walmart (WMT) – Get Free Report It has spent the last few years in an existential battle with e-retailer Amazon (AMZN) – Get Free Report.
Part of the arms race in that war was the huge rise in technology and delivery capabilities as Walmart successfully transformed from being just a mere box retailer to a formidable online presence.
And now, with inflation putting pressure on consumers’ grocery budgets as their spending habits change, Walmart has found new ways to monetize all the technology investments it’s made over the past decade. rice field.
We’ve also partnered with cloud-based data software giant Salesforce. (CRM) – Get Free Report to do so.
Anshu Bhardwaj, senior vice president of technology strategy and commercialization at Walmart Global Technologies, said:
What is the end result of the partnership?
At least retailers that Walmart often beats due to its size and technological superiority will have access to the company’s technology.
This means independent stores with the same delivery capabilities that Walmart enjoys, giving consumers another option with the same convenience.
“The same technology that powers Store Assist has enabled Walmart to fulfill more than 830 million orders.* Ordered at over 4,700 Walmart stores. By working with Salesforce, retailers can grow their business and deliver the personalized and convenient experiences shoppers expect,” the company said in a statement.
Do customers bite?
Speaking of Amazon, the retail giant is doing something similar by giving smaller rivals the chance to access their technology. However, these efforts have yielded mixed results.
In early 2020, Amazon began selling its cashierless checkout technology, nicknamed “Just Walk Out,” to potential competitor retailers.
Amazon is the king of US e-retail, with an estimated 40% market share, according to eMarketer, but brick-and-mortar retail still accounts for about 85% of the industry.
Then, in June 2022, the company announced that it would sell its Store Analytics service. This will allow brands to use Amazon-like dashboards to view detailed, anonymous data about how their products are discovered.
Amazon has been accused of misusing partner data to drive its own business, but the company claims Store Analytics data is aggregated and anonymized.
So while Walmart doesn’t have the data-gathering power or track record of Amazon, the problem is finding a large conglomerate that provides enough customer data to make Walmart’s retail-as-a-service viable, and a smaller one. Is your competitor trustworthy?
Revenue sources for retail as a service
Traditional retailers have long struggled with the reality of POS lane bottlenecks and advertising not harnessing the power of targeted data.
Initially, companies such as Amazon and Walmart built capabilities to mitigate these issues and gain an edge over their competitors.
But now they are sharing progress to create new revenue streams based on retail as a service.
According to Retail Info Systems, RaaS is “the engine that puts critical transaction processing services, including complex store processes, in the cloud for retailers to use to build the commerce experiences they need.”
Walmart sees an opportunity, choosing now as the timing of the attack while catching up to similar services from Amazon again.
Rob Garf, vice president and general manager of retail at Salesforce, said:
“By combining the power of Walmart and Salesforce, retailers can drive success with best-in-class technology, improve omnichannel capabilities, increase efficiency and ensure that shoppers, wherever they are, receive every purchase faster. can be made.”
