Walmart shoppers can now order products via text message, two years after a similar text-to-shop experiment failed
Walmart hopes to streamline shopping by allowing customers to text items they'd like to purchase.
The new service was beta tested previously and grew out of Store No. 8, Walmart's incubator arm.
The company shut down a previous text-based experiment, dubbed Jet Black, in 2020 after just two years.
Walmart has rolled out a new tool for customers to text the retailer the names of products they want to purchase. That feature, Walmart Text to Shop, is coming online roughly two years after Walmart shut down a limited text-to-shop experiment.
Launched as a beta test in October 2021 to select markets, Walmart Text to Shop "is seamlessly connected" to users' Walmart accounts, Dominique Essig, vice president of conversational commerce for Store No. 8, Walmart's secretive incubator arm, wrote in a blog post Wednesday.
"Simply text the items you need, and they get added to your cart," Essig wrote. "Choose from the full selection of Walmart's products, including items from your local store and from Walmart.com. Text 'reorder' to quickly review and add your frequently ordered items to your cart."
The tool allows for customers to create in-store shopping lists, as well as shop online and organize times for pickup and delivery.
At any given time, Store No. 8 houses five to eight "portfolio" companies — or startups that help Walmart get a jump on new shopping trends, said Scott Eckert, Walmart's senior vice president of next generation retail. The text-to-shop feature was one of those portfolio companies.
Eckert told Insider last month that Walmart is looking to "rapidly sign up customers" for text-to-shop.
"That type of convenience and inserting digital tools into your main shopping stream of activity is the type of thing that we're working on here," Eckert said.
This isn't the first time Walmart has tried its hand at text-to-shop services.
In 2018, the company rolled out Jet Black, a $50-per-month service where customers could access personal shoppers through text message. The service, also first incubated in Store No. 8, initially launched in New York City and had plans to expand.
But Walmart lost a ton of money on the service — reportedly hemorrhaging $15,000 annually per member as of 2019. And in February 2020, Walmart shut down the service and laid off nearly 300 people in the process.
"As we said in the beginning when we launched Jet black in 2018, part of the initiative was to start testing and building the technology with the intent that it could be used in other ways, including applying it to other parts of our business in the future," a Walmart spokesperson said at the time. "We've learned a lot over the past two years, including how customers respond to the ability of ordering by text as well as the type of items they purchase through texting."
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