Walmart will begin discounting products you choose to pick up in-store

Walmart is starting a new program called “Pickup Discount” that will give shoppers that choose to pick up items in-store a savings over having them shipped to their home. The discounts will begin April 19th on about 10,000 items that are only available online. Walmart said it intends to extend the offer to more than 1 million products in June.

For Walmart, the discounts can be offered because the most expensive part of shipping is the “last mile delivery costs,” meaning the trip to each home. By instead putting products on one of the company’s 6,700+ trucks traveling to stores, it saves quite a bit of money. For the customer, it’s a trip to Walmart, which many will be happy to do if they just saved tens or even hundreds of dollars.

An example Walmart provided in its press release is the VIZIO SmartCast M-Series 70-inch Class 4K Ultra HDTV for $1,698. It will have an additional Pickup Discount of $50 bringing it down to $1,648.

Customers have to go inside the Walmart store to pick up their items, but Walmart has been developing a curbside pickup option for grocery orders. Its Online Grocery Pickup service is now in 600 stores, with 500 more coming this year. It wouldn’t be surprising to see Walmart offer curbside for some of the smaller online sales in the future, given that most of the kinks have already been worked out — ranging from staffing to alerts to even the parking spaces needed to serve the pickup customers.

The idea for Pickup Discount came from Jet.com’s Smart Cart technology. Walmart acquired Jet last year and has quickly started taking advantage of how the company allowed consumers to save money with more purchasing options. This could help Walmart bring online prices down even further, which ultimately helps with its battle with Amazon. If its top-selling items can be bought for less than elsewhere, that could help to increase sales.

We are doing a lot to enhance the Pickup experience to make it even simpler and more convenient for customers. We’ve also been hard at work aggressively expanding our Online Grocery Pickup service which is now in 600 stores with an additional 500 coming this year.

We already offer great prices online. We do that every day. Offering a discount on Pickup demonstrates how we can take that to the next level by operating more efficiently and removing costs from the system to give customers even more ways to save.

*Pickup Discount will be available on eligible items on Walmart.com only. Discount will be available in the contiguous United States.

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