The Home Depot Teams Up with Walmart to Expand Same-Day and Next-Day Delivery
corporate.homedepot.com
corporate.homedepot.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://i.imgur.com/E0AUjIL.jpg
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.
Home Depot won't penalize the first type of person unlike some stores that get mad when someone isn't in their area.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
For 10,000+ different products or so per store.
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’ve had a few experiences where the site tells me something is stocked but an hour later I leave without what I came for.
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.
I like the best of both worlds:
* 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
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'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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
This is helpful when you don’t know the exact thing you’re looking for.
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.
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.
It seems to have gotten better, or maybe hardware and internet just got faster, but it used to take minutes for pages to load 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.
1. Have trouble using the Home Depot website to find anything.
2. Finally find it under some alternate brand name or SKU (maybe) and figure out what aisle it's in.
3. Get there and the thing is not there, and sometimes the aisle isn't even where the site says it is.
4. No employees available.
5. Employees can't find it either, or disappear while trying to find it
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 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.
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)
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.
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.
[1] https://www.homedepot.com/p/2-in-x-6-in-x-12-ft-Outdoor-Sele...
Turns out I was probably thinking of the Home Depot website, which does prominently display this info.
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.
The initial lifestyle change was a little rough, but I found myself over time just accepting I didn't need all the crap I used to order. People are fast to call out amazon's treatment of workers, small businesses, etc., but here we see other companies doing their best to emulate it because people still dump money at Amazon.
But the person running up your stairs is a function of throughput, not latency. Getting it a couple days later, but still ordering online, probably wouldn't change anything. I think getting it in 24 hrs just means the logistics supply chain correctly predicted the warehouse to stock your item.
Products seem to have a bimodal delivery time between "tomorrow" and "whenever we feel like it". Is it any wonder that we prefer the former?
One might ask though, if you know you need something only at the last minute, is it really a project or just something you're brute-forcing your way through?
Example, I've been rebuilding a 40 year old VW van. In the US, I'd have just started busting into it, knowing I could walk down to Rock Auto or Pep Boys and get 99% of what I find I need. Here though, I like to drive that van, and camp in it, so I am much more careful about doing repairs. I end up testing an analyzing parts before ordering them (because it can take a month to get them) and thus, end up wasting less, and building my own troubleshooting ability up more. The net result is the same, a car that works, and your way would have been faster, if not a bit more wasteful.
To your other point, I agree! I think a few days to a week would be fine for most things people want, but it's old school "Allow 6-8 weeks for delivery" or "Tomorrow, sometimes today". We know with relative surety the latter is a stress on human workers, so something in the middle which created jobs, without the down side of the high churn work style would be great.
I don't think that's necessarily true. When I order from Amazon I can pick from a small number of days when I want it delivered. I have a hard time believing that if I pick the closest day or the day furthest out that anything is substantially different to the warehouse worker. It only changes the day the system will tell them to collect an item from bin #12345 and will put it in a different shipper queue.
Also, encourages planning (maybe the opposite of impulse).
People complain about the destruction of small and/or local businesses but at the same time order everything online these days. If you're a luddite I guess I'm a fucking cave man, I still can't get over the fact that people get groceries delivered.
It's aligned with our society trajectory though, instant feedback, convenience before anything, no friction, as little human contact as possible, everything as a service, &c. It doesn't matter if the whole system is run by modern day salves or if pollution is literally destroying our planet, we need our goddamn same day delivery toilet paper
People have so much stuff they will rent multiple empty garages just to store shit no one cares about. I'm talking furniture, electronics, household white goods, clothes, all kinds of stuff. Just clutter and hoard.
It honestly, genuinely, blows my mind.
My thought process used to be to never get rid of anything because I might need it one day. My house was filling up with junk.
One can be forward-thinking/innovative/minimalist/environmental/insert-favourite-ideology-here with Great Depression thinking.
For what they ship, it's pretty inefficient. Zola or Crate and Barrel might be worse; You buy people house waring gifts, but every size plate in the set comes in a different super large box with quadruple ultra thick bubble wrap, protecting the box inside.
Fulfilling 2 of an item from a store might trigger a resupply, which takes truck space, which pushes other, higher-margins out of stock or into danger levels, etc.
Which isn't to say that Walmart's system isn't "dumb", but is to say that it's a very complex system, operating in realtime, and what look like dumb outcomes may in fact be optimized (according to whatever internal goals their logistics system has).
You don't need a whole lot of racks to do damage with the density of hardware you can purchase today. Switch is doing something like this with Fedex & Dell right now.
Amazon have won with reliable and dependable next-day shipping, but often the items you get are awful quality. Yet you "have to" order from Amazon because delivery from any other website is usually "8-10 working days" or an extra £8.99 for next-day of £15.99 if tomorrow happens to be Saturday or Sunday etc, or they require a signature and won't leave it so you end up making an hour round trip to go get your parcel from some warehouse somewhere because they refused to deliver etc .. Fuck it just get something from Amazon. Sigh. I want to buy decent quality stuff from other retailers but their shipping is really spoiling it.
A lot of it seems to be management of third party delivery firms. I don't remember ever having to interact with a courier directly with an Amazon order (even for the orders not delivered by Amazon Logistics). It's frustratingly frequent with most other retailers.
For anything I need immediately, I check out Argos, Screwfix or Toolstation. Sometimes I'll walk at lunchtime to the local hardware store if I want to check the item in person against say a rusted piece. But, not everyone has that option.
In general "same day delivery" seems like a solution in search of a problem - if you need something ASAP, it's much more straightforward to just run to the store than to be waiting around for it to be delivered on someone else's schedule. And if you're not near a store, then it's not like a gigworker can magically conjure it either.
Also never mind that half the stuff at Home Depot won't easily fit in the average car. I had a Walmart order for some shelving units that got converted to local delivery. The online status just said "delivered" with a blank picture. I found out later the driver had seen the large boxes, decided it wasn't worth it, and refused the pickup. I finally had to go to the store during their asinine online pickup hours to sort it out.
Compare to say, Tractor Supply Co. which is a chain of pet supply stores in the States. TSC purports to show stock but it’s a complete dice roll on whether the numbers are actually correct or not for any given location. In their case I would prefer them to not show any inventory online at all because of how wrong it is all the time.
I would preface that with "For your particular situation,". There are a lot of situations where it can be very valuable to have something come "today," where you don't necessarily care when today. Notably, a QoS of "today" is a guarantee that you can start using it tomorrow morning. If you actually need it tomorrow, you can save the hour or whatever entailed in a round-trip to the store. Depending on your situation, that hour can be worth a meaningful amount of money. If you're doing a larger project, the time (money) savings could add up fast.
I don't begrudge people who can benefit from gigwork delivery having that option. My problem is with the stores who seem to be running an unsustainable operation (either they're getting supremely awesome freight and packaging rates, or more likely taking a loss on many items that they ship), and choosing to change to a different and less convenient unsustainable operation rather than actually sorting out their inefficiencies (like figuring out how to avoid sending so many boxes with a single item in each).
I fortunately own a truck with a hitch (the Dingo came with its own flatbed trailer) but I could theoretically see it as an option for those who didn’t own one. Though at that price you might as well pay the $300 to $400 or so to have a hitch installed on your car instead provided you own one that could tow the Dingo (which most cars could, it’s pretty light).
My Walmart will deliver groceries and basic electronics (USB cables, SD cards, etc.) together within two hours.
Companies like Home Depot need to find a way to compete for the service level consumers expect if they want to remain in business... not that Walmart is the ideal partner to avoid human suffering.
And if you are paying for Amazon's sunk cost fallacy, that doesn't mean you want to automatically sign up for additional sunk cost fallacies at more stores. Which is eventually what these gigwork delivery options always turn into (eg Target "shipt"), because paying people to perform ad-hoc shopping and delivery isn't cheap either.
My HD curbside (parking lot) pickup experience has so far been pretty good, but I didn't go during the worst of things.
FWIW Home Depot loads in half the time with NoScript only allowing what's essential. Otherwise they seem to be backhauling every single mouse movement, at least the last time I checked.
Have you tried McMaster-Carr?
For home improvement stuff I often order from Zoro and end up looking through manufacturers' catalogs. It's a burden, but awesome in its own way.
I'd love for APIs, especially common APIs, where consumer-agent software could create one cart that would optimize between vendors on price/shipping minimum/etc. But that's not in webstores' interest for the obvious reason of decommodification.
There's a very good use case for this: If I want the item after work. A trip to-and-from the store during rush hour is a decent chunk of time, when I could have the item waiting for me instead.
During the lockdowns in Ontario, Home Depot was drowning in curbside orders. A pickup would take an hour because of the sheer volume of orders.
Similar orders at a less popular Home Hardware location would be available at a moment's notice and waiting by the door within minutes.
My online experience with both is pretty good. Walmart can't quite figure out how to pack anything, and their website's inventory management looks like an excel spreadsheet uploaded by an intern, but it comes on time and usually isn't broken.
This makes me wonder if WM couldn't move tools, so decided to get money in a different way.
TTI probably makes Ryobi and Hart on the same assembly line. 80% of the parts will be the same. They will put a different case on as they come down the line. They might also have other differences inside, like a different set of gears (which match the case so you can't always mix and match). It costs more to support different products on the assembly line, so there are trade offs. It is quite likely that they started with the design for one to make the other.
Note that I don't have any insight into TTI, just that the above is the normal way companies operate.
Although licensed manufacture is a whole 'nother wrinkle. That's why tear-downs are so popular, I guess.
It's the hard drive brand problem in essence.
This may be true for some companies but not for all. For example, TTI owns both Milwaukee and Ryobi. The Ryobi stuff almost always performs at the bottom of any test you see people on youtube doing, and Milwaukee is almost always at the top.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who has given up on a purchase due to frustration like this. If Home Depot can find ways to handle these logistics themselves rather than make the customer do so, they could likely increase conversions. I'm not sure what that would look like - maybe having runners between stores could be part of it? Regardless, if I could just go to one Home Depot and pick up my entire order a day or so after ordering online, that'd be great.
The two options represent two parallel logistics chains, and are quite similar to other brick and mortar stores. Once you know this, it's actually beneficial because you can choose whether to get the items soon by picking up, or choose from a much larger selection that can be shipped (possibly drop shipped). Although as you mention, it would be nice if they had a middleground option that would bring a medium selection to your local store for pickup within a fixed day or two, especially from other local stores.
One thing in particular that has been a major problem is how common shoplifting / shrinkage is at home stores and how you can order items at Lowe's that show 10+ in stock on the website/app for pickup and they'll wait hours before finally cancelling your order, often long enough it's now impossible to order and pickup same day anywhere else. The smaller the item is physically in dimensions, the more likely this is. Home Depot doesn't seem to have this problem, because it seems they do a better job of tracking their inventory (or maybe at loss prevention).
Neither store has anyone working there that knows anything, except maybe one dude who's semi-retired working in the electrical or plumbing sections. That's not usually an issue, but another mark against either store.