Wal-Mart offers free shipping to local stores to its online shoppers

Wal-Mart’s "Site to Store" service saves customers money on delivery costs by offering local store pickups for items purchased online.

by Helen Leggatt

walmart logo The new “Site to Store” service has been tested over the last three years and is now ready to roll out to 750 stores across the U.S. Tens of thousands of product lines will be eligible for free delivery including toys, sports/home products and consumer electronics. During the trial the top-selling item was a 32-inch LCD HDTV valued at just under $900.

According to Raul Vazquez, CEO of Walmart.com, almost two-thirds of their Site to Store trialists also shopped in their local store on a weekly basis, adding to the convenience.

Wal-Mart also discovered, through testing, that more than half of shoppers picking up purchases spent an additional $60 on in-store merchandise.

Walmart.com’s director of store integration, Mike Smith, said, “A key advantage of Wal-Mart’s online channel is the ability to offer a much larger assortment of products through our virtual shelf space, while our offline channel’s key strengths include our nationwide footprint with more than 3,300 retail store locations and a world-class logistics network capable of efficiently delivering online products to customers at our stores. Site to store leverages each of these strengths to provide customers with a robust multichannel shopping experience.”