Wal-Mart wants you to think of it as a technology company

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Andria Cheng adopted from Marketwatch.com

Neil Ashe, president and  CEO of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s /quotes/zigman/245476/quotes/nls/wmtWMT+0.08% global eCommerce business, likes it when he heard description of Wal-Mart as a technology company.

He may have a good reason to do so.

Wal-Mart’s seeking to gain ground against its larger Web rival Amazon.com Inc. /quotes/zigman/63011/quotes/nls/amznAMZN+0.71%. It’s also figuring out how to increase its share of the market with more consumers toting mobile devices and comparison shopping online.

The company is also hoping its global database of customer information will give it a better read on consumers. In the past 18 months, Wal-Mart has built or expanded three technology centers in San Bruno, California; Bangalore and Sao Paulo. In the San Bruno and San Francisco Bay area, a 1,500-people global online commerce unit has been installed, separate from the corporate home base in Bentonville.

“Ecom is the next growth engine for Wal-Mart,” Ashe said at a Barclays Capital conference on Wednesday. “We have global leverage, not just in cost and capital investment, but innovation leverage.”

For example, Wal-Mart’s been testing same-day grocery delivery service in the Bay area with some know-how from its sister chain Asda in the U.K., which already delivers groceries across most of the U.K. and the No. 2 online grocer in that country, spokesman Dan Toporek told MarketWatch.
Wal-Mart, however, has a lot of catching up to do on the online front. The company, which analysts estimate will reach $490 billion in sales this year, in October projected its online sales would only reach $9 billion this year. In comparison, Wall Street estimated Amazon would rack up almost $75 billion in sales. Other retailers such as Williams-Sonoma /quotes/zigman/246567/quotes/nls/wsmWSM+0.91% generated a significantly higher percentage of their sales online.

Among some of its initiatives, Wal-Mart’s tech team will now constantly update its home page and search functions to make it easier and more interesting to shop. Over the next two days, for instance, Walmart.com in the U.S. is rolling out a new home page design that includes features that shows what’s trending on its site, including on a local store level.

While Wal-Mart is behind on the initiative compared to its retail counterparts such as Home Depot Inc. /quotes/zigman/229488/quotes/nls/hdHD+0.57%, the company this year also began to give credit to stores for online sales generated in their local area to encourage employees to help customers in stores find things online.
The company’s team also developed a tool last year that will allow it to compare its prices online on a real time basis against its rivals and adjust instantly, compared to in the past when it wasn’t as frequent or had to be done manually, Toporek said.

– Andria Cheng
– Follow her on twitter @AndriaCheng