Walmart is integrating new technologies into its e-commerce plan as part of a larger reset.
This includes adding a nutty chatbot to manage customer service to selling Walmart goods on gaming platform Roblox.
“A standard search bar is no longer the fastest path to purchase, rather we must use technology to adapt to customers’ individual preferences and needs,” Suresh Kumar, CTO and CDO of Walmart, said in a press statement.
The announcements come at a time when the “every day low price” retailer’s e-commerce business is growing and thriving.
“At the heart of our platform strategy is developing common global core capabilities that are built once and deployed across Walmart US, Sam’s Club, and Walmart International,” Kumar added.
Walmart dubbed these features as “adaptive retail” technologies when it first shared its plans at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.
Customer support chatbot: One thing that stands out about Walmart’s customer service chatbot is that it is designed to actually take actions like “cancel order,” and “initiate refund,” on behalf of shoppers with the help of generative AI, Derek Schatz, group director for technology operations at Walmart, told Retail Brew at a company preview event last week called Retail Rewired.
“It’s not just prompting you into a workflow, but by simply saying, ‘cancel my next order,’ it can go through and take that action for you,” Schatz added. The retailer said it has been testing the chatbot for over a year.
“If you’re engaging with the app today, and we can give you the answer here, that’s a better experience than having to have you go through more and more work,” Schatz added.
Targeting the next generation: According to Justin Breton, Walmart’s head of brand marketing innovation, the next generation of customers are using social media to inform their purchases.
“They’re spending a significant amount of time on gaming platforms,” Breton said. “In fact, on a platform like Roblox, users are spending more than two hours per day on that platform, socializing with friends, engaging with brands, so it’s important for us to be there.”
Walmart Discovered on Roblox is an activation where customers can find digital items the same way they would in a Walmart store. Earlier this year, Walmart was the first brand to launch real-world commerce on Roblox for its nearly 80 million daily active users.
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“One of the biggest learnings that we had from the first drop to the second drop was that price point really matters,” Breton said. He said he found through the Discord community, that’s complementary to Roblox, that anywhere between $10 to $20 is the right price point to lean into for this immersive commerce experience.
To take on the virtual world, Walmart has also launched a new experience called Walmart Realm, its first immersive commerce destination that is driven by social trends and curated by influencers. And Walmart is planning to launch a virtual brand shop on the social platform Zepeto, which has 20 million active users. Zepetto provides 3D avatar customization in virtual environments.
“Our strategy is really to get more customers, specifically that next generation of consumer, shopping more things—like beauty, fashion, and home, through channel expansion, through platforms using our platforms, retina, and immersive commerce API [Application Programming Interface] to make that commerce experience seamless,” Breton said.
Peak customization: Walmart is taking customization to the next level by giving each user a personalized homepage. The retailer has launched its in-house content decision platform that matches content Walmart has online to each individual customer.
“The nearest Walmart to all of us is in your pocket, on your phone, it’s our app, it’s in your desktops, and that’s what personalization really helps us unlock,” Hetvi Damodhar, Walmart’s senior director of e-comm personalization who led the Content Decision Platform presentation, said.
“It helps us deliver our vision of building a truly unique store for every single one of our customers,” she added.
“My favorite part about this is actually when we started building this platform, we knew we’re going to need to exponentially increase the amount of content we have access to online, and so we’ve developed an internal platform that uses generative AI to pull together both dynamic text and dynamic images and create a custom made piece of content for our customers,” Damodhar explained, adding that this technology is already in use in “certain pockets” of Walmart’s US website and app.