Walmart has invested a huge amount of money in software and technologies that helped the company transform its business. The world’s largest retailer is now planning to make available some of these technologies to small medium-sized retailers. This is for the first time when Walmart has decided to share technologies that powered its business with others. The company used them to create a seamless experience at both online and offline stores. The technology will help other retailers to let customers buy items online and then pick them at the store. Walmart said that the technology provided by it will help small businesses to easily add products to the company’s online marketplace.
Walmart will offer these technologies in partnership with Adobe. The computer software company will sell these technologies through a subscription. Walmart vice president of technology strategy Anshu Bhardwaj said that the company reaped the benefits of adopting this technology at an early stage of the coronavirus pandemic. Walmart witnessed bumper online and in-store sales as the coronavirus pandemic forced lockdown. As a designated essential retailer, Walmart remained to function even the peak of Covid-19. Some customers used Walmart’s buy online to make purchases and then picked the products ups from stores. This essentially helped them to reduce the time spent inside stores.
According to a data, retailers in the United States that had enabled the facility of buying online and pick up in-store option enabled in 2018 had witnessed around 7 per cent of orders in that way. But the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated it to 22 per cent as of last month. Experts believe that there is a significant opportunity that needs to be tapped. Also, this could be a new business model for Walmart. This would help diversify its source of earning which currently depends totally on retail. However, Walmart has not shared any expectations about how big this could be in terms of business.
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