What Amazon’s retreat tells us about the future of biometric authorization

When retail giant Amazon announced last week the slashing of its frictionless Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh supermarkets, most attention focused on its exit from in‑house brick‑and‑mortar, the state of its Just Walk Out technology, and a strategic pivot toward Whole Foods. Less discussed was the fate of Amazon One, the biometric palm‑vein authentication service launched in 2020 and now scheduled to disappear across retail environments.

Customers who use Amazon One to enter stores, pay, or activate loyalty programmes will see the service end on June 3, 2026, though it will continue in select hospitals and sports venues. Amazon attributed the decision to “limited customer adoption,” a clear signal that biometric entry never reached the mainstream traction the company expected.

According to payments expert Mirko Spagnolatti, the reasons go deeper than Amazon’s store closures. He argues that the payment industry’s push to reduce friction has paradoxically created more fragmentation and technical complexity, both at the POS level and in backend reconciliation. That complexity, he says, makes biometric systems difficult to scale commercially.

On the consumer side, the challenge is even more fundamental: biometric data is permanent. Card data can be cancelled and replaced; biometric identifiers cannot. In markets where privacy weighs heavily, particularly across Europe, that irreversibility becomes a critical barrier. For Spagnolatti, this is why palm‑vein or facial‑recognition methods are unlikely to scale in the convenience retail space, especially when NFC and QR‑based payments already deliver high convenience without the privacy risk or extra cost.

Meanwhile, other entry technologies (contactless cards, mobile apps, QR codes) have quietly become the dominant standard in autonomous retail. That raises the question: Where does that leave palm‑vein payments? What are the best authorization methods?

The story of palm‑vein technology

Palm‑vein scanning has emerged as one of the more advanced biometric identification technologies, prized for its accuracy and resistance to spoofing. Unlike surface‑level biometrics such as fingerprints or iris scans, it captures sub‑dermal vein patterns, generating an identifier that is both contactless and difficult to replicate.

Beyond retail, the technology has expanded rapidly in sectors where security, hygiene, and identity assurance are critical: banking, healthcare, and government services, among them.

Amazon One itself debuted in 2020 at two Amazon Go stores in Seattle, positioning these frictionless stores as the proving ground for biometric entry. Despite the promo push, consumers didn’t gravitate toward palm authentication. In retail, the fate of the technology became tightly coupled to Amazon Go, and with both now shutting down, the model collapses with them. Still, Amazon was not alone in exploring biometric payments.

In Uruguay, payments provider Ingenico, alongside Mastercard and Scanntech, launched palm‑vein payments at Tienda Inglesa’s Red Expres stores. Customers enroll by scanning their palm and linking it to a tokenised payment card. At checkout, they simply hold their hand above a scanner to authenticate and pay.

The future of authorisation

Authorisation is fragmenting into “the familiar” (tap, wallet, QR) and “the high‑assurance” (biometrics) rather than converging on a single method. Tap‑to‑pay is deeply entrenched in Europe and other mature markets, while QR has become a global default in APAC and is expanding elsewhere as schemes and wallets normalise the user experience. 

For Claudia Puig, COO of Big Fish, a Spanish company operating autonomous stores, the issue is not the capability of biometrics but their fit with real consumer behaviour.

She notes that while biometric formats are powerful, “they still introduce friction in everyday use,” creating an initial barrier for customers who worry about privacy or simply find the process unfamiliar. In convenience retail, any additional step at the entrance introduces risk, and mainstream adoption tends to favour what feels natural over what is technically advanced.

This philosophy is what led Big Fish, which currently runs seven stores in Spain, to prioritise mobile and bank‑card access over biometrics. The goal, Puig explains, wasn’t to show how far technology can go, but to make the technology disappear, to blend into everyday behaviour rather than reshape it.

“The bank card and the phone are universal gestures that people already internalise and accept. No explanations, no registration, no learning a new way to buy,” adds Puig.

That doesn’t mean biometrics will stall. The palm‑vein segment is forecast to grow at mid‑to‑high‑teens CAGR through the early 2030s, particularly in banking, healthcare, and government, where identity assurance requirements are stringent.  And vendors continue to promote tangible benefits relating to speed and security. Paytronix reports biometric checkout can shave up to 40 seconds off transaction time.

Amazon’s retreat is a useful reminder that tech‑forward doesn’t always mean customer‑forward. In practice, the winners are the solutions that feel immediately convenient and low‑friction (tap, wallets, and QR) especially when the same frictionless promise can be delivered without asking people to enrol a new biometric or change ingrained habits. It’s telling that Just Walk Out will keep running in hundreds of third‑party sites while the palm scanner is being switched off in favour of cards and phones: frictionless retail survives, but the most familiar authorisation methods carry it over the line.

Written by Oscar Smith Diamante