This time, we take a look at a few best practices for optimizing content on the new Walmart.com. Earlier, we examined three key facets of Walmart’s digital initiatives and glanced at how leading food and beverage, beauty, and consumer electronics brands are adapting to the new eCommerce environment. Also included is a Q/A blog post published with PlanetRetail RNG senior analyst David Gray and Clavis Insight Chief Marketing Officer Danny Silverman, as they tackle several key questions generated by attendees of our recent special edition webinar, “Winning on Walmart Part 2: Driving Traffic, Sales and Share on Walmart’s Online Properties,” which can be found here.
Walmart is in the midst of transforming itself from a traditional retail giant with the biggest brick-and-mortar network in the world and a limited eCommerce program, to an eCommerce powerhouse with physical stores. This shift looks to be the right move, as its traditional brick-and-mortar store network is experiencing slowing revenue growth. Walmart’s goal is to turn its physical network into a major asset for distribution, Last Mile Innovation, and support for the new-and-improved Walmart.com.
What all this means is that:
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Walmart.com is now positioned itself as Amazon’s main rival, and
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While it aims to equal or surpass Amazon in size, Walmart.com differs from its other pureplay competitors in subtle but significant ways, with major ramifications for brands.
In other words, Walmart.com is a completely unique eCommerce environment, and brands will have to execute a different plan to win here than their Amazon strategies. In part I of this series, we highlighted the three key spaces that differ from Amazon to Walmart: Private Brands, The Last Mile, and Content. Today we’ll take a closer look at which of these spaces brands have the most control over: content.
On the surface, the changes to the new Walmart.com seem fairly superficial. Walmart U.S. CEO Mark Lore wrote that the redesign was meant to bring ‘a more human element to the site, and ‘beauty and design’ to ‘all elements.’ Nonetheless, this new focus on aesthetic has major ramifications for brands.
First and foremost, the new site is much cleaner compared to what it replaced and to its pureplay competitors like Amazon. There are no sidebars, and a minimal header. Without the clutter to distract the consumer, the focus on Walmart.com is now all about content: snappy, informative, and with clean and attractive images of the products in action.
Titles:
Product titles are the most basic but crucial piece of content brands must optimize. First of all, the product title is the first text a consumer will see when he/she clicks through to the Product Details Page (PDP). Walmart.com’s minimalist layout means that the bullet points and long descriptions are now buried, if they’re there at all, which means that titles have to be descriptive but snappy, and with less extraneous content, they have to be searchable as well. Brands should target high-volume and relevant keywords, but at the same time can’t include too many - titles must be readable.
Images:
Images have always been the fundamental component to any good PDP (studies show that most people look at images before reading any text) and this is especially true with Walmart.com’s spartan layout. Images must be eye catching, creative, and most importantly, show products being used. This is another point of emphasis Walmart has made to differentiate the website from Amazon, and they hope that the action shots will drive buyers from the search results, to the PDP, to conversion.
Ratings & Reviews:
Likewise, Ratings & Reviews have always been a crucial component to PDP’s - shoppers are far more likely to trust a product review than the brand’s description of its own product, and many consumers scroll right to the reviews before anything else. Consumer-generated content is a point of emphasis on Walmart.com for a couple reasons. First of all, this is one space where Walmart still lags behind Amazon. Because of its reputation for generating high-quality reviews, many consumers log onto Amazon just to read the reviews. And secondly, like every other aspect of content, Walmart’s new layout means that what content remains must be of high quality. Brands should pull every lever available to them to encourage positive user-generated content.
Walmart’s pivot to digital will be lasting, and even though it is already a major player in eCommerce, it is likely that Walmart.com will continue to rapidly grow its share of the online retail market. Walmart’s lofty ambition of rivalling or even surpassing Amazon and becoming the global leader in eCommerce might very well happen in the not-too-distant future. In other words, brands must adjust and learn how to win on Walmart as soon as possible. With the changes to the new website, the surest way for brands to compete right now is to optimize content, particularly titles, images, and ratings and reviews.
And so concludes our series on Walmart. You can catch parts 1 - 5 here, download our recent white paper here for more detail on Walmart’s new online environment, and listen to our on-demand webinar, Winning on Walmart pts. 1 and 2 here.
