walmart+ Assist 🤠

(Walmart+ program dedicated to users who are currently receiving government assistance qualifying them for 50% off of a Walmart+ full-price membership)

 CLIENT: Walmart+ (Walmart+ as a program launched September 2020 out of response to Covid-19 pandemic)

90% of U.S. population lives within 10 miles of a Walmart

438 million shoppers visit walmart.com in an avg. month

59 million subscribers to walmart+ (as of 2024, launched in 2020)

1.25 million subscribers to walmart+ Assist (as of feb 2025)

PROJECT: Walmart+ Assist

  • Walmart+ Assist is the Walmart+ program dedicated to users who are currently receiving government assistance qualifying them for 50% off of a Walmart+ full-price membership.

  • Walmart+ Full-price Memberships: $12.95/mo & $98/yr, Walmart+ Assist Memberships: $6.47/mo & $49/yr

PRESS RELEASES: Tech Crunch Article, Market Watch

MY ROLE: Product Designer on the Acquisition Pod for Walmart+

  • Designing all flows & touchpoints for Walmart+ Assist launch & any further enhancements

PARTNERS: (30+ people were involved with this launch as it was the second biggest launch aside from the original launching of Walmart+ in 2020)
UX Manager, other Product Designers, Content Designers, Product Managers, Business & Marketing Partners, UX Researchers & Engineers

  • UX Manager: Sanket Magarkar, Justin Hattingh

  • Product Managers: Sudarshan Balachandran, Bhrugi Badheka, Rajve Shah

  • Content Designer: Thy Nguyen, Erin Erb

  • Engineering: Suresh Gopalakrishnan, SoChi Chen & so many other great people

  • Business & Marketing Partners: Inna Zilber, Ashley Guge, Jake Sheetz, Mike Zabar

  • UX Research: Malia Zoghlin, Kari Hampson

  • Analytics: Banani Mohapatra, Anurag Mallem

DATE: Worked on April 2023 - July 2023, Launched in July 2023. Improvements are still being made constantly.

CHALLENGE: Walmart+ wanted to offer membership at a discounted price to specific customer groups including users currently receiving government assistance (Walmart+ Assist) & to students (Walmart+ Student).

METRICS & LEARNINGS:

  • SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) is the largest group of people within a US Government Assistance program (there are 8 different Government Assistance programs w/in the US). SNAP reduces poverty and food insecurity while stimulating economic growth.

  • 42M+ Americans recieve SNAP funds every month in the US. (2024) (US Population is 342M people so 12.5% of US population receive SNAP funds)

  • 65% of SNAP participants have no access to reliable transportation. Free shipping & delivery is a huge benefit to these users.
    Walmart+ Full-price Memberships: $12.95/mo & $98/yr, Walmart+ Assist Memberships: $6.47/mo & $49/yr

  • Since launching in July 2023 (now May 2024), Walmart+ Assist has an active user base of over 400,000


phase 1- Walmart+ assist launch july 2023

Phase 1 included the first time ever launch of the Walmart+ Assist program aimed at giving a 50% off discount to the full-price Walmart+ membership. We launched banners on the Homepage and Item pages. We also added a widget to advertise Walmart+ Assist on our regular full-price Walmart+ marketing landing page. Lastly, we created a marketing landing page dedicated to Walmart+ Assist. All placements including the landing pages had personalization depending on the type of user - Never members, Churned/Expired Members and current paid full-price Walmart+ members who could now switch to Walmart+ Assist if eligible. All were built for mobile web, desktop web and native app.

1 week into launch, we had over 6,000 successful user interactions with 2k+ reactivations 1k+ new member signups.


phase 2 - new targeted splash pages launch september 2023

Phase 2 included two new splash pages dedicated to the Walmart+ Assist program and targeted to New Members & Expired/Churned Members. We targeted users who had an online Walmart account and an active EBT card on file which indicated the user is likely on a Government Assistance program. Note: New members get a 30-day free trial. Churned/Expired members (members who have already used their 30-day free trial once before) will not get a second free trial.

These splash pages performed with a 90% lift in reactivation & 45% lift in trials.

phase 3 - Sheer id hybrid solution launch april 2024

Phase 3 included bringing the Sheer ID verification in house on Walmart platform on the front end for continuity. Back end verification still happens on Sheer ID platform, but user can now stay within Walmart site & app to get verified for Walmart+ Assist (& Walmart+ Student). A user will only have to leave the Walmart platform if extra documentation is needing to be uploaded to Sheer ID for verification. Eventually we will try to bring this in house too. Any info we have on the user is auto populated here now as well leaving less work for the user to do. (Auto-populated fields include: First name, Last name, Date of birth, Street address, City, State, Zip code & Email address.)

This project resulted in a 15% increase in verification completion. Before launching the “Sheer ID Hybrid Solution”, user drop off was at 21% when asked to go through verification process. Drop-off rate is now just 6%.

before phase 3 - Sheer id hybrid solution for reference


phase 4 - assist on integrated signup launch july 2024

Phase 4 included bringing Walmart+ into our integrated sign up flows within book-slot short cut banners & in-cart banners. This will be target to Never Members & Churned/Expired Members (not yet current Walmart+ members to switch to Walmart+ Assist). We also introduced a new functionality where we will not be asking users to go through any kind of verification (Sheer ID nor Sheer ID Hybrid Verification) to be verified for Walmart+ Assist. We are using 1P data instead to target users who have an active EBT card on file that has been used in the past 30 days. Users will be auto-verified and will only be shown Walmart+ Assist messaging & pricing at 50% off the full-price Walmart+ memberships. This will be a huge win for Walmart+ Assist as

Next update: Expand the targeting of all Assist placements to current full-price Walmart+ members to nudge them to switch to Walmart+ Assist at 50% ooff. We still currently have 1.6M current Walmart+ members who are paying for a full-price membership when they are eligible for Walmart+ Assist at half the price. (6-7k users per month are full-price paying members yet eligible for Assist.)

We launched at only 25% in July 2024 and ramped to 100% in September 2024. The July 2024 launch at 25% resulted in 14.7% lift in Never Member signups and a 9% lift in Churned Member reactivations with just 16 days of data. The September 2024 launch at 100% resulted in Walmart+ Assist trials to increase by 91% and Reactivations to increase by 35% (reactivations meaning user was once a full-price Walmart+ member and have now reactivated as a Walmart+ Assist member at 50% off full-price membership) compared to July 2024.

We now have a user base of 1.25 million Walmart+ Assist members. Before launching Assist on Integrated sign up, we were at about 400K Walmart+ Assist members.