NACCU New Member Highlight: Zippin
NACCU New Member Highlight:
Zippin
In this latest installment of our New Member Highlight, we catch up with Bonnie Milam with new NACCU member Zippin.
Talk about the history of your company.
Zippin was founded in 2015 by industry veterans from Amazon and SRI with deep backgrounds in retail technology, AI, and computer vision.Since its beginning, Zippin has been on a mission to accelerate the world’s adoption of checkout-free technology. We’re constantly innovating to make our checkout-free platform more accessible to everyone. Today our technology can be installed in just days, and total cost of ownership (TCO) is less than half what it was just a few years ago.
Zippin serves retailers across higher education, sports and entertainment, transportation retail, medical campuses, business dining, and more. As of early 2024, more than 4 million people have shopped in one of the 135 Zippin-powered stores around the globe, collectively saving more than 650,000 hours that would have otherwise been spent in a checkout line.
What does your company do?
Zippin helps retailers reimagine their shopper experience by removing the friction of in-store shopping. We eliminate the checkout to give shoppers their time back and help retailers operate their stores with a lower demand for hard-to-find labor resources. Zippin’s AI-powered platform combines computer vision, sensor fusion, and machine learning to accurately identify shoppers’ purchases. Our technology does not use facial recognition or biometric identifiers in any way.
Zippin is NOT self-checkout. Shoppers simply enter the store with a campus card, credit card, or mobile wallet, take what they want, and zip out. There’s no line, no kiosk, and no mobile app required. Shoppers are automatically billed for what they take as they leave the store.
What products and services do you provide specifically to campus card operations?
All we do is checkout-free innovation. Zippin’s checkout-free platform is the most mature in the industry, serving a broad customer base around the globe. We are known for our emphasis on lowering the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for our customers. Zippin installation costs, pre-install construction costs and ongoing support and maintenance costs are a fraction of our competitors. Our checkout-free platform is also the most flexible, with an API framework that makes it easy to add new capabilities such as self-serve coffee, fountain drinks, and more to the Zippin platform. We support all major campus card providers and payment gateways to give retailers choice in how to operate their stores.
We offer flexible deployment options to fit any environment:
Zippin Markets: Custom retrofits of existing stores or new checkout-free stores designed to the retailer’s specifications.
Zippin Lane: A turnkey checkout-free solution designed for high foot traffic, it creates a highly profitable store in unused spaces, typically long corridors. Ideal for sports venues.
Zippin Walk-Up: Transforms hot food and beverage concession stands into checkout-free shopping in just days to eliminate bottlenecks of traditional stands. This model can also be used to convert existing outdoor tents or container stores to checkout-free.
Is there a new product of service you want to tell us about?
Our newest product for higher education is Zippin for Campus Dining, which eliminates the manual process of students checking in to dining halls. Instead, we securely control dining hall access and automatically deduct the appropriate meal from student accounts. Universities gain new insights into entries and exits, and are able to serve more students during peak times because of the increased throughput without additional labor.
What are you hoping to gain from your NACCU membership?
We are on a mission to accelerate the adoption of checkout-free technology around the world. College campuses are ideal early adopters for this new paradigm. Students and staff need convenient on-campus retail solutions and operators need highly efficient autonomous tech in order to offer those solutions in an economically viable fashion. Through the NACCU membership, we want to help colleges better understand the benefits of checkout-free shopping, how it works, and realize just how easy it is to go checkout-free across the campus. We are thrilled to be a part of NACCU and look forward to productive partnerships with its members.
Learn more about us at zippin.ai.