By Marc Lore, President and CEO, Walmart U.S. eCommerce
One of the things I love most about Walmart’s heritage is the maniacal focus on our customers and finding ways to offer them low prices – every day. We do this by creating efficiencies in our business so we can share the savings with them. And, in the online world, we can use our physical stores and supply chain to do some pretty unique things for our digital customers.
That’s why I’m so excited to announce that, starting on April 19, we are going to begin offering a discount on eligible, online-only (non-store) items that customers buy online and ship to any Walmart store for pickup. Pickup Discount* will initially be available on about 10,000 items. We will then roll out the discount to more than one million of the most popular items by the end of June.
We’re creating price transparency to empower customers to shop smarter and choose what’s best for them. Now, they can either pickup and save even more money, or ship two-day for free to home, without paying for a membership.
With Pickup Discount, we are beginning to take the ethos behind Jet’s Smart Cart and marrying it with Walmart’s operational efficiency to bring price transparency to life at Walmart.com.
But first, let me share a bit on how we are able to do this for our customers. We can remove the last mile delivery costs (that represent the lion’s share of the costs to ship products to customers’ homes) when we leverage our fleet of more than 6,700 trucks to deliver products directly from fulfillment centers to our 4,700 stores. This means, quite simply, it costs less for us to ship to stores. So, our customers should share in those savings.
Here’s how Pickup Discount works: Customers shop an item notated with “Pickup Discount” on Walmart.com and ship to their local store for pickup. These shoppers will then receive a discount based on each individual item. For example:
- Britax B-SAFE 35 Infant Car Seat, Slate Strie – $148.05 will have an additional Pickup Discount of $7.40 ($140.65 new price)
- LEGO City Great Vehicles Ferry, 60119 – $23.99 will have an additional Pickup Discount of $2.55 ($21.44 new price)
- Coleman 150 qt Heritage XP Marine Cooler – $111.49 will have an additional Pickup Discount of $4.46 ($107.03 new price)
- VIZIO SmartCast M-Series 70″ Class 4K Ultra HDTV (M70-D3) – $1,698 will have an additional Pickup Discount of $50 ($1,648 new price)
We are doing a lot to enhance the Pickup experience to make it even simpler and more convenient for customers. We’ve also been hard at work aggressively expanding our Online Grocery Pickup service which is now in 600 stores with an additional 500 coming this year.
We already offer great prices online. We do that every day. Offering a discount on Pickup demonstrates how we can take that to the next level by operating more efficiently and removing costs from the system to give customers even more ways to save.
*Pickup Discount will be available on eligible items on Walmart.com only. Discount will be available in the contiguous United States.
