COMPANY // Walmart 
PRODUCT // Grocery Pickup
Stepping up their battle against Amazon, Walmart now joins many other major food retailers in providing grocery pickup at their stores. It essentially lets their customers order groceries online and pick them up for free without having to step foot inside the store.
I’m always looking for more efficient ways to grocery shop, so I took this new service for a spin and provided my thoughts below…
DSRUPTR REVIEW //
To create a more objective approach, I created my persona that lists out my demographic information, as well as my motivations, tasks, tools, and frustrations with my current grocery shopping experiences.
My grocery shopping background: I typically shop in-store using a shopping list, but I’m open to adding other high quality and/or sale items I find. I’m interested in saving time & money on groceries, so I try Walmart’s grocery pickup option.
I started by creating an account on Grocery.Walmart.com, and then started looking for guidance on the grocery pickup option.
My immediate reaction was that the homepage was overwhelming with too many options, where it seemed as though the content was thrown on the page randomly without thinking through their customers’ needs or expectations.
For example, if I want to place an order for pickup, where do I start? What steps are required? I see the big headline at the top of the page, and then see where my store location to pickup from, and then another section with a button to “See times.” But where do I start?
Alright, well I guess I’ll scan the page and start adding products to my cart and hopefully learn about the grocery pickup when I checkout?
I found a few items I wanted and added them to the persistent cart on the right side – which is awesome because it’s easy to view and edit items in cart at anytime during my shopping experience.
As I continued to browse, I realized it was a fairly limited browsing experience with limited selection. I switched over to use the search function at the top and added a few more items – fairly standard search, but I can see this becoming tedious if you have a pretty big list. This is where persona-specific actions would be helpful.
In regards to the UI, it seems fairly clean, but overall it lacks personality and inhibits scanability.
Once I finished loading up my cart, I checked out… and then checked out. Even though I can always see the persistent cart on the right side while shopping, they proceed to take me through 4 steps to checkout. Seemed a bit much.
Thankfully the pickup experience was a breeze, where I received text alerts that my order was ready. Once I drove to the store, the signage was easy to spot and it led me to the designated pickup spot. And the friendly staff helped load my groceries into my car!
Key Strengths of the Grocery Pickup Experience
- Product Page – The product page is clean and simple design, where the the nutritional information allows me to easily review ingredients and make healthy choices.
- Persistent Cart – The persistent cart experience located on the right side is amazing, where it’s easy to view and edit items in cart at anytime in my shopping experience.
- Checkout – There’s plenty of day/time options for picking up my groceries at my local Walmart, and it’s easy to add/save a payment method.
- Mobile Notifications – Receiving the SMS notifications on my phone really helped guide the pickup process.
- Picking Up Groceries – There was visible pickup signage once I arrived at my local Walmart, which easily led me to the right pickup spot.
- Quick Grocery Loading – The friendly staff quickly loaded my car with my groceries, where the whole experience was completed in about 10 minutes.
DSRUPTR RECOMMENDATIONS //
1. Intelligent Search / Support Experience
When customers extensively utilize search, it means they’re having trouble finding what they need. So consider adding an AI virtual agent to the search experience (or have it appear in bottom right corner of page when a user searches 3-4 times in a short period) to provide enhanced SKU recommendations, shortcuts, and quicker access to customer support (if necessary).
2. Promote Grocery Pickup
Enhance promotion of grocery pickup by aggregating the marketing tagline, ordering steps, and primary action (“See times”) in one banner at the top of the page.
3. Support Pre-Shopping Experience
I need more data on the current Cart and Favorites usage, but consider adding a Shopping List (and/or change the Favorites feature) to allow users to manage weekly shopping lists with the ability to set and track their food budget and nutritional/dietary needs.
4. Enhance Primary Actions for Personas
Provide shopping shortcuts to easily allow each primary segment a quick way to get started shopping based on their needs.
5. Streamline the Browsing Experience
For easier page scanning and product findability, consider adding space between sections, adding icons and increasing size of section titles, and displaying the main links (View Details, Add to Cart) on rollover. From a user interface (UI) design perspective, perhaps separate the shopping area from cart by adding light gray color to shopping area background to make them more distinctive.
6. Enhance the Browsing Experience
Consider adding submenu for each section to display more SKUs on the page without overwhelming the user with too many options. Also consider adding drag-and-drop to easily allow users to add/remove products to/from the cart.
7. Display Purchases from Friends & Family
It’s always helpful to get recommendations from friends and family who share similar tastes, so it would be great to allow users to browse items that have been purchased by friends and family.
8. Streamline Checkout Experience
Consider combining the Grocery Pickup Time and Payment method onto 1 page, where you can simply display the first available Pickup Date/Time and allow the user to change it via a modal window (see mockup below).
9. Allow Non-Grocery Order Pickup
Would be great to be able to pickup all ordered items beyond my grocery needs at the same time.
10. Optimize Product/Pricing Recommendations via Scientific Micromarket Management
Consider implementing a Scientific Micromarket Management solution vis-à-vis a loyalty management program. This provides scientific product/pricing recommendations for each unique customer-product combination, and really helps personalize the grocery shopping experience.
11. Enhance “Shop by Department” Dropdown
Consider displaying this as a full page modal window, which will provide more room to add unique icons for each department, therefore making it easier to quickly scan and find the department of choice.
Thank goodness for home delivery. And very nice deliver people. Thank you walmart. Only one to take EBT online too. For high risk that could not get out you have been a blessing.
Lacking is sorting your online cart,by department and your order invoice. If have dozens of items and need to add or change items or checking your order after receipt for occasional mistakes, as is its a confusing mess and time wasting. Something I suggested to Walmart support with deaf ears. Other online grocers have used such as Peapod have this sort.