How would you improve Walmart?

Clarification Questions:

-          Define which business

• Walmart Discount Stores.

• Walmart Supercenter.

• Walmart Neighborhood Market.

• Walmart Pharmacy.

• Walmart Convenience.

• Walmart Pickup.

-          Define which department

•  Groceries (fresh fruits, vegetables, breakfast items, bakery items, frozen food, water, juice etc)

• Everything Non-Groceries (Clothes, furniture, toys home goods etc)

-       Define App Vs Web

Distilled Choice: Walmart Pickup -> Groceries -> order via App

Users Segments: 

Types of users shopping for Groceries using the Walmart App

• Weekly: Shop for groceries on a weekly basis. Families, Couples or even Individuals who have tiringly long commutes during the week, are throttled with very busy schedules and don’t have the time to walk into the store, pick the groceries and stand in line to checkout.

• Quarterly: Shop for groceries 3-4 times in a quarter. Prefer walking into a store and selecting the vegetables and fruits themselves. But don’t mind placing a pick up order for groceries once in a while if they are very busy.

• Semi-Annual: Occasionally shop once or twice in 6 months when it’s a festival season like Easter or ThanksGiving. Have too many things to take care of during the festive times to run around shopping for the missing items in the list. 

My Choice: Weekly users who use the Walmart app to shop for groceries

Pain Points 

Currently there is no functionality in Walmart app for weekly shoppers to create a subscription for groceries.  The assumption that I am making is that since the weekly users are strapped for time, they prefer to submit a grocery order on Friday for pick on either Friday evening or by Saturday morning.

• Forget to place the order on time: There are certains items like milk, bread, juice, breakfast items, fruits etc that need to be replenished on a weekly basis as they are the most consumed. Due to their busy lifestyle of this segment of users, it is possible that they may forget to submit a grocery pick up order on Friday, and by the time they remember it on Friday evening or Saturday morning, they have already run out of the essential food items at home and the time slots for pick up available in the app are all taken until late in the evening on a Saturday.

• Adding a tip for the order: Additional feature that is missing currently in the Walmart grocery app is a field for tip. Users in this weekly segment, since they are strapped for time, are also driven by their own personal guilt that they are unable to tip the Walmart employee who will be shopping and packing the groceries for them. How about showing some appreciation for those employees who load the bags in the car?. What if the users do not have cash in their wallet during one of the pick-ups? 

Solution

I propose a solution to create options for a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly subscription on Grocery orders. Weekly shoppers have trained their shopping lists to a point they know their weekly must haves. Additionally, provide a field to add a tip on the order, so that the user does not have to make the additional visit to the ATM to draw cash before stopping to pick up the groceries or come across as an unappreciative while picking up the order.

Product Vision

“ Make your life easy by subscribing to weekly grocery pick-up”

No annual fees, just a functionality to provide weekly grocery shoppers the capability to set a subscription to a list of grocery items that they can pick-up, the functionality to pre-select the time on the subscription order and the capability to add a tip on the purchase.

Features

•  List builder feature to create a list of grocery items for subscription and capability to add items from one of the orders from the previously placed order history to this list.

• Select weekly, bi-weekly or monthly options on the subscription.

• Place to add a tip as a percentage of the order total or a set amount on every subscription order regardless of the order value.

• Set an end date on the subscription or number of times this subscription needs to be active.

• Activate the subscription and connect it to one of the payment methods that is already set by the user in the app.

• Active subscriptions need to have the functionality to end a subscription or change the end date on the subscription.

• Set a minimum threshold amount on weekly grocery subscriptions.

• Allow users to edit and tweak the list if they forgot to add some items in the first place when they created the list. If the cost of the list items is well above the threshold amount for the subscription order, saving the edited list must be possible. 

Metrics

• Growth in weekly, bi-weekly or monthly subscribers

• Popular products that are added to subscription orders

• Products that are at constant risk for out of stock 

Trade-Offs

• Requires thorough data analysis of what percentage of total grocery shoppers use the app to shop for groceries pick-up on a weekly basis. Additional analysis on if this segment has grown over time.

• It is possible that items may go out of stock and this could cause the cart amount to fall below threshold. Allow users to build a fall-back list or pre-approved substitutions that would allow the subscription to run without any interruptions.

• In order to help incremental revenue in this segment of users to grow, incentivise these shoppers by providing coupons on items from their previous shopping history and motivating users to add these items to the subscription list and make these coupons activated on subscriptions. Time range for how long a coupon for an item on a subscription order remains activated needs to be pre-determined.