Walmart provides holiday shopping assistance with image recognition
Walmart’s latest online holiday shopping tool recognizes the increasingly visual nature of the Internet.
The discount giant’s new TrendGetter tool enables product discovery through digital photos and images. To leverage the solution, customers can visit the TrendGetter.com site, take a picture of an item or upload one from their device, and then wait for TrendGetter to search and find similar items on Walmart.com.
Customers can then select and purchase an item in what is designed to be a fast and easy online shopping experience.
“We’ve all been there,” Casey Schlaybaugh, VP of brand strategy & marketing, Walmart, said in a corporate blog post. “You’re scrolling through your Instagram feed and your favorite influencer is wearing the must-have accessory of the season. Or you’re watching the latest viral TikTok video, and you find brag-worthy home décor. Maybe gifting inspiration hits for the hardest person to shop for on your list during your favorite TV show. The problem? You can’t find a shoppable link or any product details, or it’s way out of budget. That’s where TrendGetter comes in.”
Walmart unwraps online shopping features in time for holidays
Walmart has also rolled out two other visually-oriented online personalization features to be available for the holiday season. The discounter recently expanded its augmented reality (AR)-based “View in Your Home feature to over 200 televisions on its iOS app. With this feature expansion, customers can now virtually see how a TV would fit in their personal space before they purchase.
And in September 2022, Walmart partnered with visual outfitting and styling solution Stylitics to provide customers with a virtual view of how different items of clothing look together. Stylitics is now available in men’s, baby, and kids’ apparel for select brands, covering a total of 8,000 items spanning seven categories and including 16,000 outfit variations. Soon, Walmart will also expand this feature to the home category.
In addition, online Walmart customers can choose to “buy now” on most items across all categories, allowing them to purchase items directly from item pages for what the retailer intends to be a faster, easier digital shopping experience.
Customers on Walmart’s e-commerce site can also now see the most viewed and purchased items in their search results. On item pages, they can see how many people are viewing the item in real-time and how many have the item in their carts, to help avoid out-of-stocks.
Holiday savings are marked throughout the Walmart site with a green price tag. As Walmart showcases online deals during the holiday season, it is promoting them throughout multiple touchpoints in the customer journey, from the homepage through the order confirmation page.