Walmart’s Big (And Personal) eCommerce Push

Walmart.com is embracing the three key E-Commerce shuns–customizations, localizations and mobilizations—as it tries to push it’s strongest advantage against Amazon: more than 11,000 physical stores staffed by some 2.2 million associates. Given that it is an advantage that Amazon can’t touch, why not flex those muscles?

The difference here is that quite a few E-Commerce sites of major physical chains are content to make direct sales, with the only handoff to brick-and-mortar is perhaps a store locator. Costco.com goes so far as to have as little overlap between the site and the physical stores as possible, so that someone wanting to check inventory at a store before visiting is out of luck.

No, Bentonville is paying homage to Olivia Newton-Jon and has transformed the site to get physical. For example, one feature is called “My Local Store” and it’s an interactive function “to explore the features of their nearby Walmart stores, including a list of the latest Rollbacks” plus in-store coupons, according to a blog post published Monday (Aug. 4) by Ben Galbraith, Global Products VP at Walmart Global E-Commerce.

Bentonville has made the wise calculation that it can make more money by the site encouraging people to shop in its stores than for it to directly sell what it can.

That’s their localization effort. As for customization, Walmart is continuing its tradition of pushing CRM as far as it can go.

“This updated Walmart.com now tailors itself much more to our individual customers, personalizing much more of the content than ever before based on many aspects of a customer’s history with us,” Galbraith wrote. “We’ve also increased the quality and frequency of the personalized item recommendations we make throughout the site. These recommendations may be based on a customer’s past searches or purchases on the site, but we can also suggest items that other customers typically buy along with the item a customer is shopping. We’re able to deliver much more relevant suggestions because we are now able to draw from the massive trove of data from both online and store purchases.”

It’s important to remember that Walmart is one of the few of the largest retail chains that has never used CRM in-store. That’s changing with mobile, as it gives a fresh chance to track customers—and to profile based on every product they purchase through mobile, as well as every product they have even thought about buying, assuming the shopper scanned that product for more information—both online and instore.

That brings us to mobilization. “We’ve revised the site from the ground up with a simple, bold, and modern design that sings on any form factor, be it a tablet, a laptop, or a big desktop display,” Galbraith posted. “We started our new design from the baseline of small tablets, optimizing it for that form factor, and then carefully considered how each area of the site could adapt itself to take advantage of larger screens with different input mechanisms—i.e., fingers versus mice—when available.

For some, the cost of operating thousands of stores is an albatross weighing down the neck of the chain’s CFO. But if leveraged properly, it can give a retailer an advantage that Amazon can never match.