Fast Five Shorts | Would You Advise Costco To Rollout Mobile Inventory Search?

 Costco reportedly is exploring mobile inventory search. According to chain store age, Costco is beta testing a new tool on its mobile app that lets customers click a quote warehouse button located between the account and cart buttons at the bottom of the app to bring up a search bar. The search bar then enables customers to enter the names and or descriptions of items they plan to buy to see if they're in stock at a selected store.

And would you recommend that Costco roll out mobile search functionality to all its users chain wide? I'm really conflicted on this, Chris, because I did try it last night. Cause it's, yeah, it works in our region. Um, and it's really sweet because I, I shared it with my husband, who's my personal Costco shopper and his biggest complaint in mine is when, you know, I give him the list, I put it together and we have a lot of repeat purchases and when he comes home and he's like, They were out of it or they don't have it anymore this week.

Like they just stopped carrying it all of a sudden. And so like, for example, our liquid IV hydration packets, like there's a specific kind, we get it every week and the last two weeks. He's very familiar. You put those in your water, every plane trip. I do. I like to stay hydrated. Um, but you know, if he, he can check now and he's going today and we were able to see like this morning, yes, they have those, you can pick them up and that's driving him to go to Costco now because he knows that that product is there and I'm sure he's going to pick up a million other things that we didn't need while he was there.

So I think that experience makes this great and will be really good for the consumer. However, I mean. I think this is still an issue that we're seeing at a lot of retailers where, you know, consumers are coming in and they can sometimes have a better picture of inventory or they in one app, you know, they're able to see, yes, I have something.

And if you can't pay that off, if you haven't invested in the, like, Infrastructure for your store associates to have the same view as your customer has, or for, you know, that data to be accurate. I think this could be a big challenge and could end up disappointing a lot of consumers if, if they can't like get it all talking to each other.

So I'm kind of in the middle of this, but where, where do you fall? Like, so you can't be in the middle, you can't be in the middle of this one. I'm going to push you, which way you can't, you can't decide. You're just, you're like Switzerland on this. You. So net net, did you like the experience or not? Do you think it's a traffic driver to Costco?

I think it can be if they have all their ducks in a row. And that's what worries me about it is that I think it's very hard to have this data, like incredibly accurate and up to the minute. This is interesting because, um, I think, I don't think I would recommend that Costco should do this. Okay. Um, and I think there's two reasons and the first one is less important than the second one.

But the first one is that I think this is really hard to do well. Um, I got in a debate with Mike Hogan Miller on LinkedIn last, this over the weekend about this because, um, you know, depending on how many, You know, Costco moves through a ton of units with a ton of people, especially on a weekend. So depending how many people are in Costco, um, you know, you've got to have great accuracy on your items because you might have, you might have all your items sitting in people's carts as they're all waiting in line to check out.

And your inventory system thinks, thinks those items are in the store. You know, I'm at home. I'm going to plan my Costco trip three hours from now. I looked, you said it was there and it's not. And I go to store and it's not there. So now there's ways mathematically to. Mitigate that risk, so to speak. So I think you could potentially figure that out.

But the second point that I think is even more concerning to me is something that you. You kind of alluded to this, which in terms of how your husband shops, Costco, your husband and most Costco shoppers love Costco, right? You and I, you and I don't like shopping there, but the people that like Costco love going there and they're still going to go there.

Right. And so I feel like the risk here is that if, if I'm a Costco shopper and I go online and I see that something I want is not there. Yeah. Then I'm not going to make the trip. I'm you're introducing a reason for me not to make the trip. And so, you know, I think at the end of the day, Costco is a different beast than other retailers.

And so my big takeaway, you know, is that their omni channel answers, the omni channel answers for Costco may be different from others. So like this is a. Really that lots of retailers have, but I don't know that Costco needs it. Or said another way, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it is kind of what I'm saying here.

I think that you made some really great points and I don't disagree with you because I do think like in the case of my hydration packets, like then I have to go pick them up, then we're completely aborting that mission. Like we're going to somewhere else. Cause that's something that I have to get. Um, I, we will still go to Costco for some other things.

Like there, you know, there's. There's other components to that. I think you're right. Like people will still shop Costco, but you're right. I don't know that it's going to, I think there's still a delay your trip to Costco though. Right. And so then over a course of a year, you might have less trips to Costco.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think in the end you just, you really have to make sure that you can pay that off and your point about how many people have stuff in their cart, especially during like high traffic times, I'm thinking like before the holidays or something like where there's like people, you know, a hundred people waiting in line and You know, you want to get that same, everybody's going to get, you know, the wrapping paper, the, you know, that big gift for the holidays or something.

I think that could, that could pose some challenges. So we'll see. We'll see what it's just a beta test. Two by fours at home Depot. Don't move to the same degree that the hot buy at a Costco on a weekend. That's basically what I'm saying, you know, and so it's harder to understand.