Skip to main content

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

Amazon’s new smart shopping cart lets you skip the checkout lines

Amazon wants to give the good ol’ shopping cart a 21st-century upgrade. On Tuesday, July 14, the e-commerce giant introduced Dash Cart, a smarter pushcart that lets you skip the traditional cashier line.

Furnished with a mix of sensors, a weighing scale, and cameras, the Amazon Dash Cart can tell what you’re placing inside of it. Once you’re done picking out what you want, you can simply walk out of the store through a special checkout lane and Amazon will bill you automatically. The Dash Cart also has a touchscreen up front, through which you can access your Alexa shopping lists, view the items in your cart, or enter a coupon code.

The Amazon Dash Cart processes payments through an Amazon account. So when you first walk into a store, you will need to scan a code for connecting your cart with your Amazon account.

Amazon Dash Cart
Image used with permission by copyright holder

The Amazon Dash Cart relies exclusively on the tech it comes equipped with inside instead of sensors scattered across a cashier-free smart store, as in the case of Amazon Go. This enables Amazon Dash Cart to pretty much function as an Amazon Go store on wheels and works in standard brick-and-mortar facilities — as long as it houses a Dash Cart-compatible checkout lane. Because of that, Amazon is first debuting the Dash Cart first in its own traditional supermarket in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles (whenever it reopens).

“Our primary motivation for building this was to be able to save customers time,” Dilip Kumar, vice president of Amazon’s physical retail and technology told CNET. “The alternative solutions are standing in the express checkout lanes or fumbling through self-checkout stations.”

With the Dash Cart, Amazon is building upon its quest to bring its digital e-commerce chops to the offline shopping experience. Since the Dash Cart doesn’t need a full-fledged smart store, Amazon can roll them out with a quicker turnaround, and eventually rope more shoppers into its grocery and subscription services.

We’ve reached out to Amazon for more information about Dash Cart’s availability and we’ll update the story when we hear back.

Editors' Recommendations

Shubham Agarwal
Shubham Agarwal is a freelance technology journalist from Ahmedabad, India. His work has previously appeared in Firstpost…
Amazon’s new AR tool lets you fill a room with multiple virtual items
amazons new ar tool makes furniture shopping easier amazon room decorator

Shoppers who go online in search of furniture may be interested in a new offering from Amazon.

The e-commerce giant is rolling out a new augmented reality (AR) tool, currently available only on iOS, that lets you virtually place multiple furniture items in a room in your home so you can see how they look.

Read more
Amazon’s new smart oven can air-fry, bake, and microwave your meals
amazons new smart oven air frys warms and microwaves amazon

Today at the Amazon 2019 event, the company unveiled its newest smart cooking appliance, the Amazon Smart Oven. It's described as a combination of a microwave, convection oven, air fryer, and food warmer. And what's more, all of that cooking versatility can be controlled via Alexa-enabled devices and voice commands. Last year, Amazon unveiled a smart microwave, but it didn't seem to wow many. This new device seems much more advanced and useful, especially for those will modest cooking skills.

Certified for humans, Amazon says this new oven is struggle-free, tinker-free, stress-free. It looks like that label is true. The smart oven has 30+ built-in presets. So, all you need to do is ask Alexa to cook a particular food and she'll automatically find the perfect way to cook it. She will also announce when you need to stir your food during the cooking process, when the oven is preheated, and when it's finished.

Read more
Amazon will give you $5K in free smart home tech and more when you buy a house
smart home trends ring beams

You can now get up to $5,000 in Amazon credit if you buy a house through Amazon’s new TurnKey real estate partnership. 

The $5,000 incentive was announced Tuesday and includes smart home and home theater equipment along with services like unpacking and cleaning.

Read more