How Walmart Is Testing Immersive Commerce

Walmart is betting that immersive digital experiences can do more than generate buzz. It is using gamified environments and shoppable entertainment to drive revenue growth and pull consumers deeper into its digital ecosystem, Justin Breton, Walmart’s head of brand partnerships and emerging experiences, said at the National Retail Federation (NRF) 2026 Big Show.“As a consumer, you’re seeing trends everywhere, and Walmart Realm is a way to showcase those trends,” Breton said of the initiative, which launched in 2025 and builds on earlier experimentation in gaming environments. Walmart first began testing how customers interacted with brands in virtual worlds in 2022.“We started by testing in gaming,” he said. “Now we’re on platforms where people are engaging with each other in completely new ways. We found early pilots on Roblox were particularly instructive. Those environments were familiar to customers, and we took inspiration from them. We took that thinking and imagined what Walmart Realm could be.”Rather than building in isolation, Walmart partnered with creators and cultural figures already shaping those spaces.“We started with insights from our own community and from Emperia and then brought in the names and faces that are operating in this area,” Breton said, noting Walmart’s goal of relevance rather than novelty. The retailer later launched experiences on Minecraft — following earlier pilots on Roblox — working closely with the game’s creator community to ensure the integrations felt native rather than branded overlays.“It had to feel on par with the game and on par with the retailer,” he said. “If it doesn’t feel relevant, it doesn’t work.”Breton also pointed to Walmart Skyward, a Realm concept that was revised after user input. “We had ideas and took them to the community, and they told us, ‘No, you shouldn’t do that,’” he recalled. “We set out a very clear learning agenda from the original rollout. This was not a one-and-done. It’s a strategic investment. We’ve learned that certain categories work better than others, and how they need to be displayed to drive sales.”The bigger prize, however, is shifting perceptions of Walmart’s digital offer and not just having customers think about the store. Breton said that data shows that people who use Walmart Realm are more likely to shop Walmart digitally.Realm is also helping Walmart surface parts of its assortment that customers may not associate with the brand and showcase products that customers did not know Walmart sold, discovering new brands.That philosophy extends to Walmart Live, the retailer’s shoppable livestreaming business. “It’s about inviting people in,” Breton said. “Shoppable streams, distributed across an ecosystem that provides value and sparks inspiration in a really competitive attention economy.”For Emperia, the immersive commerce platform powering Walmart Realm, the focus has been on turning engagement into measurable insight. “All the products in Realm are physically available from Walmart,” Olga Dogadkina, Emperia’s co-founder and chief executive, said. “What matters is how people engage, react and resonate.“We get a lot of information from how users move through the space, where they hover, what they spend time with, what they like. That insight can inform everything from merchandising to creative strategy.”Yet she acknowledged a remaining challenge in converting immersive excitement into conventional e-commerce and reflected that there is still a disconnect between social and digital.“You can have this very stimulating, immersive experience, and then send someone to a website where there’s an immediate drop in excitement,” she warned.

How Walmart Is Testing Immersive Commerce

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