Live from Internet Retailer 2007: Wal-Mart Closes the Online/Offline Loop

Attendees at this year’s Internet Retailer 2007 meeting in San Jose CA got some tips from the top of the retail heap on ways to let their Web sites help their multichannel merchandising efforts from Brian Osborne, vice president of marketing for Walmart.com.

Osborne outlined a number of steps the Wal-Mart Web site has taken in the last year to improve the retail giant’s customer experience both online and off. Key among these was a site redesign that simplified the pages and made them easier to scan.

Osborne said user studies of the former design revealed that customers were most likely to use — and in fact were overwhelmed by– extensive category lists on the left rail and a double row of navigation tabs at the top of the page, to the neglect of product features on the rest of the page that were meant to drive them deeper into the site.

On both its home page and product category pages, Osborne said the company simplified and alphabetized the left-hand links, whittled down the page-top tabs to those that customers used most often, and cleaned up the main merchandising areas in the middle of the page to incorporate one large main graphic and a few spotlight areas. “It’s now much clearer what we’re trying to tell our customers in terms of what we term our ‘point of view’ — what we’re trying to say about the offers,” Osborne said.

Customer feedback from the redesign showed that while retaining its reputation for “good prices” and “variety”, the new site made significant gains in terms such as “educational”, “helpful”, knowledgeable” and “trustworthy”, Osborne said.

In March, Wal-Mart began the national rollout of a feature called “Site to Store”, in beta test as early as 2004. The service lets Walmart.com shoppers purchase thousands of products online — most not available in the company’s brick and mortar stores — and have them shipped to their local Wal-Mart for free. The customers are notified by e-mail when their purchase arrives in-store and can then pick that item up the next time they shop the store.

Consumers benefit from greatly expanded selection, Osborne said: Where a typical Wal-Mart store might show 10 styles of baby cribs, the Walmart.com Web site can show 60 varieties and ship them for free. About two-thirds of the customers currently using Site to Store already shop at Wal-Mart weekly, so the feature is building on behavior they’ve already adopted, he said. The service also gets over the hurdle of shipping fees that can keep some price-conscious shoppers from buying online from Walmart.com.

One sign of the feature’s acceptance is that 90% of the offering stores had their first Site to Store order within 48 hours of launching the service. And as an incremental benefit, half of customers using the Site to Store feature spent on average an incremental $60 in-store when arriving to pick up their orders.

Right now, Site to Store is available in about 2600 of Wal-Mart’s 3360 continental U.S. stores and should be nationwide by July.

Finally, Walmart.com began last month to roll out an in-store availability indicator that lets online researchers/ browsers check to see whether their local store has a product in stock before they make a trip to the outlet. Consumers can click a “check stock” icon under a product listing, enter their ZIP code, and find out if their local Wal-Mart currently has stock in that item. If not, they can opt to check another nearby store or to buy online.

The in-store availability project began in late April with 600 SKUs in the electronics category and will roll out to other areas of Wal-Mart inventory over the coming year, Osborne said.

“We knew a lot of customer were going online and researching purchases but preferred to buy during their next store visit,” he said. “But we weren’t helping them understand whether the item was even in their store and available for pick-up now, or would they get there and find they had to wait.”

“Fundamentally, our job at Walmart.com is to make the customer’s experience shopping Wal-Mart easier. The Web site is an enabler, so that when folks go into a Wal-Mart, they know they’ve got these items waiting for them.”