Purchases directed by tools, instant messaging platforms and social networks represent an improvement in the customer’s shopping experience. And with it, an increase and improvement of electronic commerce for the future. For that reason, Walmart, American multinational company, has decided to bet on conversational purchases through purchase by voice and text. This will improve the way customers interact with the company.
It is not the first time that the company has launched something like this. Was in the year 2017 when they began to enter this world of text and voice purchases. In addition, they have recently released a public version of text-to-shop, a way to send text messages to the Walmart cart.
The beginnings of Walmart with voice purchases
Walmart has always seen great potential in these tools to make shopping easier and faster for consumers. That is why, to start it up, the company decided to create a conversational commerce portfolio inside store Nº8. The purpose of this was “develop voice and text purchasing capabilities in order to save customers time”, as stated in a statement.
Once that was done, they designed conversational shopping experiences to make it natural for customers to communicate by ordering what they want in a way that works best for them. To do this, the Walmart team focused on purchases made by voice. Research helped identify consumer preferences for interact with voice capabilities when multitasking.
In order to use it, you only have to ask your mobile device to add a product that you want to buy in the Walmart shopping cart. When it is completely full, you can schedule the delivery or collection of the order, both manually and by voice.
This has not been an easy task for the company, since it has taken time. To launch this they have had the collaboration of large companies such as the organization Walmart Global Tech, Siri and Google Assistant. Today, voice purchases are found on the last two platforms and they continue to seek to go further and improve this shopping experience.
Walmart experience with text purchases
As with purchases made by voice, the same was true for text purchases. It was around the year 2018 when the company launched Jet Black, his first portfolio company. This offered a personal shopping experience by sending text messages. Once this is done, consumers can schedule delivery, pickup and payment for the order. This has been done thanks to the recently launched Text to Shop, which includes rich messaging capabilities such as RCS and Apple Business Messaging.
In a Walmart statement they state the following: “We are dedicated to our vision, mission and purpose. And with the close collaboration between our teams, we’re excited to continually create innovative shopping experiences for Walmart customers.”
