Walmart wins praise for digital efforts

A top digital marketing executive heaped praise on Walmart’s digital efforts at an industry event attended by executives from Amazon, eBay, Alibaba and Google who are more accustomed to such praise.

Walmart is one of my e-commerce heroes,” said Jason Goldberg, group vice president of commerce strategy with Razorfish. That’s high praise from a key executive with one of the world’s top digital marketing agencies.

Goldberg went on to declare that Walmart is, “one of the coolest, most desirable places to work in the Bay Area. They are an innovator, not a fast follower.” To back up that claim he offered two examples; Pay with Cash and Savings Catcher.

“Walmart invented a feature called Pay With Cash that has been a phenomenal success,” Goldberg said.

The Pay with Cash feature was introduced as a means to serve Walmart’s unbanked or underbanked shoppers who may not have a credit card but wanted to make an online purchase. The service also tapped into the latent fear shoppers have about using their credit cards online.

Even so, when shoppers who chose the pay with cash method got to stores, half opted to pay with a credit card, according to Goldberg, highlighting the irony that, as recent data breaches have shown, a card not present transaction executed online is more secure than in store point of sale systems.

“Another Walmart feature that I like even better is called Savings Catcher. This is a brilliant feature perfectly in line with their value proposition,” Goldberg said. His glowing comments regarding Walmart’s digital efforts came during a keynote presentation at ChannelAdvisor’s Catalyst conference, an annual event geared toward user’s of the firm’s e-commerce enabling software. The broader theme of Goldberg’s remarks had to do with the issue of trust and the tremendous role the concept of “social proof” plays in influencing the decisions shoppers make online.

“We want to know that people like us made the decision before we did and have a favorable outcome,” Goldberg said. “The most common form of social proof is ratings and reviews. Add one review to a product page and conversion goes up 10%.”

While it may seem like reviews and ratings have been in existence since the advent of e-commerce, Goldberg noted that 106 of the companies on Internet Retailer’s Top 500 rankings still don’t offer the capability.