Ecommerce Quotes

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.

Customers want to save money and time and have the broadest assortment of items, and we think that by bringing e-commerce and digital capabilities together with the stores, we can do things that a pure e-commerce player can't.

We're an 'And' company, we're people and tech, we're stores and e-commerce, we're innovation and execution.

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.

When you look at what was happening with e-commerce and how big that was going to become, there's the big wave of India, there's the big wave of e-commerce, and then there's the question of, "Is this the brand to invest in?". We developed this confidence in that team, and so far we've been proven to be right about that.

I think that people that shop Walmart frequently and love the brand the most find it very natural to come to us first for e-commerce. But for others that may shop around or not have chosen to shop at Walmart in the past, you get what you earn, and our opportunity to earn their business starts with winning their grocery and consumables basket.

We love basket businesses, the Supercenter is a basket business, Sam's Club is a big basket business. We want to build an e-commerce business that's a basket business, not just a spear fishing exercise.

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.

People were wondering, "How do you even do food e-commerce? Are we going to be dropping strawberries on somebody's doorstep? It doesn't feel like we're going to be doing that". But what we believed is that in the US pickup might work. So we started in California and then Denver, and a team started working to put everything in place to do grocery pickup and in the beginning we even had a separate app. It was an orange online grocery app.

We're an omni retailer, so we've got things going on ecommerce-wise, stores-wise, marketing-wise.

By the time we got to 2020, we had leaders that had a stronger digital acumen, e-commerce set of capabilities and beliefs.

The stores are an asset, and they have a great assortment in them and they're close to people. Being within 10 miles of 90% of America is a huge advantage, especially with fresh food at a good price. But we must also, if you think long-term and you think about what the company wants to accomplish, you must have a big and important first-party e-commerce business, and you must have a marketplace, and the things that go along with the marketplace.

If you think that a store e-commerce business is the answer, you end up thinking that a population of less than a million items is enough, and you end up thinking that you don't need an e-commerce marketplace, and you end up thinking other things.

Always thinking about the customer value proposition is including price, assortment, experience, and trust, and all of those have been changed by technology and been changed by e-commerce, and so leading up to the moment when I took this role, there was an understanding that we needed to invest in e-commerce, grow e-commerce, but we didn't take it seriously enough.

If you fast-forward through the years, there was a period of time when there was too much debate inside the company about the significance of e-commerce, there were leaders who believed it would never be any bigger than the catalog business, there were leaders that believed it would never be profitable.

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.

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.

I think we've seen it all. The e-commerce store is the interesting one.