Walmart Canada Improves Online Experience for Weekly Shoppers

Retailers tend to build e-commerce websites according to a traditional structure, but this has to change as more and more purchases of consumables that are shopped weekly transition online, said Rick Neuman, chief information officer and executive vice president of e-commerce at Walmart Canada, during a presentation at the National Retailer Federation's Retail's Big Show in January."We tend to put together a website that has a very traditional experience — you have your home page, you have your category pages, product pages underneath that, it flows through a traditional checkout, spits you out into an order confirm and some customer service stuff on the other side," Neuman said. "It's almost been operationalized to the point where there's not a ton of innovation anymore."But a weekly consumables shopper that visits a website on a regular basis has different needs than the general merchandise shopper that gave rise to the traditional site structure."We really need to look at it in the context of both the physical store – which will absolutely be relevant – and that website, and if we don’t, that experience will fall flat," Neuman said.Over the last 12 years, Walmart Canada added fresh food and a full grocery assortment to 80% of stores, either by building new supercenters to create that "one-stop-shop" or by conducting "in-box conversions" that take existing stores and bring in fresh food. In 2015 the division put walmart.ca through its own in-box conversion, baking food into the website's existing functions.When the U.S. division introduced fresh food online, it split its e-commerce operations into two websites (one for general merchandise and one for grocery) but the Canadian arm made the decision to build it as one. Their aspirations were to bring more and more product into the weekly shopping experience – starting with core grocery but then adding cleaning supplies, pet supplies and general merchandise items like light bulbs — so on two websites, the assortment would eventually become identical."If we set it up as two experiences, what we're ultimately doing is walking away from the core strategy of Walmart, which said we can put these two things under one roof and simplify the customer's life by being able to buy it all at once," Neuman said.Another enhancement the division made include creating a shopping companion mobile application with a built-in favorites component that lets shoppers quickly add the items they buy all the time. In addition to quick repeat orders, the functionality makes building much bigger baskets easier by letting users add multiples of an item with one click. Additional upgrades include a new style of thumbnail that lets visitors shop directly from search results pages, shelf pages, category pages or even the home page.On the operations side, Neuman also noted that the traditional e-commerce triangle that made traffic, basket and conversion (and in some cases engagement) the holy grails of e-commerce is now irrelevant."If you're just transactional, you're not leveraging the power of digital in a sufficient way," Neuman said, indicating that traffic is less important and the goal is no longer to convert every visitor, so those metrics aren't very useful. The division transitioned its store management teams into market management teams who get full credit for the sales that land within their area and are incentivized based on how well they engage their community and allow them to fully participate in what Walmart has to offer."It's a starting point, but it's not sufficient," Neuman said of layering these enhancements onto the preexisting website. "As an industry we're going to have to break it down and build new experiences that have this concept in mind from day one." He imagines that what comes after a "one-stop-shop" is a "no-stop-shop" that offers a strong assortment of product, unrestricted access (to the point of being able to transact anywhere, whether that is Facebook or WhatsApp), speed, automation (with services such as subscriptions) and personalization."As we tear down how the basics of shopping are happening and build it back up, if you leverage e-commerce from the start, then the way that you package it back together will be fundamentally different from the way you're doing it today," Neuman said.

Walmart Canada Improves Online Experience for Weekly Shoppers

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