Shopper Experience
14 December 2022
Walmart launches Text to Shop
The service allows customers to buy goods via text, and learns their typical orders.

Texting a Walmart order. (Courtesy photo)
The service allows customers to buy goods via text, and learns their typical orders.
Texting a Walmart order. (Courtesy photo)
Walmart is going conversational with its latest digital shopping tool.
The news: Walmart announced a new Text to Shop feature that allows consumers to place orders via SMS for everything from a gallon of milk to a new shirt. Available on iOS and Android, the service connects to a Walmart account.
How it works:
Key quote from Dominique Essig Walmart VP of conversational commerce, Store No8: “Text to Shop is simple and convenient by design, and was built in partnership with Walmart’s Global Tech team. We worked closely with our customers to design Text to Shop.”
Commerce gets conversational: As the mobile phone increasingly becomes the focal point of ecommerce, text messages are becoming a new place where brands and retailers are reaching consumers. After all, texts are a surface where people spend lots of time communicating. According to a recent survey from Clickatell, 78% of consumers want to use mobile messaging for shopping. Walmart’s feature shows that SMS-based ecommerce functions are going beyond offer messages for marketing, and becoming the surface for direct ordering to take place.
What stands out about Walmart’s tool:
The sticking point: To request an item, customers have to know what they want. The tool’s ability to learn from past orders will help to fill in some of the items, but at this stage, the tool may tilt more towards ordering and replenishment, and less towards browsing.
An open question: Will there be an advertising opportunity? Walmart has emphasized its Walmart Connect retail media business with all things digital this year. A tie-in isn't clear yet, but brands should pay attention to see if one emerges.
Walmart’s holiday ecommerce experience list: This is just the latest new shopping feature from Walmart to be rolled out during the holiday season. In recent weeks, the retailer rolled out upgrades to the shopping experience that included a Buy button and discount tags, as well as augmented reality tools and a visual search feature.
Joining the chat: Walmart’s feature is rolling out at the same time as Meta is making shopping a bigger focus of messaging-based service WhatsApp. The company recently talked about how it already has a $9 billion messaging-based ads business through the app, and is testing grocery shopping in partnership with Jio in India. It's clear that the companies that form the infrastructure of commerce see opportunity in text-based ordering. It's even more important at a time when they are looking to have more direct relationships with customers as a result of changes to digital marketing that will make attribution more difficult.Ask Instacart answers prompts with personalized recommendations.
A pair of recent launches from Instacart highlight how the grocery ecommerce company is integrating two of the key emerging areas of technology into its offerings: Generative AI and marketplaces.
Let’s take a look:
Instacart is seeking to harness generative AI to create a more personalized shopping experience.
A new tool called Ask Instacart that is launching this week is designed to allow customers to type in questions about specific recipes or general recommendations for an occasion. Embedded in the search bar, Ask Instacart also provides personalized questions to be asked by customers. In addition to specific items, it provides information about food preparation, product attributes and dietary considerations.
For those eying how generative AI will play a role in the shopping experience, Ask Instacart shows how search can be transformed into a place for discovery. Instacart is aiming to provide answers to the more open-ended questions that people would naturally ask, not just simply provide info in response to a question that has one answer. It shared the following sample prompts:
The tool is also showing the way for generative AI to integrate with retail media. Ask Instacart is designed to integrate with a brand's sponsored products campaign, so that the answers to questions that match consumer needs can also provide a way for brands to stand out.
To create the tool, Instacart combined the language understanding of ChatGPT with its own AI models. It added in catalog data from 80,000 retail partner locations around the country, which together have more than one billion shoppable items.
Beyond mission: Ecommerce marketplaces have honed a shopping experience where it’s easy to find what you’re looking for. But if shoppers want to happen upon something they didn’t know they needed, social media or the store is still the best place to visit. Instacart is showing how generative AI can make discovery a marketplace function. It also signals that advertising will come to generative AI by way of retail media. Going forward, the growth of discovery could make retail media more valuable as a tool for advertising that raises brand awareness, not just lower-funnel conversions.
Instacart will power a new virtual convenience store for the grocery chain Aldi.
Aldi Express will feature 2,000 of the most-shopped Aldi items, ranging from prepared food and snacks to grocery staples.
Drawing on 2,100 Aldi locations around the country, items will be delivered as fast as 30 minutes, the companies said.
“Through ALDI Express, we’re making shopping more convenient so you can satisfy a craving or get a missing ingredient in minutes,” said Scott Patton, VP of National Buying at ALDI, in a statement. “Together with Instacart, we’ll continue to find ways to innovate and make the online grocery experience even more effortless and accessible.”
Aldi began offering delivery via Instacart in 2017, and has since expanded services to include pickup as well as alcohol delivery.
Aldi’s marketplace moment? While Aldi previously offered delivery, making the assortment available through a virtual store offers the opportunity to create a marketplace for its goods. With the virtual store, it will more closely resemble DoorDash and Uber Eats, which have been expanding their grocery assortment. With a marketplace, additional revenue opportunities could open up for the grocer, such as advertising through retail media.