Walmart creates metaverse shop for college students, influencers
Walmart is expanding its "Walmart Realm" immersive shopping environment for back-to-college season.
The discount giant, which launched Walmart Realm, a 3-D virtual shopping environment curated by digital influencers and built upon the Emperia metaverse platform in partnership with Sawhorse Productions, in May 2024, is introducing "Your Dorm Your Way," the second phase of the initiative.
Accessible on a dedicated website, Walmart Realm offers a selection of three 3-D animated shops, each with its own theme and with an assortment created by a different influencer or team of influencers.
Each shop offers a rotating 180-degree view and items customers can click on to obtain detailed views and add to their shopping cart. In a gamification element, visitors can also click on “sparks” (representations of the Walmart symbol) and collect them to win prizes.
In an email to Chain Store Age, Emperia said that college students can now explore and shop five brand-new virtual, immersive dorm rooms inspired by social trends and curated by popular digital college creators including Trinity Aniyahh, Study Moofin, The Bee Kid, and Jellybean Celine. Virtual Your Dorm Your Way shopping environments include:
- Sanrio – a “fantastical cotton candy and rainbow escape.”
- Serene Retreat – a “cozy and comfortable soft living oasis.”
- Royal –“smart and eclectic with a preppy twist.”
- Y2K – featuring trends and products from the early 2000s
- LoFi –a gamer-themed environment inspired by neon lights and arcades.
Each dorm also includes a mini game, such as “Byte-sized Crush” in Y2K, as well as surprise features such as transporting inside a doll house in Royal, native social content from Walmart’s creators, and more.
[READ MORE: Walmart expands metaverse, influencer efforts with Walmart Realm]
"Walmart Realm, powered by Emperia, continues to embrace the limitless possibilities of virtual technologies, allowing us to create stunning immersive commerce experiences to inspire our customers and shorten the distance between inspiration & commerce as they shop online," Justin Breton, director of brand experiences & strategic partnerships, Walmart, said in the email.
Walmart pursues influencer, virtual commerce
Walmart has been actively expanding the channels it uses to conduct commerce. In late 2022, it rolled out a program called Walmart Creator, designed to make it easy for social media influencers and content creators to monetize shoppable products from the retailer.
Creators who sign up have access to tens of thousands of products and can earn commissions on sales they refer. The discounter has also engaged in a number of livestream sales programs with influencers across several social media and live commerce platforms.
In the area of virtual commerce, Walmart recently stepped up its metaverse commerce efforts with a groundbreaking initiative on the popular Roblox immersive gaming platform.
The retailer, which debuted in the metaverse by launching two new metaverse experiences on Roblox in September 2022 and announced in September 2023 that it would deepen its commercial activity in "virtual worlds," became the first entity to sell select physical items on Roblox.
Walmart’s IRL commerce shop in the experience enables Roblox users to check out the real world items chosen by its partner user generated content (UGC) creators, MD17, Junozy & Sarabxlla.
The company has also tested immersive commerce in a variety of online worlds, including the Supercampus gamified Roblox environment. And in January 2024, Walmart began providing developers in the Unity real-time 3D development environment the ability to integrate its commerce application programming interfaces (APIs) directly into their games and apps.
This will enable Unity creators to sell physical items in real-time 3D experiences across more than 20 metaverse platforms.
Headquartered in Bentonville, Ark., Walmart Inc. operates approximately 10,500 stores and numerous e-commerce websites in 19 countries.