Walmart.com rolls out new site features

Retailer to use stored data to connect with shoppers

Walmart.com, the online site for U.S. Wal-Mart customers, got a new look and feel Monday, with individualized features that are expected to make buying faster and easier.

Only half of the nation's Walmart.com users could see the difference Monday; the revamped site will be live to the rest of Wal-Mart's online shoppers by the end of the month.

"We've revised the site from the ground up with a simple, bold, and modern design that sings on any form factor, be it a tablet, a laptop or a big desktop display," Ben Galbraith, vice president of global products for Wal-Mart Global eCommerce, said in a blog post from Wal-Mart's technology headquarters in San Bruno, Calif.

Changes include a new home page, an enhanced search-and-browse feature and a tab that makes it easier for shoppers to find stores in their area and pinpoint specific deals offered in those stores. The site now offers about 8 million products online, which is four times its assortment of two years ago.

Walmart.com launched in 2000 and was revamped with its new Polaris search engine in 2012, which brought a 20 percent increase in the number of shoppers making purchases after searching for products using the new search engine. The latest changes have been two years in the making and are the first major modifications since adding Polaris, said Wal-Mart spokesman Jaeme Laczkowski.

The new site is more personalized to customers in that it uses data from their past shopping experiences.

"These recommendations may be based on a customer's past searches or purchases on the site, but we can also suggest items that other customers typically buy along with the item a customer is shopping," Galbraith said.

"We're able to deliver much more relevant suggestions because we are now able to draw from the massive trove of data from both online and store purchases," he said.

Online rival Amazon.com Inc. already has the process down to a science, said Harry Joiner, an e-commerce consultant and director of Ecommerce Recruiter in Atlanta.

Once an online retailer has a consumer's credit or debit card information and ship-to address, the retailer engages in a learning relationship with the shopper, "where the site gets smarter about my needs and values every time I click it," Joiner said. That connection makes it hard for another retailer to pull the customer away, he said.

Beating Amazon.com at its own game will take "money, people and know-how," Joiner said. "Not only do the people have to be tightly organized around the customer's needs and values ... they have to be able to put together project plans to deliver that in a way that gets it right the first time."

As a system and technology leader, Wal-Mart should be very well positioned, said Chris Petersen, president of Integrated Marketing Solutions in Omaha, Neb. With six straight quarters of declining store traffic, "they have to get online right and do it quickly," Petersen said.

While Wal-Mart grew its online sales by 30 percent during its most recent fiscal year, it was still just more than $10 billion out of $473 billion of net revenue. Amazon.com posted $60.9 billion in annual sales.

"Wal-Mart has to do two major things -- get more core consumers shopping online and get more affluent Amazon shoppers to see and shop Wal-Mart as an Amazon equivalent," Petersen said. "This will be interesting to watch the clash of the Titans unfold. The shine is off Amazon recently, at least in terms of Wall Street."

Wal-Mart maintains that it's less concerned with the competition than it is with pleasing the customer.

"We want to make it easier for them to shop with us, no matter how they shop with us, whether it's in-store, online or on their mobile devices," said Laczkowski, the spokesman.

Up next: a significant revision to Walmart.com's checkout process, which will take the procedure from six pages down to one.

In addition to the United States, Wal-Mart has e-commerce sites in the United Kingdom, China, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Mexico, Argentina, Chile and South Africa, all of which have been moved to the retailer's new global technology platform.

Business on 08/05/2014

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