Consumers will soon be able to get Amazon’s bargain prices at their local Walmart in the US, as the supermarket giant looks to win back lost sales online and the growing phenomenon of ‘showrooming’.
Walmart told managers at its roughly 5000 stores that they’ll officially be able to offer customers the often cheaper prices available online.
In the past, stores typically only matched published prices for other brick-and-mortar establishments.
The scheme isn’t new- roughly half of stores were already matching online prices, so the new move is meant to “formalise” the practice.
Walmart’s aggressive pricing may also help curb showrooming. Showrooming is when a consumer looks at a product in brick-and-mortar stores and buys it online at lower prices.
The increasingly popular practice involves consumers using their mobile devices to compare prices online while visiting brick-and-mortar stores and purchase the products from there if the price is the same or less.
Mobile apps like RedLaser, BuyVia, ShopSavvy, The Find and PriceGrabber lets users scan barcodes at brick-and-mortar stores to compare prices across multiple online retailers.
Last month, Walmart said that it was investing between $1.2 billion and $1.5 billion into its e-commerce and digital operations in the next fiscal year, up from about $1 billion this year.
Walmart also plans to build two new online fulfillment centres in Georgia and Pennsylvania that are over one million square feet in size each.