Global retail giant Walmart appears committed to expanding its ecommerce operations. This is hardly a surprise: last year they bought the nascent Jet.com marketplace for $3.3bn. And with that acquisition came Marc Lore who had founded Jet and has a rich heritage in ecommerce. He’s now CEO of Walmart eCommerce U.S.
And this week Lore and others have been talking about future plans at the Shoptalk conference in Las Vegas. In this video he talks about Walmart’s future plans in the ecommerce sphere.
One idea stands out from the video. Walmart is keen to establish an incubator for ecommerce start-ups dubbed “Store No. 8” based in Silicon Valley to drive ecommerce innovation. It will focus on enterprises that employ all the latest futurist buzzwords and technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence and augmented reality.
Other insights from Walmart include their expectation to make more acquisitions and also find ways to further exploit the firms formidable fulfilment system and multitude of bricks and mortar locations across the Us, and indeed elsewhere.
