Faster Than a Speeding App: Walmart Shows Off Text to Shop

Walmart wants to be the destination of choice for quick, easy, order-it-while-you're-thinking-of-it shopping when customers know exactly what they want—as well as when they're not sure what they need.

That's the idea behind Text to Shop, an offering that Walmart started testing publicly last spring. With the service—still in beta testing but available for free trial at https://texttoshop.walmart.com—customers can text or say, "reorder coffee," for example, and Text to Shop will add their usual coffee selection to their Walmart.com cart. If they need an item they've never purchased before, they can ask if Walmart carries it and the retailer will provide one product recommendation based on the query and ask if the user wants to see more suggestions. 

"Shop as fast as you text," Walmart proffers on the website for the service. And Walmart's betting on speed as the name of the game for, especially, millennial and Gen Z shoppers who might not want to mess with opening an app, scrolling and searching for items if they don't have to—no download is required to use Text to Shop, which is available for Apple and Android devices.

In a blog post Jan. 24, the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer shined a little more light on the offering, detailing the company's investments in conversational commerce and how Text to Shop seeks to be a problem-solver for customers. 

Walmart's work on voice and text shopping seeks to "meet customers where they are," wrote Walmart's Desiree Gosby and Dominique Essig, both VPs in the company's emerging-tech/e-commerce world. The goal, they wrote, is to create shopping experiences that provide the chance to "communicate naturally, by allowing customers to simply ask for what they want, any way they want." 

"Think of the last time you were making pasta for dinner and realized you were nearly out of sauce," Gosby and Essig offered. "Then consider how easy it would be to simply ask your smartphone or speaker to add more pasta sauce to your Walmart cart, the moment you realize you're low. Once your cart is full, you schedule grocery delivery or pickup using the same voice shopping experience."

For needed items remembered after the fact, or when pickup plans go awry, customers can adjust their Text to Shop order and receipt method after the order has been placed. 

The service is the product of collaboration across Walmart's Store No. 8 innovation incubator and the retailer's global tech team. Text to Shop uses the global team's proprietary conversational platform, for which three patents have been granted and 22 are pending, Gosby and Essig noted. "We're excited to continuously build innovative shopping experiences for Walmart customers," they wrote.

In Walmart's two most recently reported fiscal quarters, the company touted share gains in grocery at Walmart U.S. stores as well as a continued climb in e-commerce sales—up 6% and 8% year over year in the second and third quarters, respectively. Walmart is set to report fourth-quarter fiscal 2022 earnings release on Feb. 17.