Walmart Entices Shoppers To Try Online Grocery Pickup With Discounts

(KFSM)

Does the idea of placing an online grocery order at Walmart and then simply visiting the store to pick it up appeal to you? Walmart is now experimenting with a few pilot stores where you can do just that, and now they’re experimenting with special discounts to get customers to try it out.

Offering discounts for online orders makes sense: while they have to employ order pickers, a facility like Walmart’s new pickup-only grocery store near its mothership in Arkansas only needs to have pickup kiosks and a warehouse: there’s no need for retail aisles, pretty displays, or even cashiers. That could make pickup-only grocery more profitable…assuming that enough customers decide to try it.

In the industry, this kind of setup has a terrible acronym: BOPIS, or “buy online, pick up from store.” Walmart sent out e-mails offering $5 off any purchase or $10 off a $50 purchase to persuade customers to give it a try.

While ordering online and picking up at the store normally doesn’t save shoppers any time, in the case of a full grocery order that may be different. The Pickup Grocery test store is in Arkansas is a retail laboratory of sorts that’s meant to test this concept for possible implementation everywhere.

Wal-Mart uses discount to woo more consumers to pickup format [City Wire] (via RetailWire)