Walmart sees demand for same-day orders doubling during the final two weeks of the holiday shopping season, when the retailers stores transition into mini fulfillment centers for millions of online orders.
Buying online and picking up in store allows shoppers to bypass waiting on a last-minute order to be shipped, and also can guarantee inventory is in stock before trekking to a store.
In the coming weeks, Walmart customers will be able to shop items noted Free Pickup Today on Walmart.com until 4 p.m. on Dec. 23. Those orders can then be picked up in stores until 6 p.m., local time, on Christmas Eve.
This is one service Amazon hasnt yet been able to compete with in the same size and scale. In buying grocery chain Whole Foods, Amazon added about 460 physical stores to its portfolio, from which its begun selling the Echo and other Alexa-enabled devices, and set up Amazon lockers. In comparison, to Walmart owns roughly 3,500 US supercenters.
Meantime, other major brick-and-mortar retailers including Target, Kohls and Best Buy are making the buy online, pick-up in-store experience more convenient for shoppers. Many of these companies are also expanding their digital assortment of merchandise.
Over the past year, Walmart has tripled the number of items on Walmart.com to reach more than 70 million items today, and some of that growth stems from unique relationships with well-known brands.
In November 2017, the company announced an upcoming partnership with Lord & Taylor, where Walmart.com will feature a store within a store for the department store chains nameplates.
Also new this holiday season, Walmart will be stuffing unloaded gift cards in some boxes of orders placed online, encouraging shoppers to load funds on them if they need another last-minute gift for friends and family.
Amazon has made a similar push in Whole Foods stores, where it recently added cardboard displays for its own gift cards. Overall, gift cards are expected to be top of many consumers wish lists in 2017.
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