Walmart launches voice shopping for grocery on Apple

Dive Brief:

Walmart launched a Siri shortcut for online grocery in partnership with Apple on Tuesday, according to a company blog post. The shortcut allows customers to add products to their Walmart grocery cart by talking to Siri.
To pair their Apple accounts, customers can open the Walmart Grocery app and click "voice shopping." From there, they say "Add to Walmart" and list off the items they want Siri to add to their carts.
The function is available with Apple devices including the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, HomePod or in the car with CarPlay. With this introduction, Walmart Voice Order now works across leading voice assistants, the company said.

Dive Insight:

With the Siri shortcut, Walmart broadens the reach of its online shopping, expanding the Voice Order customer base to Apple users. When Voice Order first launched, it was only available on Google devices.

In the blog, Walmart states that voice ordering will get more personalized the more customers use it by being able to accurately identify product requests quicker due to the purchase history. For example, customers won't have to say "Great Value orange juice with no pulp" but just "orange juice," and the app will add the item the customer usually purchases.

Apple devices are popular in the U.S., with 64% of Americans owning an Apple product in 2017, according to CNBC's All-America Economic Survey. There are currently 100 million iPhone users in the country accounting for 45% of all smartphones in the U.S., according to Statista. Investing in Google first for Voice Order was still a strategic move for Walmart, as it is the fastest-growing smartphone brand in the U.S., according to research firm Strategy Analytics.

Voice shopping is still in its infancy and it hasn't picked up much traction with customers yet. In a presentation last year, Matt Kelleher, managing director with U.K. grocer Morrisons, said 1% of its shoppers are now using its Alexa-enabled voice-ordering service, which launched in 2017. Carolina Milanesi, a consumer tech analyst at Creative Strategies, told Grocery Dive customers still find it faster to sit at a computer and do it.