Walmart Adds Customer Insights Feature to Luminate Platform

Walmart’s latest digital offering is designed to help its suppliers understand their shoppers.

Digital Landscapes, a “self-serve insights solution,” is being added to the Walmart Luminate platform in beta Wednesday (June 5), the retail giant said in a Tuesday (June 4) news release. General availability will happen later this summer.

“Until now, suppliers were able to make decisions based on insights gathered after a purchase had been made,” the release said. “Now, with the ability to analyze online shopper behavior before a purchase, suppliers can explore new retail strategies to engage and drive consideration along the customer journey.”

Digital Landscapes can tell suppliers where customers begin their journey to find an item, when they find it, how that item compares to others in its category and what a shopper’s “path to purchase looks like,” per the release.

The announcement comes weeks after Walmart said it is expanding Luminate on a worldwide scale, introducing the customer insights suite to Walmex in Mexico before being offered by Walmart Canada later in the year.

The company also debuted a new service that lets suppliers combine insights from Luminate with Walmart Connect retail media solutions.

“For suppliers, this means being able to identify trends within critical categories to develop more informed, data-driven media strategies based on Walmart’s insights,” the retailer said in April.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS spoke last week with Justin Breton, Walmart’s director of brand experiences and strategic partnerships, about the growing consumer demand for more engaging online buying options.

“Steeped in data, we followed these three trends: customers enjoy brands they shop with more when they have unique virtual experiences; customers want to be entertained while shopping; [and] customers enjoy and are inspired by virtual games where they can immediately purchase items they discover,” Breton said.

Several shoppers have shown a desire for more immersive purchasing experiences. For example, PYMNTS Intelligence’s “How We Will Pay Report: How Connected Devices Enable Multitasking Among Digital-First Consumers” found that a third of consumers who own connected devices would be interested in using them to buy items that appear in streamed content while they watch. In addition, 28% said they would want to be able to make purchases based on products that appear in friends’ social media posts.

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