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Amazon.com Inc. is trying to interest the nation’s largest retailers in collaborating on the technology behind cashierless stores. So far, they aren’t sold.
Amazon AMZN, +6.46% is making some of the software that underpins its “Go” stores available through an organization called Dent, which has had talks with officials at Walmart Inc. WMT, +9.66% and Target Corp. TGT, +9.07% , according to people familiar with the matter. The talks are continuing, the people said, but neither retailer currently plans to participate, according to a person close to Target and a Walmart spokesman.
The talks highlight Amazon’s ambition to have other retailers adopt its technology, and the interest of retailers like Walmart and Target in modernizing their stores with cheaper, faster networking technology and more automation and data-driven decision-making. The Go technology, in addition to cashierless purchasing, also provides automated inventory management.
Amazon faces an uphill battle in winning over retailers, which for years have viewed the Seattle-based company as a threat. Walmart, for instance, has asked some of its traditional vendors not to use Amazon’s cloud-computing services to avoid giving a competitor more financial muscle. Other retailers also have tried to avoid using Amazon’s data storage and computing services.
An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.
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