Walmart Overhauls eCommerce Site, Adds More Personalization

Walmart, continuing to take on Amazon in the world of eCommerce, unveiled its overhauled Walmart.com website, which Marc Lore, president and chief executive of Walmart U.S. eCommerce, said was a “cleaner” and a “more modern digital shopping experience” for customers in a blog post.

According to the executive, the updated Walmart.com will begin to be rolled out in May and will include a new look and feel. It will feature photography that shows off real-life moments, while “beauty and design” have been incorporated throughout the website. “Our goal is to make it compelling for customers to shop for whatever they are looking for — whether diapers, laundry detergent or a new dining room table. We’re also expanding our color palette and adding fonts to bring more vibrancy and depth to the site,” wrote the executive. In addition to redesigning the site to be more aesthetically appealing, Lore said the changes to Walmart.com are enabling it to add more local and personalized elements, with most of the homepage personalized in some manner. For instance, Lore said Walmart will launch a new section that shows top selling items based on a customer’s location and will also feature the customer’s local store profile — including if Online Grocery, order status and Easy Reorder are available.

“We are beginning to introduce specialty shopping experiences. We know customers shop differently depending on what they are purchasing. Customers shopping for groceries and household essentials want to quickly re-buy what they always purchase, while those looking for a new couch want to be inspired while browsing the different options,” wrote Lore. “We’ve already launched a home specialty experience and, over the coming weeks, we will begin to introduce our new destination for fashion, which will feature relevant, bold imagery and seasonal stories. The Lord & Taylor flagship store we announced late last year will be a part of this new fashion destination. We want each category to feel like you are shopping a specialty store, and we plan to build out these specialty experiences for other categories starting later this year.”

Lore noted that customers, current, and prospective brands weighed in on how the website should look, and the retailer took that into account when developing it. He said the changes will also make it easier for brands to tell their stores on Walmart.com. “Introducing the new Walmart.com is an important step as we continue to build the customer shopping experience. Today’s announcement is just the beginning. There’s more to come,” the executive wrote in the blog post.