In September 2020, Amazon One was introduced as a new, convenient, and contactless system for individuals to make use of their palms to carry out their everyday activities, such as making payments for products obtained at stores.
The system utilized by Amazon One simply involved the use of everyone’s unique palm signature as a biometric marker to confirm payments. The system was developed to serve as a rapid, secure, and reliable way by which people can identify themselves or authorize financial transactions by using their palms as biometric identifiers.
Amazon One was created for use only at Amazon Go retail locations initially, before it was expanded to an Amazon bookstore and an Amazon 4-star location in Seattle. It is widely expected to penetrate other markets very soon as a lot of people are more interested in this payment’s technology today than ever before.
Amazon One makes use of a special technology in which computer vision technology creates a unique palm signature that is scanned whenever such an individual or customer holds their hand over a scanning device which then reads the biometric features of the palm and allows it to make a payment.
To enjoy this feature, customers must first complete their registration by inserting their credit card and suspending their palm over an Amazon One device, before following the instructions that come afterwards to enable the Palm Pay system to process payments from the account linked with the credit card registered whenever the customer places their palm for identification and to make payments.
This palm-reading technology is as innovative as it is unique because it serves a dual purpose, to identify an individual, and to conduct a business transaction. It is quite different from other systems which may require one to use their smartphone or another wearable device within proximity to a point-of-sale unit to initiate a transaction.
Amazon’s palm pay technology has come in at a time when many companies already run contactless systems of payment, including Apple Pay, Starbucks Corporation’s mobile payment app, Google Pay, Walmart Pay, Samsung Pay and Alipay.
The development and launching of Amazon One have seen the best possible reception due to an increase in the popularity of contactless payment methods over other payment methods that require physical contact.
This change is majorly due to the coronavirus pandemic which has taught people to minimize their contact with others, to limit the spread of the virus. For this reason, the process of adjusting to the new payment method which ought to take years to fully accomplish has taken mere months.
Amazon One is not the first of such to be floated by Amazon in recent times, as there is also the Amazon Pay technology which grants customers the opportunity to use their Amazon credentials when they need to check out on other websites.
Also, Amazon has its Just Walk Out technology which removes the need for cashiers from stores.
Amazon has reiterated its commitment towards customer privacy and security, saying that the biometric data from the palms would be protected by multiple security controls, and the images will be sent to the cloud. Amazon One has the potential to become one of the world’s leading alternative payment options and be used for different purposes like ticketing in sports bets, paying for movie tickets among many possibilities.