Walmart To Go Tests Click-And-Collect Grocery In Denver

By Anna Rose Welch, Editorial & Community Director, Advancing RNA

Company hopes to give online grocery shoppers even more choice, now testing curb-side pick-up

Walmart has decided to test a click-and-collect grocery program at 11 stores in its Denver market. Currently, the company’s on-demand shopping service called Walmart To Go offers home delivery on general merchandise and groceries. However, as an attempt to enhance its omni-channel offerings for those looking to do their grocery shopping online, Walmart will now allow their Denver customers to order groceries online and pick them up at the store. The company aims to make the grocery shopping experience as convenient as possible for its customers; in fact, customers don’t even need to set foot out of their cars when they get to the stores. They only need to park at a designated pick-up spot and dial a phone number or enter the order into a touchscreen kiosk to let store associates know they’ve arrived and an associate will load the order into the trunk.

The company is hoping to reach those busy customers who want to place orders for groceries earlier in the morning before the work day begins and pick them up on their way home. Customers begin by placing their order online. When the order has been rounded up, the store will contact the customer to let them know their goods are ready to be picked up. While this service, known as “site-to-store” has been available nationwide since 2007, it has not been an option for grocery, except for in a limited number of markets.

While online grocery shopping could cause stores to lose money because customers are less likely to make impulse buys while filling an online shopping cart, Walmart isn’t too concerned about this. According to Tech Crunch, the retailer has conducted surveys of Walmart shoppers that show 55 percent of shoppers prefer to pick up their groceries themselves rather than having them delivered to their home because it enables them to grab the items they might’ve forgotten while online. There is also the hope that consumers will find something they might not have even thought about while wandering through the store.

This new test is in no way an attempt to replace the home delivery service, however. Walmart’s director of public relations Ravi Jariwala told Forbes, “Customers are looking for new and … convenient ways to shop. They’re moving away from being told how to shop and are now telling us how they shop … This test allows us to understand what works best for [our customers], and how we can combine digital and physical assets to serve them in a way that no one else can.”

The Denver area was the first market outside of Walmart’s e-commerce headquarters in Silicon Valley to have access to the Walmart To Go grocery delivery service. Customers seem to like it, considering the service has been rated a 4 out of 5 by 90 percent of users in follow-up customer surveys. Before expanding the grocery delivery service to Denver in October 2013, the company had been testing the service in San Jose and San Francisco since April 2011. Same-day delivery of non-grocery goods has been a focus for the retail giant since October 2012 when it announced its intentions to begin tests in Northern Virginia, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and San Jose/San Francisco.

This expansion of its click-and-collect program could be a pretty important move for the retailer, which has faced increasing competition from Amazon — especially as its AmazonFresh grocery delivery service continues to gain ground. Not to mention, start-up Instacart, which, as Mercury News reported recently, has more expansions under its belt and ambitions to dominate online grocery sales and delivery in the future. Considering however, that Walmart stores are generally more local for a large portion of the population and the company is looking into the possibility of in-store pickups, customers could find themselves drawn to Walmart and its promise of even greater convenience.

Food and Grocery stores: What’s on your wish list?

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