Walmart Merges Tech Teams To Streamline Online Efforts

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Moves joins Arkansas-based group with Silicon Valley team to speed up new tech.

Customers tend to consider Walmart and Sam’s Club as a single entity, leading the retailer to merge its tech teams in order to speed up its e-commerce development. Walmart has announced that it will be merging its Bentonville, Arkansas-based tech group, which focuses on systems and applications specifically for its stores, with the WalmartLabs team in San Bruno, California, which addresses building e-commerce tech aimed at helping the company compete with digital shopping rivals like Amazon.com and Target.

The move creates a new unit called “Walmart Technology,” with a staff of 8,000, according to Fortune, which has access to an internal memo to Walmart staff. In the memo, Walmart referred to its recent launch of Walmart Pay, a mobile payment service, as one example of the type of collaboration the merger is anticipated to create.

While the teams will be merged, both locations will continue to operate, according to Retail Dive.

Chief Information Officer Karenann Terrell and Chief Technical Officer Jeremy King will continue to lead ISD and @WalmartLabs, respectively, although both will report to Ashe as head of the combined group, according to the memo.

Neil Ashe, director of eCommerce for Walmart, explained in the memo that customers have developed the expectation of uniform experiences regardless of the medium, and two separate divisions working on similar projects no longer made sense for Walmart’s vision of the future. “Our customers don’t think of these as different experiences. To them, it’s just Walmart or Sam’s Club,” said Ashe. The move also is geared at ramping up the online grocery pick-up service to better compete with Amazon’s efforts at food delivery.

Walmart has paid particular attention to e-commerce recently, investing billions of dollars to create a seamless shopping experience to lure customers and increase its bottom line. Walmart has also recently streamlined its operations, cutting 16,000 jobs and closing 269 stores,  in response to lower-than-anticipated earnings.