Walmart enhances online shopping features in time for holidays

Walmart is offering new functionality on its e-commerce site as the holiday peak approaches.

The discount giant is providing an in-house-developed virtual queuing experience that is designed to keep customers’ places in line for the highest-demand items during its Black Friday events.

The virtual queue will allow customers to continue shopping its site with notifications about when they’re in line, their estimated wait time, and how long they have to check out to guarantee an item. Walmart will hold a shopper’s spot in multiple queues at once if they are looking to purchase multiple high-demand items.

[Read more: Black Friday comes early to Walmart - earlier for paid subscribers]

In addition, online Walmart customers can now choose to “buy now” on most items across all categories, allowing them to purchase items directly from item pages for what the retailer intends to be a faster, easier digital shopping experience.

Customers on Walmart’s e-commerce site will also now be able to see the most viewed and purchased items in their search results. On item pages, they will be able to see how many people are viewing the item in real-time and how many have the item in their carts, to help avoid out-of-stocks.

Savings will be marked throughout the Walmart site with a green price tag. As Walmart begins to showcase online deals during the holiday season, it will promote those deals throughout multiple touchpoints in the customer journey, from the homepage through the order confirmation page.

Walmart is also expanding two existing online personalization features for the holiday season:

• Walmart recently expanded its augmented reality (AR)-based “View in Your Home feature to over 200 televisions on its iOS app. With this feature expansion, customers can now virtually see how a TV would fit in their personal space before they purchase.
• In September 2022, Walmart partnered with visual outfitting and styling solution Stylitics to provide customers with a virtual view of how different items of clothing look together. Stylitics is now available in men’s, baby, and kids’ apparel for select brands, covering a total of 8,000 items spanning seven categories and including 16,000 outfit variations. Soon, Walmart will also expand this feature to the home category.

“We’re pulling out all the stops for our customers on Walmart.com, ensuring that they have fast, frictionless, engaging and personalized shopping experiences that save them time, save them money, and make shopping on our site just as easy as shopping in one of our stores,” said Brock McKeel, senior VP, site experience, Walmart E-Commerce. “Every improvement to the site experience helps us create a faster, more engaging and more personalized experience for our customers, and we’re just getting started. The closest store to our customer is in their pocket, and they can trust us to makes it easy for them to save time, save money, and, ultimately, live better this holiday season.”

Headquartered in Bentonville, Ark., Walmart operates approximately 10,500 stores and clubs under 48 banners in 24 countries and e-commerce websites.