Somewhat tangential, but I am super-impressed with Home Depot's e-commerce experience on the web side, and completely the opposite with WalMart.
As I'm standing in a Home Depot store struggling to find an item, I can pull up the site, verify they have something in stock, and get a map of the store showing me where that thing is. This is an incredible consumer experience. Even when the thing I want isn't where it's supposed to be, showing that to a staffer usually gets an "Oh, yeah, we moved those to aisle Foo last week" response.
On the flipside, when I go to WalMart's site the default search behavior is showing me numerous items from 3rd-party sellers that are not and will never be available in-store. They do have inventory information but you have to specifically filter for it and I find it much less reliable and difficult to navigate than Home Depot's.
Hopefully they take pages from each others' playbooks.
> I can pull up the site, verify they have something in stock, and get a map of the store showing me where that thing is. This is an incredible consumer experience.
Notice how associates used to have custom apps to do the same thing? And now how they just pull up the website too, when you ask them?
It's almost like someone had the brilliant idea of unifying an internal and external tool that both did the same thing, and devoting more resources to making the result work better than either ever did.
> It's almost like someone had the brilliant idea of unifying an internal and external tool that both did the same thing, and devoting more resources to making the result work better than either ever did.
This is super powerful when applied to tools, but also docs, pricing and decisions. At my current job, whenever we make a rule around licensing or pricing, we publish it to our external facing FAQ. This means that the sales people consult the same info as the customer can.
Many customers choose to cut out the sales folks and read the FAQs, which is fine. Some choose not to. Some choose to read the FAQ and chat with the sales folks for further details.
But having one place where everyone can go lets people consume that info as they wish, as well as acting as a forcing function for keeping it up to date.
It frustrates me that our org chooses to hide a lot of the FAQs behind the help desk. The higher ups think this is like "white glove service", but in practice, it's so much slower for anyone who has the slightest idea about the what they're looking for, and because everyone has to go through the desk, they're sometimes overwhelmed. That leads to way more escalations than there otherwise would be (which leads to the non-higher ups having to focus more on answering tickets and less on what they're paid to do).
* publish as much as you can online (it's not like another page in the CMS costs you anything, really)
* make it very easy and clear how to contact a human, in case the online content doesn't answer my question
But I could see how implementing only one or the other would be counterproductive.
I imagine there was an investment in updating the local inventory. For internal tools, it seems to be fine to have more approximate data. People seem to offer to "check in the back" (whether that exists or not). For public facing tools that's a lot less acceptable.
Home Depot isn't /perfect/ in that regard. It'll often see "a few left" or "call for inventory" and I've had to hunt down people to find moving boxes in a store that didn't seem to carry a lot and moved them around on various end-caps. But it's way better than any other retail store I've seen. Getting that last little bit must have been difficult.
>For internal tools, it seems to be fine to have more approximate data
It's moreso that completely accurate inventory takes an incredible amount of resources and man power to maintain, and you get diminishing returns the closer you try to get to 100%. Retail is a big industry and there are many very talented people working on this problem.
Retail orders are done automatically based on inventory, and if the numbers are off, either too little will be ordered (out of stock = lost profit) or too much (backstock = man hours spent dealing with it). So there's a clear profit motive to have tight inventory. This is a much bigger deal to these stores than whether the numbers are internal or customer facing.
I don't understand how this works, but shouldn't it be as simple as NumAvailable = NumIn - NumSold - NumDamaged?
NumSold and NumIn are ofc eady to keep track of, and NumDamaged could just be like a portable barcode scanning device that the staff scans with whenever putting away a broken item.
If the world were a deterministic computer system, yes.
It is not.
For instance, NumIn would indicate how many received at the store, no? But what then?
It needs to physically exist somewhere. The display? Overflowing onto the overhead? Overflowing onto the next overhead over? Pushed to the back of the overhead behind something else? Kept in the back because there's no room anywhere?
A lot of stores used to do things like close for part of a day to do inventory. I assume there is still some syncing up during the night or whatever. But I also assume that, as with many things, many stores have probably been willing to trade off a degree of accuracy for reduced costs.
Wasn't there a store that was serving up a modified version of their site on in-store terminals with higher prices or something? CompUSA? Or was it Best Buy?
I hadn't noticed this and am fascinated (and confused)- mind if I ask y'all questions to get more details?
Like, if I see a price on the website on my home network (the lower one, yes?) then I go to the store and look it up again then I see the higher one, yes? But once I'm standing in front of the item there's a paper label on the item (or on the shelf under the item) telling me what the price is, yes?
What's the point of displaying different prices in different places?
Is it only for "online only" items that they're offering to let you purchase while you're standing in their stores?
They want to convince you to buy it then and there - if you're looking at a doodad at Best Buy and it's priced on the shelf at $40, and you look at it online at Best Buy and it's $50, you're gonna be like "this is a steal I best grab it now".
If their online price is lower than their in-store price, if you go to price-match at the checkout, the website will show the higher price. But at home it will show the lower price.
Lowes does this as well. They not only point you to the Isle, but they also have indicators that show you where in the Isle it is. Spent 10 minutes looking for an item before I pulled up their website and felt like the biggest idiot.
Really? I shop at Lowe's a lot. I often find isle numbers like BW. I assume that means something like "Back Wall" but, nope. There is no map that I'm aware of and no indication where it might be on an isle (save a bay number, which is almost always wrong). It is "good enough" to get me in the vicinity on some products but not others. A store map showing me where isle BW is would be a great addition.
At least in my local stores, things have frequently been rearranged to be in a different location and the online inventory didn’t get updated. So I have to find an associate and ask anyway. Home Depot seems to be much better at it.
This is a great idea in theory. Although per usual the rubber hits the road when people need to find the physical item. If the stores aren’t organized or the employees don’t know where things are - you end up with a situation where now everyone is at the mercy of what the computers tell them.
I’ve had a few experiences where the site tells me something is stocked but an hour later I leave without what I came for.
Ugh, the third party seller marketplace! I loathe sites that do this: Walmart, Bestbuy, and NewEgg come to mind.
They seem to all be trying to half copy Amazon? The ironic thing is this is now one of the worst features since they started "fulfilled by Amazon".
If you're not benefiting from the logistics chain, you're just adding a middleman they adds markup and makes disputes and returns more complex. In some cases they're just drop shipping it from Alibaba/AliExpress/etc and you might as well order directly at 25% the cost.
It's lucrative and dramatically increases the perceived selection so nobody is going to stop, probably. On the consumer side it might be a little more mixed but at least you can deal with a big retailer if you have problems rather than some fly by night operation.
I wonder what the long term hit is to their brand? I have to think that's brought up because it happens all the time to declining brands and I don't see that digging them out of their problems. I tend to avoid those sites mentioned after being burned a few times. In the past, they were the first place I would check. It hurts when I see family members get burned.
Over time, probably huge. eBay started as a flea market, and so people knew what to expect. Amazon started as a reputable seller and has since turned into a flea market, so people compare against the quality guarantee that used to be there.
"Roebuck". I believe they were still putting their full name on printed labels as late as the 90s? It looks like they've tried to resurrect it as a clothing brand now.
I knew Sears was really done for when I went in there circa 2010 and they had a prominent computer with their "catalog", which was actually just searching Amazon. It's like these companies completely misunderstand what their value add is - I wasn't going to Sears because I was a "Sears customer" who only wanted to buy things from Sears, and they could hold onto me by letting me purchase Amazon items through them. Rather I went to Sears to see what Sears's selection was, and if they offered anything additional to what the HD/Lowes duopoly carried. They didn't really, and the rest is history.
The problem is the hit to the brand is over decades. You can do a few stupid things without a brand hit so long as you see the mistake and revert back.
Back in their day my Grandparents bought from Montgomery Wards or Sears Robeck (note they used the full name of both stores - odds are if you remember those stores at all is just by part of the name, or perhaps from a history book) They had a lot of stuff from those stores, and it was all good stuff, so they could confidently just buy it if the store sold it. In the final decades of Sears they often didn't have the best and so I had to think about quality (I don't remember Wards).
Amazon always mixed the best stuff with junk, but it was real - now who knows if it is real. Walmart used to be "made in the USA" (or made in Canada for stores in that country), but that policy is gone - they are still a step above dollar store, but only a small step: everyone knows you often get better quality elsewhere. Amazon mixed counterfeit with real not long after starting, while WalMart had "Made in the USA" for decades (made in Canada lasted a little longer).
There is a reason why some companies talk about the value of the brand. Coke needs to be very careful about losing trust (they almost lost it with "new coke" back in the 1980s - which my uncle says it was a way to introduce classic coke with HFCS instead of real sugar without losing the value of the brand - though he isn't in position to know what went on at Coke). My company often says we need to keep making high quality products to protect the value of our brand, we are well aware that we can rest on our brand reputation for a while, but bad quality has caught up to our competitors over decades and out market share shows is.
I don’t see the point tho. It’s not like Best Buy makes laptops so they bulk purchase and sell. What is the benefit of this drip shipping nonsense. No I won’t buy a sata cable from “ePC tech” just feels shady
Yeah. That's the one awesome thing about all the not-Amazon options out there.
Walmart: All Filters => Retailer (Walmart)
Target: More Filters => Sold By (Target)
It's the first thing I look for after having been repeatedly burned by fake/damaged/obviously used items on Amazon.
Also their prices are usually better so it often pays to crosscheck.
Next step is for those retailers to just form a partnership with Waste Management because for a non-negligible percent of the time it’s basically garbage express.
I suppose it depends on who's being catered for by the platform. In Poland, we have an interesting situation in which most brands that operate their own stores end up selling their products on Allegro (local Amazon/eBay equivalent) anyway. I usually defaulted to brand's own stores, but my wife turned me around - you get the same products, from the same vendors, for the same price, but in case of any problems, dispute process is streamlined and extremely favorable to buyers.
From a customer POV, marketplaces make sense. No need to worry about creating yet another account with payment details on some obviously outdated Wordpress shop for ordering a cat toy or whatever small scale purchase.
I had covid 2 weeks ago, and I paid extra for a 2 hour food order from Walmart. I wanted something I forgot on an order I had made somewhere else. After 3 hours I got notice that some of the impulse buys I added were out of stock. Which is fine, but the only reason I added them was because they showed them to me. Then after 6 hours there was no word from them, and I knew the local store was closed. So I just canceled the order.
I understand the retail employees are busy and things don't always go as planned, but there should have been some automation in place to help them here. Like don't offer items that are low stock, and automatically issue refunds on the 2 hour purchase charge after 4 hours. Maybe even automatically include an extra credit, as an incentive to try again.
I had an experience recently with Door Dash where after you order, their app will suggest buying additional items from 7-11. They give you a ten minute window to add items. I assume the driver will pick them up after your order. I decided to go for it and order an impulse item myself. When I got to the checkout to pay, it wouldn’t let me because I guess it was after hours, but the app was still suggesting it to me. It was incredibly frustrating as a user to have a service suggest an option that was impossible to fulfill.
I wonder if maybe there are two different teams at Door Dash working on this, one doing the upsell and the other actually handling the fulfillment. Seems they need to talk to each other more.
What might have happened is they were open while you started checkout and then closed after. I’ve had this happen many times. They need to handle this better in the UI.
The issue with an actual store is that the "physical world overrides the virtual".
Your database in the virtual world may say that 20 items are in stock. When you walk over to the shelves, you only see 2 items. Well, I guess only 2 items are in stock. It doesn't matter that the remaining 18 were stolen by a shoplifter (or maybe scattered elsewhere in the store). You may have had 20 items enter inventory, but what's on the shelf is your final database.
There's not really any way to keep that up to date. Even if you have a bunch of minimum wage employees count the items constantly: as soon as the first customer walks through that row, your count is obsolete.
If you hook up your inventory system to the checkout: that still doesn't work, because thieves exist, and many customers pickup items, suddenly decide they don't want it, and then drop the item off randomly in the store (maybe they pickup some cheese, and then decided they didn't want it. So they leave the cheese in the clothes aisle and now the cheese is spoiled)
Sure, but this wasn't that. This was an item that was on sale that had one left that they showed me just before I checked out. If I had just picked it out, that is one thing, but to bring attention to it is just a bad experience. They could simply start by removing anything with a single item left from the last minute sales pitch. They could improve it by figuring out the probability of an item being available.
Honestly, it's bad UX that they even make you choose a store, that is an implementation detail. I have 3 Walmarts within 5 miles of my house, and 10 of them within 10 miles. They should present them to me as a single same-day warehouse, and then they can work out where to get which items from.
Actually I'm shocked to read this because I have the opposite reaction. To each their own — you make a good point about the accuracy of their inventory information — but to me the Home Depot website is on of the worst websites I have ever used.
It's unbelievably slow for me, a perfect example of bad JavaScript. Product menus appear at the worst possible moment, inexplicably spreading across the page after I've looked for them and given up. It's impossible to bulk edit lists you've bookmarked. I could go on and on.
It's like someone took this beautiful inventory database and layered this textbook example of bad but typical modern web design on top.
> It's like someone took this beautiful inventory database and layered this textbook example of bad but typical modern web design on top.
This is so common. I can't count how many times I wished someone just exposed a normal desktop DB browser or an Excel sheet instead of their bullshit web storefront / SaaS service. Hell, I actually semi-jokingly suggested just that in a startup I used to work for[0]. I've given it some thought then, and I realized the reason for offering subpar experience is often because the vendor wants to railroad the users into a very specific workflow. This... well... is not how I want to do computing[1], so I tend to avoid SaaS whenever I can.
--
[0] - Wasn't totally unwarranted, given that our main competitor was a company literally selling an Excel plugin. Even with us having stellar people doing the frontend part, it was pretty clear we spent more time reimplementing a fraction of spreadsheet functionality in the browser, instead of working on the "unique selling point".
[1] - My full thoughts on this are too large to fit in this comment - this approach can be the right thing to do by the user, sometimes.
I have that same problem too -- the Home Depot site is painful to use because it's so slow.
I prefer Lowes, but I can't use it while on my my work VPN because they think I'm a bot, so when my wife sends me a link to look at while on VPN, I can't see it until I log off VPN at the end of the day. So we stopped using Lowes. I complained about this to Lowes and asked them to whitelist my company's VPN endpoint, but got a generic response back about cyber security and keeping me safe.
> As I'm standing in a Home Depot store struggling to find an item, I can pull up the site, verify they have something in stock, and get a map of the store showing me where that thing is.
I have an iPhone. Their site does not work in Safari; it initially displays an item but a split second later everything just...disappears. I tried it in another browser, same result. I also tried doing the "request desktop site" in both browsers. Nothing. I've also never had more trouble getting a mainstream company's website to work properly in desktop browsers, a problem that has been going on for years.
Our home depot is a thirty minute drive and I used to do a stock check before driving over. Almost every time their stock system said they had multiple of a particular item in stock, nothing to be found and staff could not find the item in question. Last time it happened, I was trying to find a particular power tool and there wasn't a single employee anywhere to help. A manufacturer rep from another company spent 10 minutes of his own time digging through the upper storage. Never saw a single orange apron.
In the decades I've been going to home depot across multiple states I've found their stores poorly laid out, their employees impossible to find, half the stuff I'm looking for is up on the sky-high storage (which employees will whine deeply about being made to fetch stuff from, often making a plainly trivial effort to actually look for something before declaring "it's not here, sorry") and their stock to be abysmal; something even slightly unusual and they'll have a spot for it on the shelf....that is empty.
I guess I use it often enough that I have their iPhone app to flag items I want to pick up. Their store maps are great (I doubt that's available on their mobile site) for finding the right shelf. Although, I don't remember having issues with their mobile site.
I'm not sure how the stores are set up, but inventory and finding stuff can easily get screwed up at the store level. I've had the opposite experience. If I was worried and it was a long trip, I would get it for in-store pickup. I've had other stores cancel it when they send someone out to prep the order.
And I generally hew towards smaller, independent hardware stores when possible.
I've found that the disappearing item thing went away on desktop when I used a private or incognito window, so I deleted my cookies and cached browser data for the site and things seemed to work correctly after that.
Somewhat similar experience here, but Walmart / Target / Macy's.
Last time I bothered looking at Walmart's web site, the "best" part of my experience was that I was able to phone the local store, and a live human there quickly told me "No, we do not stock $Item. Ignore what our web store says." This was after Target wasted my time by saying the opposite - then after I drove to Target it turned out to be a lie.
I ended up buying from Macy's - which has plenty of its own issues, but for my n=1 had $Far_More_Upscale_Item on their shelf, a competent sales person on hand, and a sale price less than 2X Walmart's and Target's prices for $Item.
(Another fun story about Target - they stock items which do not exist in their inventory and check-out databases. I once bought a great gift for a friend's granddaughter there...after the in-store security supervisor found it (or pretended to) in some anti-shoplifting security app, and the store's manager made a snap decision on the price.)
These examples make me feel that the regulations against false advertising are either insufficient. The last time I checked, in most states the only thing protected against is a monetary loss due to making a purchase that (1) wouldn't have been made otherwise, (2) resulted from provably incorrect information, and (3) that a reasonable person would have also assumed to be true. Implying falsehoods about a product without actually stating them is allowed. Outright lying is allowed, if a "reasonable person" would notice that they were lying. Only the monetary aspect is covered, and not the waste of time caused by the lying, such as your fruitless trip to Target, or needing to sift through all the lies.
Heck, in some states a buyer can't even bring a lawsuit for false advertising, only a competitor can. Because when somebody has lied to me and wasted my time, money, or both, isn't the wronged party really the unrelated person who didn't get to take my money instead?
The old joke about the difference between a used car salesman and a computer salesman comes to mind. ("...the used car salesman actually knows when he is lying to you!")
I'm not sure what legal basis there could be for anti-incompetence laws for web stores, nor how easily they might be passed. It'd likely have to be federal law, in the U.S. (At the state level, there are some nice, simple laws about in-store goods where the shelf says "Price $X", the check-out scanner say "Price $Y", and $Y > $X...)
My approach is mostly to have a long memory, and loose tongue, about such things. And to mostly shop at places considerably more competent and expensive than Target or Walmart.
Every large store has items that don't exist in the database, the question is how long they've been gone.
Strangely enough, it's relatively easy to find stuff at Walmart that won't scan in the app or online, but is found by the registers, so something isn't fully connected.
Target being out of stock can be nice, order online for pickup and then they say they can't find it and ship it instead.
My experience is the opposite. I get the “I don’t work in this dept. I’ll call someone”. Then I wait in plumbing for 10 minutes until someone shows up. When the person shows they start looking in the same place I have been searching for the last 1/2 hour.
It depends. Some people like the experience of learning about different things and so they if they don't know finding the answer for your makes you their favorite customer. Others just want to do their job and get back home.
Home Depot won't penalize the first type of person unlike some stores that get mad when someone isn't in their area.
I guess I'd do the same if I found the associates ever had anything where anything was... I've found even the store managers would tell me they didn't sell stuff that they did, in fact, sell.
i'll have to try the app, i'm not a huge fan of the website. However, i have both my local stores memorized so i don't know how much time it will save. ...when you buy a house you should get a $1k Home Depot gift card at closing as just part of the standard process.
The Walmart app actually has that information, but it’s got some kind of strange ‘in the store’ detection that doesn’t work most of the time. So you’ll be using the app to try to find things, there’s zero stock or aisle location information and then 10 minutes later you’ll get a screen pop that says something along the lines of welcome to store X and then you can get stock and location information for products.
Lowes is trying to do as good as Home Depot but they seem to have a bunch of strange undocumented locations like N50 that nobody knows about.
N50 is part of their old bin location system that told you exactly where on the shelf the item was. In your example it would be the 50th location in the 14th bay (bay N) on that isle. Here is an example of a bin location on a price label
As part of their modernization to the product locator system they were supposed to remove all the bin location tags (red triangular flags). If they were in fact removed you can count the bays yourself or look for bin locations on other price tags.
I don't know what kind of genius thought getting rid of fine grained location data and replacing it with coarse locations would help improve the customers ability to find items, but it is typical of Lowe's current leadership. They replace a well designed and efficient solution with a half baked solution and then go on to bungle the implementation of said half baked solution.
It is shocking how bad Lowes tech is compared to Home Depot. All they have to do is copy them. I frequently can’t search on Lowes website because in Safari, the search results and pictures are offset by 1.
Yeah way in the back there's not much cell phone reception. The same goes for WalMart, since people are talking about their inventory practices as well.
I was trying to do this exact thing on the Lowe's mobile website the other day and found it totally impossible. I kept thinking, "why isn't the aisle this is located in highlighted in huge text? I'm standing in the store. I know you have this information, because I've seen it on the desktop website, but I can't make it show up."
Turns out I was probably thinking of the Home Depot website, which does prominently display this info.
HD's website and app are pretty good in general, but terrible if you are looking for wood.
For example, I needed to replace some deck boards this summer. I found exactly what I wanted on their site, and that the two nearest stores both had dozens of each.
I wrote down all the possible numbers that would help make sure I found the right items in store. For example, one of the items I needed was a 12 ft long 2x6 pressure treated board of decent quality [1]. That's model number 559000102061200, store SKU 388520, and internet number 202060477.
I wrote down all 3 numbers for all the items I wanted, and what aisles they were supposed to be in.
In store those aisles did contain lumber of the right size but not a single number on any of the labels matches a single number that I had gotten from the web site. I checked all the other lumber aisles and nothing anywhere else matched any of the numbers I was looking for.
Whatever system they use to assign numbers to lumber in store is completely different from how they number things on their website. Not even the formatting matched.
The lumber guys at both of the HDs in my area told me that there is basically no relationship between what lumber they have and what the website says they have.
Walmart's in-store pickup system can be very misleading too. If it's listed for in-store pickup, I expect it to be like Best Buy or Target - I get a notification a few hours later that I can go get my item. With Walmart, if an item is eligible for in-store pickup, that often meets they have to ship that item to the store and it will take 1-2 weeks
I like it in principal but their inventory is so frequently inaccurate. There’s a lot of theft or a flaw in their return system. I was told by an associate that people return items that never left the store, and thus gets added back to inventory. Admittedly, that doesn’t make total sense to me.
It makes sense to me because you can return stuff from any Home Depot to any Home Depot. Or even not even from Home Depot since the give you store credit without a receipt.
+1. I had to aisle browse to find stuff or call the store to see if something is in stock. This has been a major upgrade in experience. The inventory count is pretty accurate too (important when looking for remodels, flooring, trims etc)
YMMV. I've gone to Home Depot because their site said they had an item in stock; they did not. I bought a cheaper alternative and left. I could not shake the feeling that this was on purpose to get me there.
Walmart doesn't even classify tomatoes as vegetables in some stores. They're in their own section. Every store looks the same and none of them are laid out that way.
My experience with the Walmart app for iOS has been a nightmare and my store is 3 minutes from my house so I use it frequently for pick up orders.
The app made some insanely confusing UX decisions, such as forcing users to go to 2 separate parts of the app depending on if you are searching for products on Walmart.com vs local Walmart store, instead of one seamless UX flow of adding your local store and searching for items in stock locally on top of suggesting to ship it to you as a secondary channel.
After I somehow navigate the maze of getting to the local store search section of the app after wasting time searching their Walmart.com commingled section of the app, I enter my zip code and the store 3 mins away never shows up and I have to do some hacky workaround to get the store to show.
Finally after ordering for pickup, I have to navigate a maze to get to the local store orders page to see the order details.
Walmart labs really needs to do some solid UX research on their in-app end to end customer journey and copy how Hone Depot does it. Don’t get my started on how frustrating it is to find an item in their maze of alphabetical ordered aisles that often doesn’t match the item location aisle details in the app.
Ugh thinking about the app makes my blood pressure increase.
TL;DR
The Home Depot in-app experience and UX for browsing, purchasing, and locating in-store items is a dream to use and is arguably best practice for e-commerce and retail commingled UX compared to Walmart.
As I'm standing in a Home Depot store struggling to find an item, I can pull up the site, verify they have something in stock, and get a map of the store showing me where that thing is. This is an incredible consumer experience. Even when the thing I want isn't where it's supposed to be, showing that to a staffer usually gets an "Oh, yeah, we moved those to aisle Foo last week" response.
On the flipside, when I go to WalMart's site the default search behavior is showing me numerous items from 3rd-party sellers that are not and will never be available in-store. They do have inventory information but you have to specifically filter for it and I find it much less reliable and difficult to navigate than Home Depot's.
Hopefully they take pages from each others' playbooks.