Walmart App Update Will Let You Leave Your List At Home

Last week, Target opened up a new, startup-inspired innovation facility in San Francisco to much media fanfare, but it seems Walmart has wasted little time in fighting back for its share of the headlines.

The world’s largest retailer announced this week that it plans to use the depth of its customer data to improve its in-store and mobile app experiences. At the CTIA Wireless Expo in Las Vegas, Walmart indicated that customers will soon be able to access automatically populated, customized shopping lists via their mobile apps at brick-and-mortar locations.

“The future of retailing is the history of retailing, of a personalized interactive experience for every customer delivered through a smartphone,” Gibu Thomas, the Arkansas-based company’s global head of mobile said in a speech at the event, according to IDG News Service.

How The Updated App Will Work

On the surface, the app update seems slight. After all, the media outlet notes that Walmart’s app already includes a shopping list that can direct customers to products at its physical locations. That said, the planned improvements stand to make the app more intuitive and user-friendly, allowing customers to save time and effort by reminding them about essential items.

“The best shopping list is the one you don’t have to create, so that’s the one we’re working on,” Thomas told IDC.

Walmart says it has the data to make this vision a reality, as it believes that by analyzing what customers have bought during past visits, it can create a list that anticipates their needs whenever a shopper opens the app. However, the planned innovations don’t stop there.

The retailer is also testing a “scan-and-go” system that would allow shoppers to log purchases on a mobile phone and pay by swiping their device at checkout.

Why Walmart Is Banking On Mobile

IDG also spoke to Thomas about the reasons Walmart is looking to leverage the power of its mobile app to improve the in-store experience. He cited a number of statistics about the current market and how it is increasingly being influenced by mobile, telling the source that its app users are the store’s best customers and noting that the company’s app users spend 40 percent more per visit and frequent its physical stores more often than casual consumers.

However, the one stat that rises above them all is that by 2016, Thomas says in-store buying influenced by mobile is expected to be twice as big as traditional eCommerce sales.

Read the full report here.