• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, December 18, 2022

Walmart is introducing Text to Shop, a new service making it even easier for people to add to their Walmart shopping list.

"Text to Shop is seamlessly connected to your Walmart account, so we know your usual ordered items," explains Dominique Essig, vice president, conversational commerce at Walmart's Store No. 8, Walmart's incubation arm. "Simply text the items you need, and they get added to your cart," she writes in a blog post introducing the new feature.

Via text, shoppers can choose from the full selection of Walmart's products. And by texting "reorder," they can quickly review and add frequently ordered items.

With just a few text messages, customers can shop, checkout, and schedule a delivery or pickup time without having to log into the Walmart shopping app.

It's Walmart's latest attempt to boost digital "stickiness," which it says helps build sales over time.

In a recent Morgan Stanley Global Consumer and Retail Conference presentation, chief executive officer Doug McMillon explained the importance of a more robust digital relationship with customers.

"If people buy in-store and online with walmart.com, they generally spend twice as much, and they shop in-store more often," he said. "That data has held over time. That digital relationship -- which could be for a pickup order, it could be for a delivery order, whether that's from a store or an ecommerce fulfillment center -- that's really important to us."

That may be especially true for higher-income customers, including the shoppers with incomes of $100,000-plus who have driven the retailer's market share gains in the last two quarters. 

Those people have mostly been stocking up on food and consumables. "Our challenge is to have market shares that look more consistent across the whole assortment," McMillon said.

In past downturns, Walmart has also made gains with more affluent shoppers, but hanging on to them when the economy improves has been challenging.

This time, McMillon thinks Walmart's extensive digital offers may make the difference. "We've got this bigger ecommerce business. We've got an app, we've got pickup, we've got delivery, we've got Walmart+, and we added Paramount+ to it. So there are other things in place that were not in place in the last cycle that we hope will help us retain more customers."

He said the company has seen pronounced behavioral changes for people with household incomes less than $50,000 starting in March.

"They started really prioritizing. Their dollars went to food and consumables, to gasoline. They didn't have to invest in home décor, for example. They didn't have to buy a new sweater. And so general merchandise sales started really dropping off. And that pressure played through to higher income levels as the months went by."