Walmart To Sell Technology To Help Other Retailers Power Digital Transformations

After successfully building, testing and scaling its proprietary technology and capabilities, Walmart Inc. WMT is ready to share its tools with the rest of the world. The technology and efficiencies that have fueled Walmart’s growth in recent years such as buy online, pickup in store, and mobile checkin, will become available to small and mid-size retailers.

As part of this effort, Walmart announced a strategic partnership with Adobe to integrate Walmart’s Marketplace, online and in-store fulfillment and pickup technologies with Adobe Commerce ADBE .

Merchants on the Adobe Commerce Platform will soon have the opportunity to access the technologies powered by Walmart Global Tech, giving thousands of small- to-mid-size retailers the same tools as those used by largest retailer in the world.

Through the Adobe Commerce platform, retailers and brands will be able to use Walmart’s unique cloud-based services to offer seamless pickup and delivery to their customers. Businesses will be able to reach new consumers on Walmart’s fast-growing Marketplace where they can leverage Walmart’s fulfillment services to offer 2-day shipping nationwide, all while improving customer experience and operating more efficiently.

Before pushing out the capabilities to the market, Walmart wanted to test them and build scale. The retailer has been using some of them – including buy online and pickup in store – for a decade. Walmart has also been layering on its own delivery capabilities. As store pickup and other omni experiences become more popular with consumers, Walmart is offering to help other retailers, and make a profit.

“We’ve built new capabilities to serve the evolving needs of our own customers, and we have a unique opportunity to use our experience to help other businesses do the same,” said John Furner, chief executive officer of Walmart U.S. “Commercializing our technologies and capabilities helps us sustainably reinvest back into our customer value proposition.”

The retail behemoth is monetizing more of its capabilities and generating a new revenue stream. It’s part of the new flywheel model Walmart Inc. CEO Doug McMillan has talked about in the past. As Walmart generates new profit pools it allows the retailer to reinvest in prices and customer experience. 

Suresh Kumar, chief technology officer and chief development officer of Walmart Inc. said, “Combining Adobe’s strength in powering commerce experiences with our unmatched omni-customer expertise, we can accelerate other companies’ digital transformations.”

Walmart’s store pickup has been leveraged at 3,800 units, and Express EXPR delivery is available at more than 3,000, while mobile checkin is available across Walmart’s fleet. “These are capabilities we’ve used and optimized,” said a Walmart spokesman. “Also, the pandemic was happening last year. So many business were shuttering or scaling back.”

Walmart, on the other hand, was able to grow U.S. e-commerce by 79% in the third quarter of last year, which contributed about 570 basis points to comparable sales, accounting for almost 90% of the same-store growth.

Adobe’s focus on small and mid-size businesses – 150,000 merchants use Adobe’s platform – compliments the retail segment Walmart is initially addressing. “We want this capability to be used by as many businesses as possible,” the Walmart spokesman said. “There’s an opportunity to enhance customer experiences across the retail landscape. Think of all of the different types of businesses and retailers we can serve in the future.”

Retailers using Adobe’s platform will gain access to millions of potential customers through Walmart’s online Marketplace and will be able to take advantage of the retail giant’s fulfillment services, including storing their products in Walmart warehouses and using Walmart’s backend for the fulfillment of orders, including shipping and handling reverse logistics.

“We’re excited to collaborate with Walmart to help Adobe merchants expand their businesses to new channels and offer shopping experiences that increase their competitiveness and fit well with shifting consumer behaviors in an increasingly digital economy,” said Anil Chakravarthy, executive vice president and general manager, Digital Experience Business and Worldwide Field Operations at Adobe.

This is the first time Walmart is making capabilities it built internally available to other retailers. Why didn’t it do this sooner? “The reason we’re uniquely qualified to do this more than any other retailer is because no one else operates at our scale,” the Walmart spokesman said, adding, “There’s a lot of other capabilities. We’ll be evaluating different opportunities to bring some of these technologies forward.”