Background

Walmart has started charging higher prices online than in-store in an effort to save on shipping costs and push shoppers to brick-and-mortar locations.

The company is experimenting with a new system – raising the prices of items that would otherwise be unprofitable to ship. Walmart is trying to encourage customers to visit its physical locations with higher online prices. We previously started offering pickup discounts to entice customers to go to stores to collect their orders once they arrive, helping Walmart avoid costly last-mile delivery expenses. These new online price differences are part of the same strategy, as they incentivize in-store shopping with lower prices, this time cutting out shipping entirely. Walmart's greatest advantage in e-commerce is its brick-and-mortar network, and getting more consumers into its stores allows it to leverage that strength.

Goals

How might we provide price transparency, empower customers to shop smarter, offer them with more ways to save with low prices – every day.

Success metrics

Customer basket size: per pickup order, per store
Frequency
Store revenue growth, store traffic growth

Ideation

Ideate to explore all possible paths to solve the problem:

Path 1 – Associate original price with a particular shipping fulfillment method
Path 2 – Generalize shipping and pickup price: Equal visual hierarchy
Path 3 – Do not associate original price with shipping and give more prominence to pickup discount price E2E

What we tested and learned

Research goals:
Explore price hierarchy and relationship between elements from discovery thru transaction funnel. Uncover usability issues on proposed design, including:

• •Duel pricing
• •Fulfillment lauguauge

Key findings:

• •All customers rightly identified that the two prices for an item was for shipping and pickup
• •Almost all customers noticed and rightly interpreted what “Pickup discount” meant.
• •Customers understood that items with a single price were not eligible for pickup discount.
• •Most customers wanted more information about the “estimated date” for the ship to store option.

Solution

The design principle was to bring ​transparency to pricing for our customers, display the Pickup discounted price or In-store price on shared items and the exact pickup date when relevant on search, item and cart pages.

Challenges

Having higher online prices may prove problematic for Walmart, particularly as it looks to push its omnichannel offerings. While Walmart’s aim to make online transactions more profitable makes sense, consumers are probably be unhappy that they’re not getting the lowest prices possible online. The price differences could scare e-commerce customers away from Walmart, especially given how this may appear to betray Walmart’s low-price reputation. In particular, this move could negatively impact the company’s omnichannel operations, which are critical in its fight to leverage its brick-and-mortar network against Amazon, by reducing customers’ desire to shop across channels.

Outcome

Successfully delivered the 2-pricing launch on time for the holiday, coordinated closely with ​multiple vertical team leads to make sure the best quality of work within the timeline.

However, due to many poor customer feedback (VOC) after the launch, we decided to turn off this 2-pricing capability across platforms and explore other ways to solve this business problem.

Role

Designer (leading all discovery touchpoints)

Collaborated the design lead for this project, developed conceptual ideas for a customer end to end experience to test and iterate within a challenging timeframe.

Partnered with user research to conduct ​multiple studies for different phases of the project to validate ideas, then integrated relevant findings to make design decisions. Adapted quickly to competing demands and shifting priorities, and was a great team player throughout the process.