Walmart

Walmart: Shopping Strategies

Competitive Analysis

Time
3 months (2021)

About the Project

In this project, I provided Walmart with recommendations to enhance their fulfillment strategy, based on competitive analysis and user research.

The Problem

Walmart expanded the online shopping process by allowing customers to choose between getting an order delivered or picking it up in-store. These options have consequences on the shopping logistics. The goal of this project was to define at what point in the shopping flow we should customers allow to choose their delivery format to define how to integrate that in the back-end logistics.

Goals and Task Flows

We started this project by reviewing existing personas, known customer pain points and data analytics. Based on this information we defined the focus area for this project.

Shopping goals
Based on existing customer data we defined three key shopping goals for our target audience: Speed, effort and price.
User Flow
We then defined the typical steps and tasks a user needs to do in their shopping process.

Competitive Analysis

We selected 10 competitors for our review. They included direct competitors in North America, but also indirect competitors form other countries.

Review
We did a heuristic evaluation of each selected competitor and collected strengths and weaknesses.
User Flow
We mapped our findings across a customer journey map to collect all our inputs
Shopping concepts
We identified different shopping concepts with their pros and cons.

Recommendations

Our final recommendations were presented in a form of an interactive workshop to discuss any impacts on the back-end logistics.

Summary
Recommendations included improvements for the website to increase the overall customer experience.
Ideal customer flow
We also defined an ideal shopping flow, end-to-end, to discuss any logistical implications.

Challenges & Restrictions

This project went overall very well and created a great foundation for any future design decisions.

The project participants included team members from marketing and design – but we didn’t talk to people from the fulfillment centre and the logistics, which would have added great value. The communication process continued internally, but I wasn’t involved in future decision-making. 

Outcomes & Learnings

One of the main take-aways for me was to keep the process transparent and include the team as much as possible. We had multiple interactive meetings and working sessions which helped us shape and refine the problem statement we were about to find answers for.

The project was a success overall and generated great insights that will drive future design decisions.