Toronto transit shelters become virtual Walmarts

Retailer, Procter & Gamble use shelters to bring suburban retailer into the heart of the city.

By: Morgan Campbell Business

Walmart had a problem.

The discount retailer has more than 370 Canadian locations, most in big buildings that occupy the kind of acreage only the suburbs can provide. Reaching urban shoppers has remained a challenge.

To solve this problem, Walmart teamed with Procter & Gamble to convert 50 Toronto Transit Commission bus shelters into virtual Walmart stores.

This week, the shelters were fitted with posters featuring QR codes for Procter & Gamble products. Scanning the codes with their smartphones, riders are taken to a Walmart web page that allows them to buy the product and have it delivered for free.

The virtual stores required no special arrangement with the TTC — Procter & Gamble spokesperson Victoria Maybee says the posters were part of a standard media purchase.

She says the campaign, which will last for four weeks, is focused on bringing Walmart to a group of consumers who wouldn’t normally shop there.

“This is a great way to approach high-density areas that have a high concentration of e-commerce customers,” said Simon Rodrigue, Walmart Canada’s vice president of e-commerce. “It allows us to very quickly target them.”

Rodrigue points out that Walmart’s online shopping program is less than two years old, and that virtual stores help drive users to Walmart’s e-commerce site. He says that in the three days since the bus shelter stores launched, traffic to Walmart.ca from downtown Toronto has increased measurably.

The shelters are located in areas of heavy transit use — the downtown core, King St. W, and uptown — and feature anywhere from two to six products.

One set of shelters peddles baby products, while a second sells beauty goods and a third showcases winners of Canadian Living magazine’s Best New Products awards.

While this campaign marks the first time Walmart and Procter & Gamble have collaborated on virtual stores in Canadian transit shelters, both companies ran virtual stores last year. Procter & Gamble set up in Union Station, while Walmart and Mattel ran a virtual toy store in the PATH.

Last year, New Zealand-based grocery story chain Countdown enabled mobile-phone shopping at bus shelters in cities like Auckland and Wellington.

Before that, Korean retailer Tesco Homeplus turned entire subway stations in Seoul into virtual stores.