Walmart E-commerce Chief Reveals His Omnichannel Vision & The 4-Minute Delivery Secret

Hello, everyone.

This is omnitalk Retail.

I'm Chris Walton.

And I'm Anne Mazinga.

And we are coming to you live from the Walmart Seller Summit at the beautiful Gaylord Hotel in San Diego.

And joining us now to kick off our live coverage from the summit is David Gugina, the Chief E Commerce Officer for Walmart US David, welcome back to omnitalk.

It is great to be back on omnitalk.

We're so excited to have you.

For those who might be meeting you for the first time, Dave, will you give us a little bit of background on you and your current role now at Walmart?

Great.

I'll be quick.

I have been in manufacturing and supply chain for about 20 years.

Right.

And I've spent the last seven months leading Walmart E Commerce, which is new for me.

So exciting.

And I couldn't be happier in this role.

So, Dave, what is your vision?

What is your vision?

Seven months.

Putting you on the spot.

What is your vision for integrating the omnichannel experience across stores and digital at Walmart?

So, first off, at Walmart, we want people to shop any way that they want to shop.

And that means that they're going to be shopping off of shelves.

That means that they're going to be picking goods up from their local neighborhood market.

They may be getting goods delivered to their home or even inside their pantry.

So we want people to experience Walmart in the best way possible so that they come back again and again and again.

And as we've noted at our summit, we want to be America's favorite place to shop.

So how do we do that?

Well, we are really focused on Omni, and I always like sharing examples, so I'll share a few examples.

Examples are good.

Dave, how Omni is coming to life.

So one is when you are in one of our stores and you go onto the Walmart app, you will enter into store mode.

Okay.

And we have enhanced store mode to make it more lovable for our customers.

So if you are looking for a product.

Exactly.

If you're looking for a product, we'll help you find that product.

Maybe you're looking for a deal or maybe you are looking to go deeper into the torso and tail assortment that we have online and not in the store.

And you can experience that as well.

Yeah.

So we're really excited about the enhancements to Store Mode.

Store Mode.

We're also really excited about how our marketplace, and we've got it right behind us, is coming to life within the store.

Cypress, Texas, is a store where we've launched some new capabilities and we've got basically features and displays in the store that teach you about our marketplace offerings.

So you may walk in and see a Kenmore washing machine, a QR code that brings you onto the app and shows you that we've got washers, dryers, and, oh, by the way, you can have them shipped to your home and installed in your home.

And folks don't necessarily know that about Walmart and these new features and these new displays are bringing that to life.

So in store mode and then bringing the marketplace to life through those displays and features is just a couple ways that we are moving forward in an omnichannel manner.

Well, and moving forward with a lot of positive growth.

Earlier this year, Walmart E Commerce achieved profitability for the first time.

Congratulations.

First off, what would you say were kind of the key drivers of this big achievement?

You know, I'd start by just thanking the thousands of Walmart associates that have been working on this for years.

So there are so many people to give credit to.

And I would.

We would spend the rest of the time me talking about all the things we've done to deliver profitability in E Commerce.

But if I had to pick a few things, I would call out one, I'd call out speed.

Okay.

You know, you've heard us talk a lot about that this week at our seller summit.

As we have leaned into delivering items faster to our customers, they're coming back to us faster.

And as you all know, with your supply chain backgrounds, that allows us to improve our cycle times and really make our operations, both our stores and our supply chain, more efficient.

So we're finding that fast delivery is the most economical way that we can deliver to customers.

And what that means is we can take those savings and we can reinvest into price and we can reinvest into experience, which is what we do best.

So, Dave, I love the example of Kenmore, particularly like bringing the marketplace in store because that's a big white space in the marketplace, especially if you've been in the market for a washer and dryer of late, as I have.

Ann, I'm curious, though, like, where you kind of talked about where things have been, but where are you planning to take things next?

What's your vision there?

Yeah, as I think about the future, I think about leaning into technology, but I also think about what isn't going to change.

So I'll hit on both.

Okay.

Okay.

So let's talk a bit about what's not going to change.

One, customers care deeply about Price.

Right.

So they care about price on our 1P items.

And as you all know, Walmart is known for, for leaning into price, but they also care about price on our 3P items.

So we're leaning in to making sure that our marketplace is the most economical, affordable marketplace for our sellers.

We lean in with them, we're going to invest in them, we're going to invest in the marketplace so that we can show up in an incredible way for our customers around price.

Next is assortment.

We are going to continue to expand our assortment of goods and services.

So if you want to get that washer and dryer installed, that was key too.

Yeah, I picked up on that.

Or the tires.

You got it.

You got it.

So we're going to continue to lean into assortment.

That means broader high quality items for both goods and services.

And then next is experience.

And I've said it once, but I'm going to say it again a lot of times for us, experience means speed.

So we're going to get faster and faster and faster.

More items delivered to customers at faster speeds.

Today about one third of our scheduled deliveries are fast.

That means sub three hours, sub one hour, one third.

Okay, 25% of those fast deliveries are delivered in under 30 minutes.

Our fastest delivery to date was four minutes.

And no, the individual did not live inside the Walmart but they were relatively close.

But we were able to pick those items and bring them directly to the customer.

Customers home in four minutes.

That's really remarkable.

Well Dave, let's close on this.

What would you say to those who are curious that the growth of Walmart marketplace says about kind of Walmart in general's future growth?

I am incredibly bullish about Marketplace.

Our customers love our prices, they love our speed, they, they love our assortment and they love doing business with someone that they trust and our customers trust Walmart.

And we are going to continue to lean in to our marketplace so that customers can get the goods and the services that they need and that they want at fantastic prices really, really quickly.

Awesome.

Great Dave.

Well, hopefully that interview was fast enough for you too because I can tell how key and important being fast is for you and hopefully it was fast for all you listeners, but fast but also very insightful.

So again, thank you to Dave Gugina for joining us today.

We're going to be here all day, day long interviewing wonderful Walmart executives throughout the seller summit.

So Anne, until then, be careful out there.