WALMART AND GOOGLE JOIN FORCES TO COMPETE AGAINST AMAZON
Walmart has teamed up with one of Amazon’s biggest rivals in terms of voice assistant technology: Google. The company announced on their blog that shoppers would be able to buy Walmart products by speaking to their Google home products by late next month.
Walmart customers can link their accounts to Google, allowing the technology company to learn their past shopping behavior to better predict what they want in the future.
Shoppers would buy items through Google Home, the company’s voice-controlled speaker and a rival to Amazon’s Echo. The discount company’s plan is to ultimately have customers shop through Google Assistant, the artificially intelligent software assistant found in smartphones running Google’s Android software.
As they are trying to grow their online presence and competing with Amazon, this partnership with the world’s largest search engine, Google, makes sense. It is a way for Walmart to adapt to how consumers are shopping and offer customers the service offered at Amazon.
According to a 2016 survey, 55 percent of Americans begin their online shopping trips on Amazon and Amazon shoppers spend an average of $157 each month, in comparison with $27 at Walmart.
Walmart is raising the stakes not only through their partnership with Google, but by joining in on the voice-activated products.
THOUSANDS OF ITEMS OFFERED THROUGH GOOGLE ASSISTANT
Marc Lore, President and CEO Walmart U.S. eCommerce, wrote in the Walmart blog, “When it comes to voice shopping, we want to make it as easy as possible for our customers. That’s why it makes sense for us to team up with Google. They’ve made significant investments in natural language processing and artificial intelligence to deliver a powerful voice shopping experience.”
Walmart is offering hundreds of thousands of items for voice shopping through Google Assistant, which is the largest number of items currently offered by a retailer through the Google platform. Google announced that it would delete its membership fee and shipping is free, as long as customers spend a retailer’s minimum, which is $35 for Walmart.
The companies also announced that Google would start offering Walmart products to customers who shopped on Google Express, the company’s online shopping mall.
