Carrefour adds smartphone scanning to app

Supermarket chain Carrefour is adding Smartscan to its Belgian app, which allows customers to scan and pay their purchases in-store using their smartphone. This eliminates the use of a handheld scanner, and thus reduces the risk of spreading the coronavirus.

Priorities

The introduction of Smartscan had been planned, but was sped up by the coronavirus crisis: in these times it is paramount that customers keep their distance from each other and from supermarket employees, and avoid physical contact as much as possible. The new function allows customer to scan their purchases using their smartphone, and use the resulting code at a self-checkout or show it to a cashier at a normal checkout.

“Safety and ease of use are the two driving forces that allowed us to deploy Smartscan in less than a month, head of digital & ecommerce projects Jean-Philippe Blerot stated in a press release. The new feature can be used in hypermarkets as of this week, smaller Carrefour Markets will have to wait till next week.