As the battle between Walmart and Amazon intensifies, the R&D centre of Walmart in Bengaluru is helping it to get ahead in the battle.
Various Walmart platforms like those that help it ensure best prices, online order delivery, low cost product delivery etc are developed here.
Jeremy King, CTO at Walmart, said in an interview that a technology team has configured for competitive analysis and he said that, “They have been really successful. Now we are building the new-generation version of this. We have acquired a number of companies recently (Jet.com, Modcloth, Shoebuy, Moosejaw) all of which have added millions of new products. So we have to scale the system”.
Competitive Analysis Of Other Players Is Important
Since the company is committed towards providing the products at lowest cost that’s why it has to be regularly inspected about the prices offered by other contenders including online and offline.
King said that, “Just collecting the data from all the competitors is itself a huge problem. Collecting that and matching with our prices is a huge machine learning problem. Some people might be selling it in packs of, say six, so we have to figure out what the price of one is. And do this across millions of items”.
Online platform Recode mentioned that Amazon also follows a similar algorithm that helps it to match or beat the prices from other online or physical stores. The algorithm finds out the lowest price per piece or by weight and accordingly applies it for the products available at Amazon.
Walmort’s effort to beat Amazon in past years:
- In recent years, Walmart has fortified its efforts to compete with Amazon.
- Last year, it acquired Jet.com, online retailer, at $3 billion. It also has acquired some other online players.
- Walmart offered free two day delivery to home or store for over two million products on condition that the customer spent a minimum of $35.
- The Bengaluru centre has 1200 employees dedicatedly working to give Walmart an edge over its competitors. Walmart established its Bengaluru centre five years ago, and it has already grown to 1,200 people, with 500 being added in just 2016.
King said Walmart’s sourcing engine is also built in India. King said that, “If I’m in California and I order an iPhone case and a glass, where should I ship it from? The iPhone case is in California, but the iPhone case and the glass are in Colorado. So should I ship those in one box? And if you have ten or fifty items in your basket, and there are trucks coming from such and such places, it’s about as complex a machine learning project as you can get”.
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