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WOONSOCKET, R.I. — Shopping just got a little easier for CVS Health customers.
Last month, the company announced its partnership with Curbside — a company perfecting the store pickup experience for retailers and consumers — in order to launch CVS Express, a digital solution offering consumers a new level of seamless convenience.
CVS Health is also investing in Curbside, demonstrating the company’s commitment to driving further innovations that will help customers save time and money while pursuing a healthier lifestyle.
“Retail pharmacy is an exciting, competitive landscape that is ripe for digital innovation,” said Helena Foulkes, executive vice president of CVS Health and president of CVS Pharmacy. “This partnership with Curbside allows CVS Health to offer new and more convenient ways for our customers to shop with us, ultimately making it easier for them to enjoy a healthy lifestyle in a way that works best for them.”
Curbside cofounder and chief executive officer Jaron Waldman added: “We founded Curbside to help make shopping at neighborhood stores faster and easier than ever before. Our proprietary location technology ensures seamless, reliable order handoff at the moment a customer arrives, and our console app powers an efficient pick and pack operation for CVS Pharmacy colleagues to prepare orders in the store. In partnership with CVS Health we’ve created a fast, convenient new shopping experience that busy CVS Pharmacy customers are going to love.”
CVS Express is the industry’s first retail solution that integrates Curbside’s market-leading technology right into the CVS Pharmacy app. With CVS Express, customers can make mobile, in-app purchases from their local CVS Pharmacy and have those products delivered directly to them when they pull up to the store, all in about one hour with no markups or added costs for convenience.
Created in less than three months in the CVS Digital Innovation Lab in partnership with Curbside, CVS Express embodies the digital mission of CVS Health to make healthy lifestyles more accessible and convenient for customers nationwide.
“We believe digital tools are the key to making health care convenient, personal and affordable for our customers, and CVS Express is a perfect embodiment of our digital mission,” said Brian Tilzer, senior vice president and chief digital officer, CVS Health. “By working closely with our retail team and partnering with Curbside, who brought industry-leading technology to our platform, we rapidly developed a seamless and simple solution that creates a significant time savings for customers. We are committed to redefining convenience, and this will be one of many steps on that journey.”
CVS Health will continue to redefine retail convenience during 2016 and beyond with an investment in Curbside as it develops the latest technology to evolve the retail shopping experience.
CVS Express is currently available in San Francisco; Charlotte, N.C.; and Atlanta, and it will begin rolling out to additional CVS Pharmacy locations later this year. It is applicable to all front-store and over-the-counter items, with no added cost to the customer for utilizing the service.
And the partnership, according to Scott Mushkin of Wolfe Research, could enhance CVS Pharmacy’s front-end business by picking up some purchases that may be migrating to online retailers, which could prove appealing to the primary drug store shopper — women, many of whom are embracing the convenience of buying O-T-Cs and other front-end items online.
“According to our latest report on food shopping patterns, women appear less inclined to purchase everyday essentials from mass merchants and drug stores,” Mushkin explained in a research note. “These purchases appear to be gravitating online, as online retailers gained the most share in our survey this year relative to last year. This could, in part, explain the lower front-end traffic trends as more of these sales move online.”
Sales growth for consumer packaged goods has been lackluster across retail trade classes, making the burgeoning online channel even more important.
