Walmart to Make Its E-Commerce Tech Available to Other Retailers

Walmart is partnering with Adobe to make the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer's e-commerce technologies available to other retailers. 

In a move to position itself as a friend to small retailers—especially those built, like Walmart was, as brick-and-mortar businesses—Walmart will offer, via the Adobe Commerce platform, access to its fulfillment technologies to help other retailers better manage their digital operations. That means, for example, providing real-time inventory data across store locations to let retailers show online shoppers their options for order pickup locations and times. Businesses using the Adobe Commerce platform also will be able to syndicate their online offerings through the Walmart Marketplace and, in doing so, offer two-day shipping nationwide.

"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," Walmart U.S. CEO John Furner said in a news release.

Additional benefits that Walmart and Adobe are touting to prospective retail customers include tools for associates to pick orders more efficiently and manage multiorder pickups and item substitutions more effectively. For retailers not already offering these capabilities, order status communications, customer ETA and arrival detection also will be available. In a blog post, Adobe said the partnership with Walmart will boost its customers' ability to "offer exceptional pickup experiences" and reach new customers through improved omnichannel flexibility.

 Furner said commercializing the retailer's technologies will help Walmart—which not-so-subtly referred to itself as a Fortune 1 company (Amazon is No. 2 in Fortune's 2021 ranking)—"sustainably reinvest back into our customer value proposition." Added Walmart Chief Technology Officer and Chief Development Officer Suresh Kumar: "Combining Adobe’s strength in powering commerce experiences with our unmatched omnicustomer expertise, we can accelerate other companies’ digital transformations."

Growing Walmart Marketplace, the company's platform for third-party sellers, is a top priority this year for Walmart Inc., which saw U.S. e-commerce sales climb 37% in the first fiscal quarter of the year, helped in part by Marketplace sales. E-commerce made a 360-basis point contribution to comp sales at the start of the year, Walmart noted in a better-than-expected quarterly earnings report in May. Walmart's second-quarter earnings release is scheduled for Tuesday, Aug. 17.