Walmart Introduces a Mobile Checkout Solution

As the year-end Holiday season approaches, the US retailer Walmart introduces several initiatives meant to speed up in-store checkout processes, including a mobile checkout option based on in-store equipment rather than on a self-scanning app, and avoiding that customers should spend time waiting in line.

Earlier this year, Walmart said they were testing a mobile checkout services called Checkout Out With Me in some of their locations for garden equipment. This option is officially is now being implemented throughout their network.

Walmart employees will be stationed in the stores’ most visited departments and provided POS devices allowing customers to buy articles without having to pay at the main cash registers. They also avoid having to wait in line at checkout with bulky items (TVs, Christmas trees, etc.), as initially intended (and already applied to gardening-dedicated centres).

In order to help their customers find the products they look for faster, Walmart also added digital maps of the different stores to their mobile app. They may then precisely locate given articles in the departments’ aisles.

Comments – Competition grows between Amazon and Walmart

Considering the Amazon threat, Walmart further strikes back. A few days ago Cowen & Co reported that Walmart carries around half of the top 1 million best-selling items on Amazon, hence their tremendous growth. Walmart is then getting ready to retaliate. They first invested in their website, where new brands were added, such as Lord & Taylor and Mossejaw, in hope that they would increase their market shares in the e-commerce sector.

Walmart also came up with new services in line with evolving customer habits. Checkout With Me is a way for them to improve existing customer satisfaction levels, while driving new consumers in their stores and increasing purchasing frequency. This mobile checkout service is meant to streamline customer processes, even more than with an app-based self-scanning solution: customers do not have to intervene at all. It is then meant to enhance in-store customer experience, even providing higher satisfaction levels than via an e-commerce site. This could help drive customers back in the stores.

By way of addressing Amazon’s challenging and ongoing development, Walmart recently presented a concept of cashierless store quite similar to Amazon Go. This store, called Sam’s Club Now, could be opened in Dallas.

(Photo credits: Walmart)