After redesigning its web site in 2006, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. last year embarked on three key initiatives aimed at integrating the customer experience online and in store. The retailer made every effort to make the web part of that experience as customer-friendly as possible, said Debbie Kristofferson, vice president of creative and user experience at Walmart.com, in a keynote address today at the Internet Retailer Web Design ’08 conference in Miami.
The web piece was crucial, Kristofferson explained, because of the large overlap between shoppers at Walmart.com and Wal-Mart stores. More than half of the 130 million consumers who shop at Wal-Mart stores each week have shopped at the retailer’s web site. And among users of the web site, 82% go to a Wal-Mart store at least monthly, and 54% weekly.
That made it essential to present effectively on the web site the three big initiatives of last year: customer reviews, order online for in-store pickup and the ability to check store availability online, Kristofferson said.
Customer reviews were the No. 1 request from Walmart.com customers, Kristofferson said, but the retailer’s web team initially struggled to figure out how to make reviews on Walmart.com stand out. The project fell into place when a designer came up with an image of a woman holding up a card with five stars. “People internally looked at that image and said ‘I got it.’ We’re activating this community of Wal-Mart shoppers,” Kristofferson said.
She said Wal-Mart now views online reviews of products sold both in-store and online as a way for Wal-Mart customers to help each other learn. She says there have been more than 200,000 reviews posted in six months, and most of them are four or five stars out of five. Highlighting a top rating has the biggest impact of any promotional method in boosting a product’s sales, she said.
For the order-online, pick-up in store initiative, the company came up with a logo—“site to store”—and keeps that logo consistent on web pages where customers choose items for in-store pickup, and in the store at the customer service desk and the loading dock areas where larger items are picked up.
When it came to enabling customers to check online for in-store availability, Wal-Mart had to sort through a wealth of information that could be included on those web pages.
The retailer tested alternatives with customers and found they wanted to have access to the address of their favorite store. To minimize the required page real estate, that information pops up when the customer rolls over the store name. Customers also wanted to see the addresses of other nearby stores, and that information was added. Kristofferson said her team had to carefully consider every word to keep the most important information visible on the web page without scrolling.
Summing up her presentation, Kristofferson encouraged conference attendees to “not lose sight of what the customer needs and what will make it easy for them as they are navigating through your site.”
Wal-Mart is No. 13 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.
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