How Walmart Is Branching Out into Enterprise Technology
During the global COVID-19 crisis, we have seen enormous boosts to online retail. Companies such as Amazon and Walmart have generated massive volumes of online sales as millions of housebound customers took to the internet to find food, medicine, household goods, and entertainment products to help them ride out the storm.
This accelerated transformation in consumer habits has led to many brands with lower levels of ecommerce maturity scrambling to play catch up with their more technologically advanced peers.
This means there is fertile ground for those retailers with their own proprietary ecommerce technology to make it available to the industry and open up new streams of revenue at the same time.
Ecommerce Technology
One brand which has been engaged in the technology market for a long time is Amazon. In fact, Amazon Web Services is the main profit driving arm of the entire company and is the keystone which allows the ecommerce juggernaut to run in the way it does.
Seeing the incredible business which can be done by rebranding itself as a technology provider, retail titan Walmart is now taking a leaf from Jeff Bezos’s book and making its own proprietary ecommerce technology available to the wider online shopping market.
"We’ve built new capabilities to serve the evolving needs of our own customers, and we have a unique opportunity to use our experience to help other businesses do the same," said Chief Executive Officer of Walmart US, John Furner. "Commercializing our technologies and capabilities helps us sustainably reinvest back into our customer value proposition."
In the second half of 2021, Walmart signed a strategic partnership with computer software powerhouse Adobe to integrate Walmart Marketplace together with online and in-store fulfilment and pickup technologies into the Adobe Commerce Platform.
Walmart has seen tremendous gains in ecommerce thanks to its ability to leverage the power of its nationwide brick-and-mortar store network. Walmart’s stores are able to act as both fulfilment centers and pick up points for online orders – something which Amazon cannot at present offer its customers. Connecting this network together via a single cohesive ecommerce platform took a significant amount of technological innovation on Walmart’s part. However, with the help of Adobe, it is the fruit of this labor that the retail giant is now looking to package and sell as its own ecommerce technology product.
"The core mission of helping people save money and live better is at the heart of every idea including Scan & Go and checkout technologies, AI-powered smart substitutions and pickup and delivery," said Chief Technology Officer and Chief Development Officer of Walmart Inc., Suresh Kumar in a statement. "Combining Adobe’s strength in powering commerce experiences with our unmatched omni-customer expertise, we can accelerate other companies’ digital transformations."
Walmart
These newly available technologies will be made available to both Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source clients and will enable them to access a range of features. These include viewing store opening times, pickup eligibility and available pickup times, and multiple collection options such as curbside or instore. It will also provide store workers with powerful digital tools which will help them pick orders, validate selections and manage substitutions, and communicate with customers.
One part of Walmart’s ecommerce business which has been seriously lagging behind Amazon is its third-party retailer marketplace. The Walmart Marketplace grew to an estimated 70,000 retailers in 2020, representing a massive increase, but still pales in comparison to the 1.5 million active sellers Amazon Marketplace presently hosts.
One reason for this could be that sellers have reported that Walmart Marketplace if far more difficult to use and less intuitive than Amazon’s and Walmart is failing to support them – such as having to wait weeks or even months to get approval to sell on the platform.
By leveraging Adobe’s considerable computer software experience, Walmart has the potential to iron out the creases in its marketplace operation and create an improved platform which has every chance of competing with Amazon’s.
"During the last several years, Walmart has built a world class organization that has developed its own technologies and services to meet the rapidly evolving needs of customers at scale," said Walmart in a press release. "These unique capabilities enable Walmart to better serve customers, create differentiated experiences and grow its business as digital shopping continues to increase."
Adobe’s retail customers in the US will be able to integrate Walmart’s technologies in their own storefronts starting in early 2022 with pricing and other details to be confirmed closer to the official launch.
Final Thoughts
We are seeing an increasing number of retailers and other companies venturing into the world of enterprise technology provision. It makes perfect sense that those brands with the resources to develop their own proprietary ecommerce technology would want to pass those advances onto the next generation of retailers.
Advanced ecommerce technology is set to be a hot topic at eTail Connect 2022, taking place May 4-6 at the Westin Fort-Lauderdale Beach Resort, FL.
Download the agenda today for more information and insights.