WALMART+ CASE STUDY

About the Ecommerce Platform

Sam Walton founded the Wal-Mart Company, one of the biggest retailers in the world, in 1962. Walton started it with the intention of offering things at lower prices so that customers would have the chance to save money and utilize it to better their lives. As a result, the business began as a little bargain shop.
Wal-Mart was dedicated to meeting the needs of its clients by providing them with amiable service and affordable products. The business still upholds its original promise to look after its clients.
With its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, Walmart Inc. is an American global retail firm that runs a chain of hypermarkets (also known as supercenters), cheap department stores, and grocery shops domestically. In 1988, Walmart started constructing Supercenters, which are roughly 182,000 square feet in size and employ 300 people. By integrating a grocery store with fresh fruit, a bakery, a deli, and dairy items with electronics, clothing, toys, and home furnishings, Walmart Supercenters provide a one-stop shopping experience. Customers can get products delivered to their homes the same day from Walmart Online Grocery. In these select marketplaces, thousands of products, including fresh produce, meat and seafood, health and beauty products, electronics, and toys, are available for online ordering and delivery to consumers' doors.

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WALMART -
PRE COVID

1962- Present

.Walmart was established in 1962, and by the late 1980s, it had developed into one of the most well-known American brands.
.It rose to the top of the Fortune 500 list by 2002 and has been there ever since.
.With its $3 billion purchase of online retailer Jet, Walmart made its e-commerce debut in 2016.
.Widely regarded as a deliberate attempt to compete with Amazon, which by that point had eclipsed Walmart as the largest retailer in the United States, the move was made.

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WALMART -
POST COVID

.Walmart stopped Jet and refocused its e-commerce development on Walmart.com in May 2020 due to the "continuing strength of the Walmart brand" and what analysts ascribed to financial losses and operational challenges during the escalating COVID-19 epidemic.
.Walmart's in-store customer base (53% of American customers) continues to outpace its online shop, despite the latter's 13% year-over-year growth. .Walmart.com has surpassed other industry juggernauts like Target, eBay, and Costco to become the third-most-shopped store in the United States overall.
. Some business owners claimed that the system is beginning to feel the strain of the rapid development, and an increasing number of them are concerned that if the pace quickens, Walmart could lose its status as a shelter for reputable vendors. Compared to competitors like Amazon, Walmart has established itself as a safer, less crowded marketplace, making it simpler for merchants to stand out and sell goods.

MIS OF WALMART ECOMMERCE

The Management Information System used by Walmart plays an important role in being one step ahead of its competitors such as AMAZON , TARGET , etc.

SAP HANA

Thousands of Walmart employees now have access to information, opening the door to a world of data-driven creativity across the organization. For instance, our merchandising teams can identify trends or opportunities and seize them within a few hours thanks to near real-time data and self-service queries.

Walmart’s Transaction Processing System (TPS)

A system like this one processes crucial business information. It obtains, enters, saves, and generates papers necessary for conducting business. Walmart's TPS is extremely dependable and can handle many users, a lot of input, a lot of storage, and security. There are two varieties of TPS available online, one of which operates in batch mode.
The Walmart TPS is totally automated, which means that since it is an online system, data is supplied and processed by it automatically.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Point-of-Service (SLEPOS)

Walmart developers can create extremely reliable, secure POS systems with SUSE Enterprise Linux thanks to features like centralized or distributed servers and uniform admin tools.

TECHNOLOGY USED IN WALMART E-COMMERCE

SHOPIFY- Walmart joined forces with Shopify. It is a multinational Canadian e-commerce business with its main office in Ottawa, Ontario. Its e-commerce platform for online storefronts and retail point-of-sale systems is known as Shopify.
Walmart's technology is divided into two groups: Global eCommerce, situated in Silicon Valley, develops e-commerce technologies, while Walmart Technology, based in Bentonville, focuses on constructing and maintaining technology for the shops themselves.

WALMART +

AMAZON

MEMBERSHIP

If you choose to be billed monthly, a Walmart+ membership costs $12.95 each month or $98 for a one-year commitment. By making the yearly commitment, you'll save $57.40.

An Amazon Prime membership is marginally more expensive than a Walmart+ membership at $139 year, or $14.99 monthly. Specifically, an extra $41.

PRICES

In terms of cheap costs, Walmart's price match policy plays a competitive game; it essentially ensures that you'll always get the greatest offer on a certain item. Generally speaking, Walmart has lower prices than Amazon.com.

LendEDU examined 50 identical products in 2020 from a range of categories, including household goods, technology and entertainment, kitchen/appliances, and other items. They discovered that Walmart was 1.79% less expensive than Amazon if a buyer bought the same things from both stores.

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

EXTRA BENEFITS

.Delivery windows of one hour are available.
.Spotify Premium is free for six months.
.No matter if you are a Walmart+ member or not, Walmart usually runs a competitor deal concurrent with Amazon, and it is open to all customers.

. Access to Amazon's streaming video library, which includes Amazon original content
. Sales and promotions at Whole Foods Market
. Unlimited photo storage is offered via Amazon Photos.

BOTTOM LINE

Both merchants offer reasonable shopping memberships that, if used—and this is where you must be completely honest about your purchasing habits—pay for themselves in reduced delivery and shipping expenses. City inhabitants will value the two-hour and same-day delivery windows offered by Amazon, while others in rural and suburban areas may prefer Walmart's wider distribution. Walmart triumphs when it comes to economical grocery shopping and fresh food delivery.
Amazon is the store to shop at if you want a broader selection of goods (including handcrafted artisanal goods), a wide range of streaming services, and Whole Foods Market discounts.

DATA BREACH IN WALMART +

On January 13, 2018- MBM Company, a partner containing database of Walmart customers and financials exposed its data to 1.3B people around the world. It was reported by security company Kromtech that Walmart’s partner company, MBM left personal information of customers exposed via an unsecured Amazon S3 Bracket.
Personal information including financials, address, zip codes and email addresses were said to be public in the “walmartsql” bracket of the Amazon S3 bracket for a couple of hours before Walmart retrieved the information and secured the database to protect malpractice and fraud. The breached information was made private by Kromtech Ltd., a security company specializing in ethical hacking and data manipulation.

Walmart employs data mining to identify patterns in point-of-sale data. Data mining assists Walmart in identifying patterns that can be utilized to make product recommendations to consumers based on which goods were purchased simultaneously or prior to the purchase of a specific product.

(Graphical representation of sales of Walmart+)

Walmart is building the world's largest private cloud, capable of processing 2.5 PB of data per hour. Walmart has established its own analytics hub, Data Café, at its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. More than 200 streams of external and internal data, as well as 40 PB of transactional data, can be modified, modelled, and visualized at the data café. In just a few weeks, the data café collects information from 200 different sources, including telecom data, social media data, economic data, meteorological data, Nielsen data, gas prices, and local events databases, accounting for 200 billion rows of transactional data. To construct machine learning models, Walmart is having difficulty hiring experts with experience in cutting-edge analytics applications and working understanding of data science programming languages such as Python and R. Walmart's recruitment effort employed the hashtag #lovedata to enhance its profile among the rising data science community in Bentonville and Arkansas.

RECOMMENDATION FOR E COMMERCE WEBSITE/APPLICATION

Walmart recently merged with Flipkart and bought its shares. The application that Walmart use in India is under the name of Flipkart

USER INTERFACE-

Walmart+Flipkart's website is slower and heavier than Amazon's because it lacks clearance, practicality, and user friendliness. Additionally, because it lacks gimmicks. The graphical user interface on Amazon is clean and friendly, which enhances the shopping experience. As a result, it may display more results per page than Walmart+Flipkart because each result is smaller. Thus , Walmart MIS system can make the website more user friendly

CUSTOMER SERVICE-

Amazon beats Flipkart when it comes to providing excellent customer service. When you call Amazon's customer service, a representative answers the phone right away and works hard to find a solution for you as soon as possible. Conversely, Flipkart receives a lot of complaints about its customer service staff, who frequently try to avoid helping you with your problems. Thus , Walmart can certainly improve its customer service especially when its competitor is acing the customer service sector.