A buy online and pickup in-store or curbside (BOPIS) experience your customers want

By Sunil Kumar, General Manager, Walmart Commerce Technologies

The fulfillment landscape can be complex, fragmented, and hard to navigate for retailers. Yet, it’s paramount to give your customers the best in-store, online and pickup experience to ensure they shop with you again.  This is one of the reasons why Walmart Commerce Technologies focused on bringing Store Assist to market first.  If you’re running a business with physical locations and trying to grow online sales, the following scenario may be familiar.  You want your customers to have a positive fulfillment experience and to enhance your business operations, from order status transparency to quick and accurate fulfillment with seamless handoff and delivery.

Outsourcing in-store order picking was a temporary solution and now you’ve realized you’re losing ownership of the customer relationship. You’ve considered building BOPIS (buy online and pickup in store) capabilities in house but attracting talent to develop technology solutions is increasingly difficult, time consuming and expensive. Plus, you want to spend your time focusing on what’s most important to you - your customers.

Improve your profit margins with Store Assist. Here’s how:

Increase employee efficiency, picking accuracy and speed

Store Assist takes the guesswork out of order picking for your employees. From auto generated order queues based on order promise pickup date and time to optimized pick path logic and error alerts for invalid picks. Your employees will feel confident they are delivering the best customer experience every time.

Offer a seamless handoff experience

Fulfilling orders quickly and accurately is half the battle. It’s just as important that the customer is not waiting to receive their order when they arrive at your store. By enabling customer arrival notifications through our check-in capabilities your employees are prompted to prioritize customers who arrive first with specific pickup location details to minimize wait times.

Reduce shipping overhead and logistics

Leverage your existing store footprints and turn your physical locations into micro fulfillment centers. Reduce the overall logistics that come with packing and shipping an order and instead give customers the ultimate convenience and satisfaction – picking up their order within a few hours.

Keep the sale by better leveraging in-store inventory and substitutions

Provide your customers with the best available products so you’re not disappointing your biggest brand ambassadors. Enable your employees to substitute items that are in-stock based on their judgement, the business rules you have set, or based on purchases that your customers have made in the past.

Gain best practices from the world’s leading retailer

With Walmart Commerce Technologies, you are able to take advantage of the operational excellence and expertise we have built in our stores for decades. From implementation to execution, together we’ll optimize the technology to fit your needs and align with your unique business model.

We built our BOPIS technology in house and leverage it across our Walmart stores, Sam’s clubs and international markets. We have used this technology for more than 10 years while growing our own omnichannel business and continued to adjust, learn and adapt to changing trends. If you’re a retailer of any size who is looking for ways to provide a customer friendly fulfillment experience that is built to integrate with your operations, contact our Walmart Commerce Technologies team.