Walmart Offers Discounts For Online Purchases Picked Up In Stores

Looking ahead, Lore promises there’s more to come.

Yesterday Walmart announced it would be cutting more jobs by the end of April.

The move by Walmart – whose e-commerce operations are largely designed at company offices in San Bruno and Sunnyvale – is a reminder of the increasingly fierce battle to capture shoppers’ dollars through the Internet.

Lore said the program won’t require any additional investments from Walmart. The stock, after opening at $3.9, touched a high of $4.1 before paring much of its gains.

The move adds to a string of job cuts and layoffs over the previous year.

Earlier this year, Wal-Mart cut more than a 1,000 corporate positions, mostly in its human resources department.

According to Nick McLean, CEO of order management software provider OrderDynamics, Walmart’s pickup discount “will only work to the company’s advantage if they use the discount sparingly”. The program will include price slashes on about 10,000 store items, Fox News Business reports. Walmart said it meant to extend the offer to more than 1 million products in June.

Walmart is launching a new effort to make inroads on Amazon’s market share by offering in-store pickup discounts on more than a million online-only products it sells. “So the biggest opportunity is to save on big items or heavy items”‘.

And Walmart has shown a fresh appetite for acquisitions, scooping up quirky women’s apparel website ModCloth and dropping $51 million on the online outdoors retailer Moosejaw.

Walmart can afford to provide discounts on these items because it saves money on its logistics costs.

Zolidis said that in addition to the high cost of same-day delivery, having the ability to deliver the product to the customer when he or she wants it and the inventory on hand are two other challenges. Target and others seeking to turn physical locations into giant online lockers may find they have to pass on the shipping savings to customers. Pickup Discount is only available for online orders picked up at Wal-Mart stores within the lower 48 states. They point out that one of Lore’s mandates since becoming CEO of Walmart.com a year ago after selling Jet.com had been to equip Walmart.com with tools to beat all rivals, even Amazon on price.

Walmart.com shoppers can now set a pickup time to have their groceries loaded into the cars, helping to explain why Amazon is testing its own grocery stores and considering a Whole Foods takeover.

Starting next week, shoppers on Walmart.com will be able to get a break when they order eligible online but go retrieve them at a store, pocketing most if not all the shipping costs Walmart would have incurred to send those items to the customers’ home.