Walmart Connect Launches Program to Boost Social Commerce

Aiming to innovate new ways for suppliers and sellers to connect with customers, Walmart Connect has announced an Innovation Partner program that will help advertisers access channels such as social feeds, entertainment, t-commerce and live streaming during the holiday season.

The Innovation Partners in this program are TikTok, Snap, Firework, TalkShopLive and Roku, Walmart said Tuesday (Sept. 20) in a press release.

“The newly expanded offering includes additional touchpoints and channels to reach customers wherever they are with new ad formats,” Walmart U.S. Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer Seth Dallaire said in the release. “Together, we will work with each partner to more deeply connect advertisers with customers throughout key moments in the shopper journey in order to provide the best solutions for advertisers.”

Program partnerships will also provide “test and learn” opportunities across various channels, according to the release.

Among the offerings that are enabled by these partnerships are in-feed ads on TikTok, as well as Snap ad units that can be bought through Walmart Connect to reach the Snapchat audience. Shoppable livestreams and videos will be available on Walmart.com/live via the Firework partnership and across the web via the TalkShopLive partnership. Additionally, t-commerce shopping via streaming will be available through Roku.

“Our partnerships further underscore how Walmart Connect is committed to evolving our business and expanding our offerings to actively stay ahead of what advertisers need,” Dallaire said. “There is no other platform that can extend to new formats where customers are engaging and interacting, and leverage Walmart’s unparalleled first party omnichannel data to deliver measurable sales performance.”

The Innovation Partner program announcement comes days after Walmart said it was making changes to help sellers connect with shoppers.

Read more: Walmart, Amazon Escalate Fight to Win Buyers and Sellers

Among those changes are a “Search Brand Amplifier” that displays advertised products at the top of search results, a swifter onboarding process at the Walmart Ad Center, additional application programming interfaces (APIs) to serve international sellers and new resources for optimizing sponsored search campaigns.

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