“Walmart’s key priority is to win in e-commerce”

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A new motto of ‘Anytime, Anywhere’ is driving the world’s largest retail chain. Walmart, famous for its brick-and-mortar stores is striving to catch up with its online competitors. Jeremy King, Senior Vice President & CTO of Global e-Commerce, Walmart.com, talked to Payal Pruthi about how the mega retailer was throwing its weight behind e-commerce

Industry experts say that Walmart’s increased focus on e-commerce is largely because it was losing out to Amazon in the same space. Is that the case?
Mike Duke, our CEO, has publicly stated that Walmart’s key priority is to “win in e-commerce.” Today, we are witnessing a transformation in the way that people shop largely due to the proliferation of mobile and social networks. We find that even the people who are walking into our stores carry digital shopping devices and that is changing a lot of things. It is driving a fundamental change in customer shopping behavior. Increasingly, customers expect retailers to offer a seamless shopping experience across physical stores, online and mobile devices or, to put it another way, ‘anytime, anywhere’ access. With our global scale combined with our commitment to innovative technology, we are well positioned to succeed in the next-generation of e-commerce.

You were quoted as saying, “Amazon is a very big competitor. My biggest issue is playing a catch-up game.” How much does Walmart need to scale up?
Walmart is the largest consumer company in the world. We believe that the retailer that will win in the future will connect brick and mortar, e-commerce, mobile and social networks in a seamless way that makes it easy for customers to shop when, where and how they want. Walmart had several e-commerce sites worldwide; our goal is to build a single, integrated digital platform. The existing sites were developed separately. Walmart needs a next-generation platform designed to connect all of the pieces—social networks, mobile and retail stores, bringing together research, product information, analytics, big data, shopping, inventories etc.

How does Walmart intend to increase its online sales? Which new technologies and online infrastructure are being brought in?
We are focused on building new technologies to increase traffic to our stores and online properties. Early examples of these efforts include Shopycat, a social gifting product that we launched last year. It can scan the social media preferences of a customer’s Facebook friends and recommend gift ideas that are sold on Walmart.com. New iPad and iPhone applications have also been introduced to make shopping easier and more efficient. We recently introduced a ‘Get on the Shelf’ contest wherein anyone can participate and get a chance to get their product sold on Walmart.com and even in our stores. We continue to be focused on providing low prices on a broad assortment of merchandise and believe that our new technology moves will continue to help these efforts.

In what ways is the Indian team contributing to building up online sales at Walmart?
We opened @WalmartLabs in India in November 2011 and have hired people in the areas of high-scale computing, network infrastructure and big data. We will be adding another hundred people to the operations to focus on the next generation, integrated e-commerce Web site. The development of the site is in its initial stage and we clearly intend to involve the Indian team in its core development. We see India contributing to our technology innovation in a significant way.

How evolved is the e-commerce space in India?
There are many exciting developments and innovations happening within Indian e-commerce and a lot of passionate young entrepreneurs are creating new business models. We are excited by what we see and look forward to continue to watch the landscape evolve. I spent many years at eBay where we saw rapid changes in the technology landscape for e-commerce 1.0. Today, we are at e-commerce 2.0 and the changes are coming faster and are more transformational than before. The advent of social and mobile networks and the over one billion people that are on the Internet today are resulting in fundamental changes to the way that shoppers discover, research and purchase items. When you combine the Internet, mobile and social networks with retail, you have the next-generation of commerce and that is where we are focused.

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