E-commerce had become so big and the plan was moving along such that you can't undo it now, you can make it better, you can plus it up, you can find some synergies and remove some of the older problems we had of the separation, but it created some newer problems and some complexity on how you actually integrate a supply chain, for example.
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It was always the plan to bring things together, but just like the structure, it needed to be separate for a while for good reasons. We couldn't pick at store level the full Supercenter for a while. It's a lot harder to receive an e-commerce order and pick a toy at Christmas on time than it is to pick the strawberries every day, because you know where they are.
I think we've seen it all. The e-commerce store is the interesting one.
As it relates to brick-and-mortar, we've seen it all and done it all. We operate around the world in different formats, different brands. We've got large stores, small stores, all these different formats. So we know that space pretty well, but the e-commerce business was different.
There are all these things that add up into this business that's Walmart that keeps it really interesting. At the root of it all, though, it's a people business and it's a merchandising business. Today, it's increasingly a technology business. The supply chain is critical, of course, and real estate still plays a key role.
Retail is detail, and that plays out throughout the international business as well. Today's portfolio has got omnichannel businesses in Mexico, Central America, Canada, China, but we also have an e-commerce marketplace in India with Flipkart and our financial services business in India, PhonePe - those are a bit different, but the other markets have a lot of commonality strategically.
So growing ecommerce in the marketplace is key to being able to attract more advertisers. What we can do that some other people can't do is we can connect the dot between an ad you may have paid for digitally and a subsequent purchase in a physical store so that you can see the ad actually worked. So it too is an omni business for us.
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