Walmart

Lawrenceville, N.J.  – A new GS1 US standard offers a common approach for listing and classifying products across all e-commerce platforms. Developed in collaboration with 18 companies, including Best Buy, Bing, CNET, eBay, Google, and Wal-Mart, the GS1 US Simple Product Listing helps ensure that products are accurately represented across all sales channels and are more easily discoverable by search engines and consumers.

Lower gas prices led to improved traffic and a 1.1% same store sales increase at Walmart’s U.S. stores division, but total company performance suffered under the weight of a $3.3 billion foreign exchange impact and expense pressures which caused profits to decline 7%.

Bentonville, Ark. – Declining gas prices helped U.S. same-store sales at Wal-Mart Stores Inc., but the negative impact of foreign currency exchange and efforts to improve store experience and employee wages dampened total sales and operating profits.

Walmart is reportedly testing an unlimited shipping service that could undercut Amazon Prime.

Bentonville, Ark. – Walmart will test a free online shipping service in summer 2015 that will serve as a competitor to the Amazon Prime service from Amazon.com. The service will only cost $50 for a year’s subscription, as compared to $99 for Amazon Prime.

Austin, Texas – Video and text messaging app Tango is partnering with Wal-Mart and Alibaba to offer full e-commerce functionality inside the Tango app. Tango is rolling out functionality to U.S. users, which will provide them with the ability to browse and purchase items available from Wal-Mart and the AliExpress international shopping site, which is hosted by Alibaba.

Walmart is partnering with Chinese e-commerce powerhouse Alibaba to allow customers to make purchases using mobile devices in 25 of its stores in southern China.

Bentonville, Ark. – Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is partnering with the Alipay payment services subsidiary of Alibaba Holding Group to offer a new mobile payment option in some Chinese Wal-Mart locations. Customers at 25 Wal-Mart stores in the Chinese city of Shenzhen in southern China are now able to use the Alipay mobile wallet to pay for purchases.