Walmart Unlimited: The Future of Shopping or a Soon-To-Be Failed Experiment?
In the latest edition of Omni Talk’s Retail Fast Five, sponsored by the A&M Consumer and Retail Group, Mirakl, Simbe, and Ocampo Capital Chris Walton and Anne Mezzenga discuss:
🎮 Walmart just launched Walmart Unlimited, a shoppable video game experience designed to merge immersive gaming and e-commerce. But is this the future of shopping or just another metaverse experiment destined to fail? In this week's episode, sponsored by the A&M Consumer and Retail Group, Simbe, Mirakl, and Ocampo Capital, we explore whether Walmart can drive real sales through virtual experiences and if customers will actually buy products inside a game.
For the full episode head here: https://youtu.be/rTReEPz6yR8
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Transcript
Walmart has released Walmart Unlimited, a shoppable gamified miniseries.
Speaker A:According to Chainstorage, Walmart has launched an immersive in game commerce experience called Walmart Unlimited in partnership with 3D gamified media platform Spatial and the Unity Real Time 3D Development Environment.
Speaker A:For the first time ever on Spatial, players in the three episode Walmart Unlimited gamified miniseries can purchase real world goods inside of a virtual experience.
Speaker A:Each Walmart Unlimited episode takes players on a multi level journey to play, discover and support products created by Walmart suppliers.
Speaker A:After playing, users can explore the immersive commerce hub and purchase products from suppliers.
Speaker A:Chris, what do you think of Walmart's new shoppable video game experience?
Speaker A:Walmart Unlimited.
Speaker B:Get ready for this one, Ed.
Speaker A:Oh God.
Speaker B:Unlimited.
Speaker B:Unlimited.
Speaker A:Is this from a movie or something?
Speaker B:It's from Wicked.
Speaker B:Oh, a waste of money.
Speaker B:That's what I think it is.
Speaker B:And it's a, it's unlimitedly a waste of money.
Speaker B:I, I just keep going back to save two ideas that I'll say over and over again on the show or really the first one, which is how do you get traffic to it?
Speaker B:The experience was incredibly hard to find.
Speaker B:I tried to find it last night.
Speaker B:No one's going to this experience.
Speaker B:Like, there's just no way.
Speaker B:And second, as David Ritter said in our year end podcast, are you really going to get people to buy items from these virtual game experiences from Walmart?
Speaker B:I'm, I'm skeptical of that.
Speaker B:So, you know, and if Walmart, if you want to get into video game production as an extension of retail media, which is really like what, you know, you know, video games are all about at this stage, like, okay, do it, you know, but buy a gaming platform for that purpose.
Speaker B:Stop screwing around with these silly gimmicky things.
Speaker B:I mean, Generally I love 99% of the innovations Walmart, you know, puts out in the market.
Speaker B:But, but, but this in Walmart realm, they just seem so misguided to me and I, I hope, and here's the last point I make, I hope that these are just the last vestiges of like the metaverse hype.
Speaker B:Like, we're gonna stop seeing this.
Speaker B:Like, that's what I hope.
Speaker B:But I know you've been bought into these before, but I'm curious to see, like, where's your head now?
Speaker B:Because, and did you go and try and use it?
Speaker B:Because.
Speaker B:Yeah, no, no, it's going to the Spatial site to play this game.
Speaker B:Like, how are they doing that?
Speaker B:Like, I haven't watched a YouTube video and it doesn't have a leak to the site.
Speaker B:Like I was like, what is going on here?
Speaker A:Yeah, no, I mean I was really digging.
Speaker A:I like Talked to my two kids who are almost 8 and 14 last night and I was like, do you, are you on spatial?
Speaker A:Like tell me where I'm getting this wrong or where, where the opportunity lies that I just am not understanding.
Speaker A:They know Roblox.
Speaker A:I think Walmart participating in the Roblox environment, that makes more sense to me.
Speaker A:Like you said, like it's already got the traffic, people are already there and this might be a cool thing and you know, probably is a way to get some new customers who maybe wouldn't have shopped at Walmart, even aware of the Walmart brand.
Speaker A:So that's, that's fine, but I think there are much better ways to do this.
Speaker A:And like I would go back to what Denise and Candela was talking about from Walmart last week when we interviewed her.
Speaker A:How they're you know, going, they see an opportunity where they're going to start doing pop ups and experiences around New York Fashion Week to you know, draw in that new shopper who's in this case a higher income shopper, where they're going to see more traction from these types of activities than inside of a, of you know, obscure video game platform.
Speaker A:So to me it seems like this is, this was somebody that wanted to play around with an experiment and it's probably my guess would be that this is where that experiment ends and ends probably relatively soon knowing how, how quick Walmart is to, to pull things that aren't showing a return on investment.
Speaker B:Got it.
Speaker B:So this falls under the bucket of not every experiment is a good experiment for you.
Speaker B:Is that, is that, is that right?
Speaker A:I, I would, I, I don't know.
Speaker A:I, like, I'm not the creative side of me and, and again like I have, I don't know this, I don't have enough experience in these platforms.
Speaker A:Like someone had to make the business case for going forward with this experiment.
Speaker A:I think for me it's really about how quickly do you shut down the experiment versus, versus whether you did the experiment at all.
Speaker A:Like how quickly do you get your proof points and say like yeah, we're better off finding other ways to attract new customers.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:As you're talking about this, I kind of wonder if this is like the continuation of the spatial contract and somebody just didn't, you know, just have the guts to be like, let's pull this thing now.
Speaker B:You know, but maybe they will, you know, right that's kind of what I'm thinking as you're talking out and thinking out loud, so.
