Last year, Walmart Labs jumped on the subscription commerce bandwagon in an effort to compete with a whole range of startups offering monthly boxes of goodies to customers with a new service called Goodies.co. But the service, which has spent year or so in beta, will be shut down over the next few weeks.
To recap, Goodies.co was one of several projects that Walmart Labs has developed since launching as the Silicon Valley-based innovation arm of the brick-and-mortar retailer. The idea is to see what works, what doesn’t, and hopefully apply some of those learnings to the larger Walmart business.
With Goodies.co, that meant developing its own subscription commerce business. With the growth of Birchbox and services like it, there was a bit of a rush among e-commerce companies to begin offering various other types of products — including everything from snacks to underwear — on a monthly, recurring basis.
Goodies.co promised a box of six-to-eight snack samples for just $7 each month. At launch, there were already a number of similar products out on the market, including Love With Food and Sprigbox, but the Walmart Labs service severely undercut most of them on price.
It appears that plan hasn’t quite worked out: We’ve heard that Goodies.co will soon send email to subscribers –perhaps as soon as next week — that it will discontinue its monthly deliveries. A company representative confirmed the shutdown to us by email, but also said that learnings from Goodies.co will be applied to other products:
Yes, we are making changes to the program, and we’re always testing new ideas and concepts. Many graduate in their initial form like Polaris and Get on the Shelf, while some end up being applied in other forms. We are letting Goodies customers know we will discontinue shipping boxes, but the technology and learnings from Goodies have enabled several new products we are incorporating into our mainline Walmart.com business. More details will be shared in the coming months.
