Website Wars: How does Walmart's website weigh up in the Christmas stampede?
The ability of some of the world's largest retailers to handle the increase in demand they now face online, with several websites buckling under the weight of traffic, has been under scrutiny during this holiday season. Here, as part of a series of reviews through The Drum, Ryan Jones, co-founder of digital publishing development agency Pixbi is the first to offer his scrutiny, looking at the Walmart's ecommerce platform.
With the holiday season comes presents. Whether you purchase them in-store or online you have to go through a checkout. If there is too much hassle to purchase the product it can deter customers. As part of a series we are taking a look at checkouts, specifically online checkouts. There is a zero tolerance for poorly planned user experiences now.
For this article in the series we are looking at the largest retailer in the world, Wal-Mart. In one year they sell more than $400bn worth of products. To test the online checkout experience we looked at their guest checkout, WalMart account checkout, differences between categories (headphones or dining table chairs) and desktop versus mobile.
Let’s start off with what we liked:
1. Free standard shipping on most items $50+.
2. Wal-Mart tells you which products in your cart will make it before Christmas and those that will not (something others do not).
3. Ability to pickup items in-store. With over 11,000 stores there should be one close. There can be worries about getting presents in time for the holidays when shipping them and this can decrease that stress.
4. Easily add care plans for your electronics.
5. Ability to use PayPal for checkout. With PayPal being one of the most widely used payment systems it allows millions to quickly checkout with just a password. No sign-up for WalMart is necessary (most retailers want greater control over the checkout and do not offer PayPal).
6. With a Wal-Mart account they make you enter your password twice if you are already signed in. The second time comes when you hit proceed to checkout. This is a pro because it makes sure that if you are already signed in your kids can’t go on a shopping spree without you.
Before we go into where we see room for improvement let’s go through Wal-Mart’s desktop and mobile checkout. Amazon has been hailed to have the most frictionless checkout so we though they would be best for comparison. In both circumstances we used their pre-filled accounts.
More steps equal more friction and we can see that Wal-Mart has more steps to checkout that Amazon. However, there are a few key areas we need to look at. The first is delivery versus in-store pickup. Amazon doesn’t allow for this and it is a positive for WalMart. While that is an additional step it provides customers with value added optionality.
Another interesting aspect is the filling in of a cvv (the 3-4 digit code on the back of your card) on desktop but not on mobile. For compliance/fraud reasons credit card companies charge more for transactions that do not confirm the cvv. As a result, Wal-Mart must have found it more important to get rid of a step on mobile and pay more. It is more understanding on desktop as most people will not be in a rush and with WalMart being about low prices they will look for ways to decrease costs.
The room for improvement comes from the extra steps of selecting shipping and payments. When individuals have already signed up for an account they selected default shipping and payment information. Amazon has a great way of allowing customers to change shipping or payments on the checkout screen in case they wanted to send a product to someone else. Attached is a snapshot of Wal-Mart’s shipping selection on desktop. There is a lot of open space that can be used to decrease steps. The other part to look at is consistency. Wal-Mart consolidates the shipping on the mobile checkout but not on the desktop version. Keeping experiences consistent (except for the cvv) is important for returning customers and decrease any question of what comes next. One thing that we need to caveat is that we do not have the information about their customers that they do so I’m sure there is good reason for breaking out each aspect. It is a trade off that should be weighted heavily though.
Overall, WalMart’s checkout is very well structured and provides consumers with multiple value-add options that others do not. Their stride for a frictionless checkout and strong business model has consistently increased their sales keeping them in that top spot.