If Walmart.com seems a bit more familiar these days, it might just be that you're an avid Amazon.com shopper as a redesign appears to have brought in some very Amazon-like features.
Those features include product recommendations tied to prior purchases and a more efficient payment method -- sort of like a 'one-click' option, which those who know Amazon.com know very well.
While Wal-Mart's corporate site doesn't boast any news releases on the website redesign, the company did announce the changes on its corporate blog and news reports are abuzz about the revamp.
"I'm very excited to share that over the coming months, we're making some substantial updates to Walmart.com, overhauling familiar features and introducing new ones. I'd like to share some of the details of this new Walmart.com in this post," writes Ben Galbraith, VP, global products, Walmart Global eCommerce in the blog announcement.
He notes the website design is "simple, bold" and "modern."
It "sings on any form factor, be it a tablet, a laptop, or a big desktop display. We started our new design from the baseline of small tablets, optimizing it for that form factor, and then carefully considered how each area of the site could adapt itself to take advantage of larger screens with different input mechanisms (i.e., fingers versus mice) when available (I'll talk more about our work on smartphones in a later post)."
As Galbraith explains in his post, site recommendations may be based on a customer's past searches or purchases, but the site may also suggest items that other customers typically buy along with the item being viewed.
"We're able to deliver much more relevant suggestions because we are now able to draw from the massive trove of data from both online and store purchases," he said.
The redesign will include providing shoppers with custom homepages that even include the weather and closest retail store and even coupons.
The redesign is live with just about half of the site's daily online shoppers.
"The biggest change of all is one that our customers can't see: an all-new e-commerce platform under the covers that we've been building from the ground-up over the past two years," reveals Galbraith, describing the platform as one that "fully modernizes the technology and includes "our vaunted search engine."
"While we're all thrilled for our customers to experience this new Walmart.com, updating the experience that millions of customers depend on isn't something we take lightly and we're therefore being very deliberate about how we roll out these changes, taking it a step at a time and working closely with customers to get their input and making improvements as we go.
The blog post promises to keep consumers and fans updated as the redesign effort continues.
