Walmart will now let you ‘Shop with Friends’ from home

Walmart shoppers can now get advice from friends on new clothes they’re considering without ever setting foot in the store or even trying anything on.

A new website feature called Shop with Friends, currently in beta, lets users choose from a set of models to find one that looks like them, then assemble a virtual fitting room of outfits they’re potentially interested in. Then, they can see how the outfits look on their chosen model and generate a link to their fitting room to share by text, email, or social media, letting friends weigh in on which outfits to get.

Once they’ve assembled their virtual fitting rooms, they can share the link through any messaging or social tool they choose. If they’re on a desktop or laptop, the Walmart website will generate a QR code they can scan, making it easier to share through whatever apps they have on their phone. Friends who get access to the link can provide their name and virtually like as many of the outfits in the virtual fitting room as they wish for their shopping buddy to see. Users deliberately don’t need to install any Walmart apps to create fitting rooms, and they don’t need to create a Walmart account in order to vote.

“It’s that way on purpose,” says Todd Goodyear, software engineering director at Walmart. “We want them to discover and explore Walmart without having to do that.”

In order to keep the experience feeling positive, users also can only upvote outfits—there’s no way to give negative votes or more detailed comments, though users could of course text their friends separately about particular outfits. Future versions might have more feedback options, but the company wants to make sure it can avoid negative trolling, especially since users may share their fitting rooms with large audiences on social media.

Goodyear says the idea for Shop with Friends came from a company leader who saw their own daughter shopping in a brick-and-mortar store, taking photos of herself in outfits to send to friends for advice. 

“They’d get this real-time, back-and-forth feedback,” he says.

The company’s goal was to replicate that with an online experience, and so far, Shop with Friends is available with fall fashions from Walmart’s house brand Scoop. And if the beta continues to go well, it’s likely to expand to a wider range of clothes, including menswear.

Goodyear envisions the new feature could be integrated with Walmart’s existing Be Your Own Model tool, which lets people see how clothes look on their own bodies; the company is also already considering how Shop with Friends could work with other types of products, from furniture to eyeglasses. And as consumers receive feedback requests from friends, they’ll be more likely to try the feature themselves, bringing still more users to see what Walmart has to offer in different categories and making them aware of the retailer’s sometimes-overlooked tech prowess.

Already, Walmart offers virtual try-ons for glasses and an augmented reality view-in-your-home feature for furniture, so it’s not too much of a stretch to see the store making those features easily shareable. But, as with the Be Your Own Model feature, sharable views of a customer’s face or home might require more privacy safeguards than the existing Shop with Friends, which highlights clothing on a professional model.

“We’re looking at making sure we do it in a very conscientious way,” Goodyear says of Shop with Friends.

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