The retailer's Labs division wants to see how social networking and other systems can aid the shopping experience
By
Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service November 11, 2011 03:20 PM ET
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Walmart could start letting shoppers buy products in the aisles and skip the checkout line, but the world's largest retailer needs to find out how that would improve the customer experience, the company's e-commerce chief said Thursday.
With Apple's new EasyPay feature for its Apple Store iOS app, shoppers with an iPhone 4 or 4S can buy some products simply by scanning the barcode, entering their Apple ID, and walking out with the item. Venky Harinarayan, Walmart's senior vice president of global e-commerce and head of Walmart Labs, said the issue with setting up such a feature is not technology but the user experience.
"Yes, you can do this. ... What we've got to figure out is, how do you make that customer experience something really worthwhile," Harinarayan said. The same is true of other new technologies. "These are not technology problems, they are customer experience problems."
"This actually has been playing really, really well over the last few weeks as we've started engaging some of this," he said.
Mining social-networking data "can impact billions of dollars of merchandise if we get it right," he added.
Walmart eventually would like to provide an API (application programming interface) and let third parties create applications
using some of these capabilities, but it is still very early in the development process, Harinarayan said.
Harinarayan declined to give more details on Thursday about Walmart Labs' purchase of Australian startup Grabble, a developer
of point-of-sale systems for mobile phones.
Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com
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