Shopper Experience
27 October 2022
Walmart adds 'Buy Now' button, sale tags to ecommerce experience
The retailer is also expanding 'View in Your Home' and 'Complete the Outfit' features in time for the holidays.

The retailer is also expanding 'View in Your Home' and 'Complete the Outfit' features in time for the holidays.
For retailers, the holidays are a time to roll out the latest updates to the shopping experience. It’s a matter of not only being prepared for an influx of traffic, but also debuting new ways to delight customers.
A new slate of releases that Walmart rolled out on Thursday shows how that peak season energy extends to ecommerce. The retailer unveiled a host of new features for the digital shopping experience on Walmart.com and the company’s app that are focused around saving time, money and personalization.
Here’s a look, and The Current's view on each:
Buy Now buttons are being introduced on most items, allowing users to purchase directly from a product page without having to go to a cart and separate checkout page.
Skip the line: During the holiday rush, sometimes there is a way to buy an item. Walmart Global Tech and the company’s ecommerce product team developed a virtual queuing experience that will hold customers’ places in line for checkout of in-demand items during Black Friday events (which will be held throughout November). The feature identifies estimated wait time, and how long users have to check out. The feature also holds a place in multiple lines at once.
Most-viewed and most-purchased items will now be included in search results, so users can see popular items. Item pages will also show how many people are currently viewing an item, and how many have it in their carts. This is billed as a way to help ensure users purchase an item on their list before it goes out of stock.
The Current’s view: Each of these features will make shopping more convenient, and will help to ensure customers get the items they want in a year after supply chain challenges made out-of-stocks a real worry. They will also create urgency. By showing how popular a product is and introducing a clock that ticks down, Walmart is clearly looking to inspire sales in the moment. This culminates in being able to click “Buy Now,” without needing to take a moment to second guess. Abandoned carts continue to be one of the ever-present issues in ecommerce, and easier checkout helps to solve that.
Green price tags are being introduced on items to denote which items are on sale. Walmart said this is the first feature in a new push to make deals stand out, and added that it will introduce “multiple touchpoints” throughout the season across the homepage, order confirmation page and more.
The Current’s view: This feature highlights a big reason that people shop at Walmart: price. That's especially important to call attention to at a time of 40-year-high inflation. Taking every opportunity to identify savings makes sense. It underscores the company’s value proposition, and creates more incentive to buy a product while it’s on sale. For the company that created the red rollback signs in store, it makes sense that this capability is coming online, albeit in a different color that has a more positive connotation.
View in Your Home is a new augmented reality feature that allows shoppers to visualize what a home product would look like in the room where it is intended to go. Users hold their phone up to the room, and an image of the item is then superimposed into the view. Walmart recently added over 200 TVs to this tool, underscoring the popularity of upgrading the home viewing experience during this time of year.
Complete the outfit: Walmart recently launched this feature from visual outfitting and styling solution Stylitics to provide recommendations to shoppers. While shopping for clothing, Walmart now identifies additional apparel and accessories that would complement the style. This was initially available for women’s clothing, and is now opened up for men’s, baby and kids’ apparel for select brands including No Boundaries, Free Assembly, Wonder Nation, Justice and more. In all, Walmart said it has 8,000 items across seven categories, with 16,000 outfit combos. The feature will soon expand to the home category, as well.
Be Your Own Model: Last month, Walmart announced the first iteration of its virtual try-on technology. This app feature displays apparel items on a photo of a person. Rather than simply an overlay, Walmart said its capabilities generate an “ultra-realistic simulation with shadows, fabric draping and where clothing falls on their figure in seconds.” Additionally, it allows for variations in color, size and sleeve length of a particular item. It was available on more than 270,000 items at launch. This follows the company’s acquisition of virtual try-on platform Zeekit in May 2021.
The Current’s view: These features have the opportunity to elevate the shopping experience on Walmart.com. Seeing an item in the space where it will live, easily viewing different variations of products and automatically looking at which other items might match are all elements that don’t happen easily in a store without unloading racks. It’s a sign of the curationa automation advances that software can bring, even if it can’t match the eye test and touch of a physical shopping experience. Given Walmart’s size and the number of items involved, these are also examples of augmented reality and machine learning being implemented at a scale that has few comparisons. Key metrics here, especially for augmented reality, will be incremental sales and returns reduction.
Consumer behavior differs by age group, Jungle Scout finds.
Gen Z consumers are shopping online at higher rates than other generations, and choosing to start product searches on TikTok over Google.
Those are a couple of takeaways from a new report on consumer trends issued this week by ecommerce seller platform Jungle Scout.
When it comes to Gen Z consumers, the report found the following:
Daily digital: 32% of Gen Z consumers shop online at least once daily. That’s compared to 25% of millennials, 15% of Gen X and 7% of baby boomers.
Starting at TikTok: 43% of Gen Z consumers start product searches on TikTok. That’s a higher share than those that start searches on Google. In the overall population, a majority of consumers still start product searches on Amazon.
Secondhand savings: 42% of Gen Z consumers purchased a resale item in the last year. Gen Z is the most likely generation to shop secondhand items online to save money.
The report highlights how Gen Z appears to be more digitally inclined, and willing to embrace emerging shopping modes, whether that is a social media platform or category like resale. At the same time, it underscores the generational variation in consumer behavior.
Gen Z seems to be putting the lowest priority on saving money, despite wider anxiety about the economy during this period of high inflation. The report found that baby boomers are 78% more likely than Gen Z to purchase items on sale. Boomers are also the most likely to use credit cards that have perks allowing them to save money.
Meanwhile, 56% of Gen X and 43% of millennials are cutting back on purchases in the fun or impulse category to save money. Among Gen Z consumers, the share of those pulling back is 37%.
“In the world of ecommerce, one size does not fit all,” says Michael Scheschuk, President of Small & Medium Business at Jungle Scout. “Businesses must understand each generation’s unique values, preferences, and behaviors to create tailored strategies. As the youngest and newest cohort of shoppers, Gen Z offers invaluable insights into the current and future trends shaping retail.”
A note on spending: When it comes to overall commerce spending, data from Jungle Scout shows that spending ticked up in the first quarter, though more spend is being directed toward essentials. Consumers bought more groceries, cleaning supplies and supplements, while cutting back on discretionary items such as electronics, clothing and home goods.