More than half of the sales from Walmart.com are now picked up at Walmart stores, Mr. Anderson said.
Walmart says the majority of in-store purchases are made with cash or debit cards, and that about 15 percent are made with credit cards.
Walmart noticed that a different set of customers also found the service appealing. About 40 percent of the customers who paid with cash when ordering online ended up using noncash options, like a credit card or check, when they arrived at the store. They simply had not wanted to provide that financial information online.
The service already accounts for 2 percent of Walmart.com’s sales.
Sears, which has long offered store pickup for items bought on the Web, added a drive-through service a few months ago that allows customers to return or exchange purchases without leaving their cars.
He said that the online orders for in-store pickup also tended to be much larger than typical in-store purchases, and that customers who picked up orders in the store visited about 50 percent more often than customers who shopped only in the stores.
That follows the company’s decision three years ago to combine its online and offline inventories, so that if nordstrom.com was sold out of a size 8 Nicole Miller shift but a store in Los Angeles had the item in stock, the store would ship the item to the e-commerce customer.
further toward the “showroom” model — carrying lots of products for shoppers to see and test, but asking customers to buy the merchandise via the stores’ Web sites or apps.
“You will definitely start to see online-only players open stores,” she said.