as they are more frequent use cases. 

Solutions 

Checkout Kiosk with POS

User will collect whatever items he/she wants to buy and add them to a shopping cart —> user will come to the checkout kiosk ——> scan the items one by one  —> it will supervised by staff to ensure all items are scanned properly —> once that is done, bill will generated , user can make the payment by scanning a QR on the kiosk screen or touching/swiping the card on POS —> user can add number of bags that is needed —> bag dispenser will dispense some shopping bags —> the user can collect the items inside the shopping bag and leave

Electronic Shopping Bags

The user will get an electronic shopping bag when he enters the store — > once the user places any item in the electronic bag, it is automatically added to virtual cart and recorded at a central location against that bag number —> once user is done with collecting all items he or she wants to buy —> at the checkout counter, there will be a bar code scanner which will scan the bar code on the bag and generate the bill on the kiosk screen —> user will make the payment by touching card on POS machine or scanning QR on the kiosk screen and use any of the UPI Apps —> once the payment is received, user can exit the store with the same shopping bag —> exit gate will not open if the shopping bag is not paid for.

Shopping App + Electronic Tags 

The user will enter the store —> will have the store app downloaded —> he or she will create a new cart on the app—> start collecting each item and scan it to add to cart —> once all items are collected —> the user will make the payment on the app using Store Wallet / UPI Apps or Card (Razorpay or PayU like payment gateway integration) , the store wallet can be preloaded to make the payment even faster —> A QR will be shown on app —> before exiting , he can get this QR scanned at exit to verify that the bill is paid —> Once the bill is paid, electronic tags on items will be disabled and user can exit the store. 

Prioritisation

I think solution 1 will still require user to spend significant time at the checkout kiosk and may even need help from the staff to use that system. Doing that same process using app may solve that problem. 

Solution 2 will require significant innovation (high effort high cost)  but will reduce the effort required to scan each item and reduce time to shop or checkout. 

Solution 2 is better than solution 3 in terms of user experience. 

I would go with solution 2 even if it requires high effort and high cost since it reduces time required for checkout significantly. 

Metrics 

Average Number of people inside the store at given point of time

Time spent by each user at checkout / inside the store 

Number of contact less purchases per day  

Footfall at the store