Enabling Credit Card Entry with Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution for Amazon Just Walk Out Technology

By Michael Sachar, Pallavi Upadhye, and Pradeep Raju – Cognizant
By Raja GT, Cody Shive, Shaf Begen, and Saurabh Mathur – AWS

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As the retail landscape continues to evolve, retailers look for new technologies like Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology to enhance the in-store shopping experience for their customers.

While retailers are evolving, so are the habits of today’s customers. Frequent shoppers may rely on an app to manage their relationship with a retailer—using the app for everything from managing their shopping lists to entering and exiting stores. Other shoppers, however, want a degree of anonymity or perhaps just want the ease of using their credit card without the need for an app.

In a prior AWS blog post, we discussed a unique solution that leverages the Just Walk Out technology’s App Full Delegation retail integration model.

Cognizant, an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner, leverages that model by providing a white-label app customers can use for entering, shopping, and exiting the retailer’s store. This model is ideal for retailers who connect with their customers through an app, but some retailers may want the option of allowing customers simply to use their credit card to gain access to, purchase from, and exit the retailer’s locations.

Giving retailers flexible options that meet customer needs is a top priority for Cognizant. In this post, we focus on another option: Just Walk Out technology’s Credit Card Entry Fully Delegated integration model. We’ll discuss how the Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution employs this model for customers who wish to use their credit card in order to enter, shop, and exit a retailer’s store.

Credit Card Entry Fully Delegated Model

Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology provides flexible deployment options grouped in several retail integration models, allowing retailers to choose which functions Just Walk Out will perform and which will be delegated to the retailer to perform. Such functions include shopper identity, fraud and abuse checks, order and payment processing, and post purchase (examples: receipts, returns).

Here, we focus on the Credit Card Entry Fully Delegated (CCE–FD) model that is currently available in Australia. With the CCE-FD model, Just Walk Out provides the gates/pedestal hardware, builds the virtual cart, and sends it to the retailer. The external payment processor supplies the card readers, and Just Walk Out seamlessly integrates with the payment processer through APIs.

Cognizant actively facilitates the streamlined process of the CCE-FD model using the Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution for Just Walk Out technology.

How Cognizant’s Solution Works

In the Just Walk Out technology’s CCE-FD retail integration model, Amazon provides the entry/exit hardware pedestals. Shoppers can tap or swipe their credit card or mobile wallets for entry to the store.

Residing at the core of Cognizant’s Customer Concierge Solution for Just Walk Out technology is the Cognizant Retailer Technology Accelerator for the Credit Card Entry Fully Delegated model. This integrates directly with Just Walk Out connectors and offers capabilities such as fraud and abuse, order processing, payment processing, receipt registration, and bad debt clearance.

The example below illustrates how the Cognizant Retailer Technology Accelerator works when using the Just Walk Out technology’s CCE-FD model.

Figure 1 – Overview of Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution for Just Walk Out’s CCE-FD model.

As shown in Figure 1, depending on the retailer’s systems, different connectors are configured for bi-directional communication, including call-backs from point-of-sale (POS) systems for product catalog, taxes, product price, product recall, and price changes.

Cognizant’s solution directs the communication to downstream applications like POS systems to handle sales transactions. Additionally, Cognizant’s solution offers options for publish/subscribe and other flat-file capabilities, including CSV file interchange, along with reporting and logging adapters tailored for retailer-specific needs.

Business Flow

The Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution for Just Walk Out technology’s CCE-FD model supports a complete frictionless shopping journey.

With the CCE-FD integration model, the shopper’s journey is simple: once the shopper taps a credit card at the entry gate, their eligibility is verified and the gate opens for the shopper to enter the store. Once the shopper completes their shopping and exits the store, their virtual basket is handed over by Amazon to Cognizant connectors.

From that point, Cognizant universal connectors come into play, interfacing directly with the retailer’s existing POS system. At the end, the payment is triggered by calling the Amazon Payment APIs to complete the transaction.

Figure 2 – Business flow for Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution for Just Walk Out’s CCE-FD model.

In Cognizant’s solution, illustrated in Figure 2, the business flow is clearly delineated by business function.

Key business area functions are grouped together and include:

• Just Walk Out technology and Cognizant Business Logic Accelerator: The core layer that includes all business validations and business logic required to integrate with Just Walk Out technology.
• Universal connectors: The gateway to third-party POS solutions that provides standard integration points, allowing both commercially available off-the-shelf (COTS) POS applications as well as home-grown POS, to connect with the Just Walk Out integration layer.
• Web portals for shoppers and merchants: A web application offers key features for shoppers to provide enhanced user experience and merchants to manage users and help remediate bad debt.

Architecture Overview

Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution for Just Walk Out technology architecture leverages more than 25 AWS services to support the CCE-FD retail integration model. As part of this architecture, Amazon provides gates, pedestal hardware, “in-store technology” like sensors and cameras, builds the virtual cart, and facilitates the payment using the retailer’s external payment processor.

The Cognizant solution handles the remaining retailer functions through its business logic and various connectors.

Figure 3 – Architecture for Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution for Just Walk Out’s CCE-FD model.

The architecture for Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution for Just Walk Out technology’s CCE-FD model, depicted in Figure 3, consists of microservices which encapsulate specific business functions, enabling a modular and agile development approach. Each microservice is built to address key domains, including fraud and abuse, order management, POS connectivity, and user interactions through shopper and merchant portals, along with seamless item pricing connections.

The following is a breakdown of Cognizant’s solution, which handles seven major functions, each of which leveraging various AWS services.

Cognizant Fraud and Abuse Connector

When a shopper taps their credit card or mobile wallet at the entry gate, Amazon verifies the shopper credit card, authorizes the payment method, and invokes Cognizant’s fraud and abuse Amazon API Gateway service to check for any outstanding balance for the shopper based on their shopping history.

Shoppers with outstanding balances from prior shopping trips are not allowed to enter the store. The shopper will be redirected to pay-off balances using the bad debt remediation process.

Cognizant Ordering Connector

Once the shopper exits the store, Just Walk Out technology sends a request to Amazon Ordering Gateway, which in-turn sends the virtual shopping cart data to Cognizant ordering connector.

The Cognizant ordering connector performs various functions:

• Stores virtual cart information in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket.
• Calculates the cart total based on the virtual cart, applies relevant promotions and discounts, and stores the cart information in Amazon DynamoDB.
• Amazon’s payment services are called to adjust the authorization depending on the order total, and then captures the final amount on the shopper’s credit card.
• Payment is processed using the retailer’s payment service provider, and the payment status is updated in DynamoDB.
• Once the payment is successfully processed, a detailed receipt is generated, providing shoppers with a complete overview of their purchases.

Cognizant Point of Sale Connector

Upon successful processing of the order, the transaction log (TLOG) is published to Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). An AWS Lambda function, which has subscribed to the TLOG queue, matches the transaction details with additional data stored in Amazon DynamoDB, generates a standard TLOG XML, and stores it in an Amazon S3 bucket.

This new log captures the transaction information, including item and payment details, and any relevant promotional data. The POS connector sends the TLOG XML to the retailer’s POS system for further processing.

Cognizant Shopper and Merchant Portal

Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution provides both shopper and merchant add-on portals as part of the CCE-FD model. Their functions are discussed below:

• Shopper portal provides two capabilities:
  • Receipt registration is used to register the shopper’s email address to receive digital receipts.
  • Receipt lookup retrieves the digital receipts based on key search attributes.
• Merchant portal provides three capabilities:
  • Employee and store management registers retailers and allows them to manage their store associates and Just Walk Technology stores.
  • Outstanding balance lookup retrieves the outstanding balance for a specific transaction.
  • Bad debt remediation is used to clear any bad debt issues for a shopper.

Cognizant Item Pricing Connector

Current product catalog data is necessary to process orders. Therefore, the Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution offers options for retailers to feed item and price data to the Cognizant solution using various means, including CSV files or by using an API.

The pricing connector retains a history of item prices by location and date. That way, the correct price is always applied, even if there’s a delay in cart processing.

Continuous Delivery and Integration with AWS Services

The Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution is completely automated. It adopts a robust CI/CD pipeline leveraging AWS services including AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodePipeline, allowing for the automated and systematic testing of new features and enhancements.

AWS CodeBuild facilitates the building of application artifacts, while the infrastructure is built using AWS CloudFormation templates which are managed by a version-controlled repository, AWS CodeCommit, and are deployed through pipelines using a CloudFormation stack.

Security and Monitoring Notifications

The Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution for Just Walk Out technology is built with security being top of mind. The solution ensures adherence to the principle of least privilege with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users, roles, groups, and policies. It also incorporates a multilayered security approach that uses a suite of AWS services to fortify the solution against potential threats.

Amazon CloudWatch stands as a cornerstone, providing comprehensive monitoring capabilities, while Amazon GuardDuty continuously monitors for malicious activity and AWS WAF WebACL provides firewall protection to the API Gateway endpoint. Data stored in DynamoDB is fully encrypted at rest, while AWS CloudTrail is enabled to trace all user activity and API usage.

Value Propositions for Retailers

The Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution for Just Walk Out technology can be adopted across formats and verticals such as travel and hospitality, specialty retail, university campus, sports and event venues, and grocery.

Other value propositions for retailers include:

• As the retail industry evolves, so does the in-store experience and how both customers and retailers approach it.
• Cognizant offers an attractive and easily-integrated option delivering advanced shopping technology from Amazon that implements Just Walk Out technology in fewer than 3-4 months. Benefits include:
  • API/microservices based integrations to POS and other systems.
  • Powered by AWS, the platform incorporates an event-driven, serverless microservices architecture that offers a cost-optimized, scalable, and highly-available solution with a pay-as-you-go model.
  • Pre-built connectors to bridge AWS and the retailer’s systems.
  • Offering as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model with both offline and stand-in processing.
  • In-built shopper add-on portal helps shoppers register and look up their digital receipts.
  • In-built merchant add-on portal helps retailers manage store supervisors, associates, and stores; and retrieve/remediate any bad debt issues of a shopper.
  • Reconciliation report that can be used to reconcile the transactions between payment provider and actual sales transactions.

Conclusion

For retailers who want a Just Walk Out technology store and need help integrating it with their current point-of-sale (POS) system, the Cognizant Customer Concierge Solution provides several options. Using the Cognizant solution, you can lower costs, reduce risk, and improve time-to-market when implementing the Credit Card Entry Fully Delegated model from Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology.

Once again, Cognizant puts you in the driver’s seat by doing the heavy lifting for you. Now, all you have to do is turn the key and get started. Learn more about Cognizant on AWS >

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Cognizant – AWS Partner Spotlight

Cognizant is an AWS Premier Tier Service Partner and MSP that transforms a retailer’s business, operating, and technology models for the digital era by helping organizations envision, build, and run more innovative and efficient businesses.

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