Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. will offer discounts on more than a million online-only items that customers then pick up at stores, as part of an effort by the world’s largest retailer to challenge Amazon.com, Inc.
Taking another page from the Jet.com business it bought last year, Wal-Mart will first cut prices on about 10,000 web-only items, such as Britax car seats and Lego toys, according to a statement. The Pickup Discount programme, which starts on 19 April, will expand to more than a million so-called 'long-tail' items by the end of June, the company said.
“With Pickup Discount, we are beginning to take the ethos behind Jet’s Smart Cart and marrying it with Wal-Mart’s operational efficiency,” Marc Lore, head of Wal-Mart’s e-commerce business, said in a statement, referring to the business model he pioneered at Jet, by which customers got discounts for agreeing to package items together, or forgo returns. “Quite simply, it costs less for us to ship to stores. So, our customers should share in those savings.”
The move is Lore’s latest step to check Amazon’s growing online dominance, showing how he’s keen to meld Jet’s innovations with Wal-Mart’s 4,700-store network. Earlier this year, Wal-Mart scrapped a free-shipping programme that competed with Amazon’s Prime membership and replaced it with free two-day deliveries for orders of at least $35. Amazon will control half of the US e-commerce market by 2021, according to analysts at Needham & Co. They estimate that the online giant currently commands 34%, compared with Wal-Mart’s less than 5%.
Delivery Savings
The discounts vary by item and reflect the savings to Wal-Mart for shipping the orders to its stores on one of its more than 6,700 trucks, rather than to a customer’s house. The $148.05 Britax B-Safe 35 infant car seat is reduced by 5%, to $140.65, while the Lego City Great Vehicles Ferry is discounted 11%, to $21.44. Other products in the programme are Coleman coolers and Vizio televisions. In an interview, Lore called it a “game-changer”, saying that the level of discounts could be adjusted going forward.
“Part of the reason why we are launching 10,000 products to start and growing it over time is that we want to perfect that discount,” he said.
The term 'long-tail' refers to the seemingly endless assortment of products that online retailers can offer, compared with the shelf-space constraints that force physical retailers to focus on a more limited assortment of top-selling items. A typical Wal-Mart supercentre offers about 120,000 items, while its website currently has 35 million products available.
Wal-Mart’s online sales rose 29% last quarter, helping its holiday results top estimates. So-called 'click-and-collect' orders, which are picked up curbside at stores, increased 27% in the period. Some curbside pickup customers do enter the store to buy additional items, Lore said, declining to provide specifics.
Wal-Mart paid $3.3 billion for Jet in August and quickly put founder Lore and his lieutenants in charge of its online strategy. Lore used to work at Amazon, which acquired an earlier business of his, Quidsi, operator of sites like Diapers.com and Soap.com. Last month, Amazon said that it’s shutting Quidsi because it couldn’t make a profit, eliminating more than 260 jobs.
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