Unstaffed retail shops have emerged recently and been noticeably changing our shopping styles. In terms of these shops, the design of vending machine is critical to user shopping experience. The conventional design typically uses weighing sensors incapable of sensing what the customer is taking. In the present study, a smart unstaffed retail shop scheme is proposed based on artificial intelligence and the internet of things, as an attempt to enhance the user shopping experience remarkably. To analyze multiple target features of commodities, the SSD (300x300) algorithm is employed; the recognition accuracy is further enhanced by adding sub-prediction structure. Using the data set of 18, 000 images in different practical scenarios containing 20 different type of stock keeping units, the comparison experimental results reveal that the proposed SSD (300x300) model outperforms than the original SSD (300x300) in goods detection, the mean average precision of the developed method reaches 96.1% on the test dataset, revealing that the system can make up for the deficiency of conventional unmanned container. The practical test shows that the system can meet the requirements of new retail, which greatly increases the customer flow and transaction volume.