Amazon is shutting down its Amazon One palm-scanning system mainly because it never reached the scale or impact Amazon wanted, especially as it rethinks its physical retail strategy.

Quick Scoop

  • Amazon One (the palm scan you used to pay or check in) will stop working at retail businesses on June 3, 2026.
  • Amazon says the decision is due to limited customer adoption of the service.
  • The shutdown lines up with Amazon closing or restructuring Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores, which were the core venues using this tech.
  • Amazon says all Amazon One user data, including palm data, will be securely deleted after the service ends.

The Official Reason

Amazon’s public line is straightforward:

“In response to limited customer adoption, we’re discontinuing Amazon One, our authentication service for facility access and payment.”

In practice, that means not enough people consistently chose to hover their palm instead of just tapping a card or phone, so the system didn’t justify ongoing investment.

Behind the Scenes: Likely Business Factors

People close to the product and community discussions point to a few deeper reasons:

  1. Not enough real-world usage
    • Even after millions of uses and rollout to all Whole Foods stores, palm payments didn’t become a default habit like contactless cards or Apple Pay.
 * If it doesn’t move key metrics (speed, sales, loyalty), Amazon tends to cut it.
  1. High costs vs. benefits
    • The tech involves specialized hardware, cloud-based biometric matching, and payment integrations, which are expensive to maintain at scale.
 * A former team member says it wasn’t financially viable given how few retailers beyond Amazon itself used it.
  1. Retail strategy reset
    • Amazon is closing or overhauling Amazon Go and some Amazon Fresh locations, the very stores that showcased Amazon One.
 * Once those “flagship” use cases shrink, the business case for keeping the palm network alive becomes weaker.
  1. Trust and adoption friction
    • Forums have long threads of people uneasy about giving a tech giant their biometric data, even with privacy assurances.
 * That hesitation likely slowed sign-ups, especially when tapping a card is already easy.

What Happens to Your Data

  • Amazon states that all Amazon One user data, including palm data, will be deleted after the service ends.
  • Existing users can keep using Amazon One at participating retail locations until June 3, 2026, after which the service shuts off for those use cases.

Forum Vibes and Speculation

On Reddit and other forums, the mood is a mix of “saw this coming” and “I’ll miss it”:

  • Some users loved the convenience and are genuinely disappointed.
  • Others always felt uneasy about “handing over” biometrics and are relieved it didn’t go mainstream.
  • A common theory is that Amazon will reuse the underlying tech and lessons from Amazon One in future identity or access products, just not as a mass-market palm-pay system.

Bottom Note

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.