EXCLUSIVE Q&A: Ashley Hubka, senior VP & GM, Walmart Business
The Walmart Business program seeks to help small businesses, non-profits and governmental agencies adapt to the current retail landscape.
Chain Store Age recently spoke with Ashley Hubka, senior VP & GM of Walmart Business, which was introduced in January 2023 and offers a broad assortment of millions of SKUs with categorization and navigation tailored to organizational shoppers, about the organization’s goals as well as challenges its customers face and how leading-edge technology can help them succeed.
What is the core mission of Walmart Business?
Our core mission is aligned with Walmart's overall purpose, which is we help our business, non-profit and government or public sector customers save time, money and hassle. It’s consistent with how Walmart helps people save time and live better.
For example, Walmart is overall known for assortment and price. Walmart Business has tens of millions of SKUs across categories including food, office supplies, janitorial and sanitation supplies, facility and professional needs, and electronics for the workplace.
The other thing that Walmart Business draws on from the enterprise and then apply to serve our organizational customers is our omnichannel capabilities. Our customers can shop with us online, in-store or via our Walmart Business app, and then they can have those items delivered or pick them up.
We remain on track to deliver to 95% of the U.S. within three hours by the end of this year. And that figure is not only 95% of households, it also includes our organizational buyers.
What are the major operational challenges Walmart Business sees your customers having in the next 12 months?
Our customers are, in turn, responding to their customers who expect fast service, clear communication and personalized experiences. One of the clear trends that comes out of that is that functions like procurement require time. They become strategic priorities that when done right can enable growth and free up time to focus on strategy, marketing, and revenue-generating or customer-facing activities.
We see and hear a lot around how our customers can get more efficient in their operations. Something we learned in talking to nearly 500 small business leaders is they reported spending approximately 40% of their work week on administrative and operational tasks.
None of them want to be dedicating that much time to administrative and operational tasks. They want to free that up, to spend working on strategy, to be with customers, to manage their employees.
How will Walmart Business help your customers meet those challenges?
We start with our assortment and price. However, we are providing more tools and services that simplify that purchasing process and reduces friction and frees up time.
This can include automated purchasing, such as subscriptions for essential items a business or organization could choose to have delivered on the cadence they want and in the quantity that meets their needs. Most organizations have some items that they purchase regularly and can schedule.
However, businesses are made up of people, and people have last-minute needs. Our customers also have times when they need quick delivery service, which can be in as fast as an hour in with our express delivery offering.
Small businesses also often need flexible payment options, such as the pay-by-invoice pilot we are continuing to expand. We also have spend analytics tools available to our Walmart Business Plus paid membership program participants. It allows them to track all of their Walmart Business purchases in one place and look across all the users on their account, and they can filter tor slice the data in different ways.
How can small businesses best tackle digital transformation?
Generative AI is becoming a reality. It is one of the things that is really powerful for small businesses because is it's highly democratized. You can accomplish a tremendous amount with a free version of the leading large language model tools, and if you want to do a bit more, you can pay $20 a month.
Those are levels of investment that a small business can afford. Every small business needs to think about that, but they have to think about how the technology should serve them and serve their business in much the same way that Walmart thinks about being people-led and tech-powered, and not the other way around.
Are there any future plans you can discuss?
What you will see us do in the coming year or two is become more business-to-business specific. One of the great advantages of Walmart business is how much of the Walmart enterprise and enterprise-level capabilities we can draw on, such as the existing assortment, one-piece supplier relationships, marketplace sellers, supply chain, and store footprint.
Walmart Business will continue to lean on those. But becoming more business-to-buiness specific could mean becoming more industry-specific with our assortment, or letting somebody manage many users in an account. And how can we continue to provide delivery to business-to-business customers in a way that's best suited to the quantities they're ordering and the ways in which they'd like to receive those those items?
[READ MORE: EXCLUSIVE: How Walmart Business serves commercial, nonprofit customers]
