New Walmart App Could Turn Physical Trips Into Online Sales

Walmart is continuing to break down the walls between the physical and online retail worlds, introducing a new app allowing its store workers to facilitate online orders in stores.

Walmart is promoting the technology as a convenience for shoppers who may struggle to find a particular item in the store while gaining the convenience of paying for it on the spot, including with the Walmart Pay app or cash. In this way, the physical store can replace a trip to the computer or shopping app, and not the other way around, giving Walmart the potential to capture incremental sales that might otherwise be lost in stores. While Walmart carries about 100,000 SKUs in a Supercenter, its website has millions.

This new app is the latest in a series of tools associates have on their own phones or store-issued handheld devices to help them tackle in-store tasks such as processing unsaleables and damaged items; receiving goods; making price changes; and checking inventory against data provided by an automated robot. An app can also show workers real-time sales data for their departments.