- Wal-Mart (WMT -0.1%) provides more details on its new Pickup Discount program to Seeking Alpha.
- The company says the discounts will apply to 10K items initially before being expanded to cover more than one million items by the end of June.
- "We can remove the last mile delivery costs (that represent the lion’s share of the costs to ship products to customers’ homes) when we leverage our fleet of more than 6,700 trucks to deliver products directly from fulfillment centers to our 4,700 stores," notes Wal-Mart U.S. e-commerce CEO Marc Lore.
- "We’ve also been hard at work aggressively expanding our Online Grocery Pickup service which is now in 600 stores with an additional 500 coming this year," he adds.
- Lore is one of the execs that Wal-Mart picked up in the Jet.com acquisition.
- On a blog post today, Wal-Mart described the new e-commerce program in detail and displayed a picture of what the pickup towers in stores will look like.
- Other retailers in the line of fire of the aggressive Wal-Mart e-commerce push outside of Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) include Best Buy (BBY -0.4%), Staples (SPLS -1%), Kroger (KR +0.7%), Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) and Target (TGT -0.5%) to name just a few. There's also FedEx (FDX -0.8%) and UPS (UPS -0.7%) to consider.
- Previously: Wal-Mart offering discounts for online orders picked up in store (April 12)
- ETFs: XLY, XRT, VCR, RTH, RETL, IYK, FXD, IYC, FDIS, SCC, RCD, UCC, PMR, UGE, SZK, CNDF, FTXD, JHMC.
Original article