Walmart updates metaverse shop for holiday season
Walmart is gearing its "Walmart Realm" immersive shopping environment for holiday shoppers.
The discount giant 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 and offered a back-to-college shopping experience in July 2024.
[READ MORE: Walmart creates metaverse shop for college students, influencers]
In an email to Chain Store Age, a representative for Emperia said Walmart Realm is now launching a holiday update which includes four new virtual shops inspired by social trends from Pinterest and TikTok, with gifts and holiday ideas curated by influencers.
Accessible on a dedicated website, Walmart Realm offers a selection of 3-D animated shops, each with its own theme and with an assortment created by a different influencer or team of influencers. The new themed shops are:
- Mountain Chalet, curated by Loi Dan
- Holiday Gathering, curated by Chasitey
- White Elephant, curated by Armin Arshe
- Sweetest Gifts, curated by Cozy K
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.
The new holiday update also includes more augmented reality-enabled products, enabling customers to see how products would look in their own personal space; a wish list feature enabling customers to create and share gift lists with family and friends; and improved product discovery.
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Walmart Realm holiday shop. -
Walmart Realm holiday shop. -
Walmart Realm holiday shop.
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 to sell physical items in real-time 3D experiences across more than 20 metaverse platforms.
