Walmart

Dallas -- X Team International announced that partner Venture Commercial Real Estate completed three retail anchor leases for landlords and tenants, totaling 110,000 sq. ft. across Texas.

Walmart signed a ground lease to build a 42,000-sq.-ft. Walmart Neighborhood Market store at the site of a former Brookshire Brothers at 1030 N. University Drive in Nacogdoches.

Hobby Lobby signed a lease to open a 50,200-sq.-ft. store at 2200 S. Loop 256 in Palestine.

Mississauga, Canada – Walmart Canada is looking to extend its omnichannel grocery experience.

Starting on July 7, customers will be able to place online grocery orders for select product, including fresh food, for pickup in six stores in the Ottawa area. An additional five stores will offer the service starting on July 21. The pickup fee is $3 and customers will be able to order up to 21 days in advance.

Bangalore, India – Image is important, and that extends to mobile commerce. Indian e-commerce platform Flipkart is recognizing the importance of image for its mobile shoppers by rolling out image search on its mobile app, using ViSenze technology for visual search and image recognition.

The newly introduced image search allows users to upload photos of fashion items and find similar products in terms of color, pattern or style inside the Flipkart merchandise database. This eliminates keyword searches, simplifying the search process.

Walmart has experimented with grocery delivery and store pick up in the U.S. for several years and now it is testing the waters in Canada.

Walmart chose Ottawa, a medium-sized city an hour west of Montreal in the French-speaking province of Quebec, as the first market in Canada to receive the Online Grocery Pickup service. Eleven stores in the city are part of the program. Six locations are scheduled to go live on July 7 with another five stores due to come online July 21. Walmart operates 395 stores throughout Canada.

Ottawa, Canada – Home Depot is narrowing its price gap with Amazon.com, which typically offers the lowest overall prices on home improvement goods.

 According to a recent study from pricing analytics provider 360pi, “Building Up to Home Improvement Season,” Home Depot was the most aggressively priced home improvement “category killer,” with an average price of just more than 5% above Amazon, narrowing down to around 3% above Amazon by the end of the sampled period (May 1 – June 16, 2015).

It might seem counterintuitive to suggest that Houston, the nation’s fourth most populous city, is ever in danger of being overlooked, but the reality is that, for a long time, this rapidly growing Texas metropolis has frequently not been thought about in the same category as its peers. That is changing, however, and in many ways Houston has become that gateway market it has always longed to be. With the kind of population growth the city has been experiencing, population projections of 8 million - 9 million people in the not-too-distant future do not seem too far-fetched.

Walmart is appealing to suppliers – even those who don’t sell it merchandise – to share their complete product catalog with the company in the name of providing shoppers accurate, up-to-date and comprehensive information.

The goal of a new pilot program according to a blog post on Walmartlabs.com written by global head of content acquisition, Ram Rampalli, is to solve a universal problem by delivering exceptional product content.

With many retailers such as Walmart and Target focused on opening smaller stores, Midwest supermarket operator Roundy’s is thinking big in Chicago with its newest Mariano’s location.