Rollback: A strategy to help Canadians save money

Walmart Canada’s ability to deliver unbeatable prices is based on a simple but powerful price-value retail strategy, which includes Rollback pricing on literally thousands of items in our stores.

In 2011, Walmart actually doubled the number of items on Rollback. We started early in January with a month-long Rollback event which featured over 9,000 items and saved our customers over $30 million dollars.

Behind Walmart’s Price-Value Strategy

Our retail price-value strategy is based on the core principle of Every Day Low Price or EDLP. It’s an effective way to build trust and loyalty with customers by providing stable, consistent prices. And the EDLP strategy creates operational efficiencies for Walmart, which allows us to reinvest those efficiencies back into the price.

The second part of our strategy is the Rollback on prices – which customers view and appreciate as a key Walmart equity. The Rollback lets customers know that we have negotiated a lower cost with specific vendors and are passing the savings on to them.

The Rollback works to support the EDLP strategy because we maintain the lower price over a long period, for 90 days on most items. The length of this period is highly beneficial to our customers because it allows them to buy when they need, not just because of a short-term sale price. Many items actually end up staying down to become new “Low Prices Every Day”.

As we are constantly negotiating with vendors, there are thousands of items on Rollback every day, which we also combine in multi displays to tie in different products. And since all the items are merchandised over a longer period, the lower costs of labour saves us money on the changes in price.

Unbeatable pricing policies

We also have an everyday pricing program in place. Walmart conducts a third party price audit to ensure our Prices are Unbeatable Every Day. We check 2,500 items found in the weekly shopping basket each week compared to 26 competitors.

We also make good on our commitment to offer “Unbeatable Prices” with our Ad Match Guarantee. Knowing that we will match the advertised price of any local competitor’s printed ad gives our customers the confidence that they are indeed getting the best price possible.