Walmart’s Online Grocery Ordering Play​

Walmart wants you to use its online grocery ordering service, and — recently — it was willing give you 10 bucks’ worth of goods for your efforts.

The City Wire reported that the retail giant was most recently making an effort to push consumers towards its online grocery pickup service at stores in in San Jose (California), Phoenix, Huntsville (Alabama) and Denver, by offering $10 off a first-time order of $50 or more last week (March 24-26).

The report explains that Walmart has in recent weeks been marketing to its website users in test areas with emails promoting the discount.

As for the company’s potential next move regarding the online grocery pickup service — a service that notably does not presently include a delivery element — Walmart corporate spokesperson Betsy Harden was mum on details. “We are testing many things and we’re continuing to learn from our customers,” she said in an interview, noting that the Pickup Grocery option in Denver is seeing roughly 80 percent of orders from repeat customers.

Meanwhile, Carol Spieckerman, CEO of newmarketbuilders.com, shared her theory with The City Wire that Walmart’s discount offers are an effort by the company to drive traffic to its Pickup Grocery so it can collect more insight on how shoppers use the concept, as well as gain information on how such promotions affect consumer traffic.

“In my experience using the Pickup concept, I’ve encountered many shoppers who rely on it to the exclusion of other formats so Walmart would seem to already have solid examples of how its Pickup Grocery is driving loyalty,” Spieckerman said. “It remains to be seen how or if Walmart will deploy the format in other regions but in the meantime, the insights gained are surely being parlayed into its other businesses.”