WalMart announced a series of holiday-time strategies on Wednesday, primarily focused on battling the threat of Amazon taking away from their sales. Their holiday strategy includes three themed parties between now and December 16, across 7,000 stores, for a total of 20,000 in-store parties. The parties will give shoppers the opportunity to play with toys, take pictures with Santa, see product demonstrations and taste goods. In the stores, WalMart will have extra staff on hand to assist with checkout and grab additional items for shoppers. In addition, the retailer has also tripled its inventory and expanded its assortment of brands. WalMart will also offer price rollbacks on thousands of items.
As far as online strategies, WalMart is offering more than 2 million items with free 2-day shipping on orders over $35. Also new is a “pickup discount” when shoppers order online and pick up in store. They have also doubled their grocery pick up locations, where they bring the groceries out to the customers’ cars.
WalMart is also going after Amazon’s helm as the low-price leader. A study was released this week showing that Amazon’s prices are typically 11% lower than WalMart, Target and Jet, but WalMart is closing in, being only 3% higher than Amazon across all products . The retailer is especially price competitive with Amazon in the beauty category, with products being 1% lower than Amazon on average. Experts state that going into the holiday season, the price war will continue to heat up across all of the categories of products WalMart sells.
Source: Chain Store Age
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