Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer, rolled out first phase of its “Site to Store” inititiative on 6th March, 2007. While, the new service will allow Wal-Mart’s customers to surf, select and order merchandise of their choice at their webshopping site (walmart.com) online, they would be able to physically pick up the ordered goods from any of the Wal-Mart’s stores. There will be no shipping cost on such orders. Online store of Walmart, it may be noted, offers a much bigger selection of products than Walmart stores. This will also have the advantage of placing orders at one’s time of convenience in the comfort of one’s home.
The new service, which offers a new way to shop Wal-Mart’s products and services, therefore, will effectively marry the comfort of online shopping with the nationwide brick and marter footprint of its stores. The new service, marks an important milestone in retailing, as what Wal-Mart does today becomes the industry norm tomorrow.
“A key advantage of Wal-Mart’s online channel is the ability to offer a much larger assortment of products through our virtual shelf space, while our offline channel’s key strengths include our nationwide footprint with more than 3,300 retail store locations and a world-class logistics network capable of efficiently delivering online products to customers at our stores. Site to Store leverages each of these strengths to provide customers with a robust multi-channel shopping experience,” said Mike Smith, Walmart.com’s director of store integration, on the company’s new initiative.
“Our extensive testing of the Site to Store service allowed us to create a multi-channel shopping experience that brings additional assortment, convenience and value to our customers,” added Raul Vazquez, Walmart.com’s CEO. “We found that nearly two-thirds of the customers who used the trial service also shop in Wal-Mart stores on a weekly basis. Site to Store not only offers these customers access to thousands of additional online products, but also gives them the added convenience of picking up those items at the store during their weekly shopping trips without paying for shipping.”
While, the new service will initially be available through 750 stores across the U.S., over the next few months, Wal-Mart will exend the service to all the 3,300 stores throghout the U.S.
The only negative about the service is delivery time. It could take as much as 7 to 10 business days (or 15 calender days) to deliver the merchandise after processing of the order. Although, customer will be notified about arrival of the ordered material through e-mail, the actual delivery time of up to a fortnight could prove to be a dampner
Source : IndiaRetailBiz
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