Discovery shopping with Pinterest’s more useful “Product Pins”

An experiment we’re “inspired” to explore here @WalmartLabs is discovery shopping. How can we offer solutions that make the shopping experience visually inspiring, fun and helpful? That’s why we’re excited Walmart.com is among one of the first websites to unveil “product pins” today on Pinterest. 

With these more useful pins, people can now view more product information on Walmart’s pins, including the product’s every day low price. Get started by following us on Pinterest.

We’ve started experimenting with discovery shopping when we noticed Pinterest users were pinning product images from Walmart.com without our help. Products that were pinned ranged from everyday products to surprisingly practical discoveries.

For one of our first Pinterest experiments, we curated popular Walmart.com pins into an inspired shopping experience called Spark Studio. Here, shoppers could be inspired by Walmart shoppers on Pinterest. 

We’ve heard some amazing feedback from our users so far about their discoveries. Comments like “I never knew Walmart sold that” or “I discovered this product was much less expensive than I realized” demonstrated the power of the crowd and the thrill of discovery shopping.

We’re also experimenting with Pinterest and discovery shopping on our Walmart.com home page. When we launched a new design for Walmart.com earlier this month, we unveiled a new “Trending” tab that provides a dynamic snapshot of Walmart.com products that are currently trending based on recent pins from Pinterest.

We’re excited to continue leveraging these better product pins to inspire our shoppers and direct qualified traffic to Walmart.com. Watch for more inspirations to come out from @WalmartLabs this year. 

Continuing to accelerate in e-commerce with some new additions – welcome OneOps and Tasty Labs!

For those that have followed our journey, you know we’re focused on building best-in-class ecommerce capabilities and combining them with Walmart’s best-in-class retail assets to deliver unmatched customer experiences.  And we’re moving fast by building our team organically and by strategically adding technology and talent through key acquisitions.  

Along those lines, we’re excited to announce two new additions to the @WalmartLabs (the technology arm of Walmart Global eCommerce) family that will help us further accelerate our ability to innovate and bring new experiences to our customers around the world.  The first is the acquisition of OneOps, which has developed a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) capability that enables us to significantly accelerate our PaaS and Private Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) strategies.  Click here for more information.

The second is the acquisition of Tasty Labs, a software applications developer based in Mountain View, CA which has pioneered more effective ways to connect people via social software.  We’ll be adding some of Silicon Valley’s brightest innovators to accelerate our delivery of new products, both within the Products organization as well as our Mobile team led by Gibu Thomas.  Click here for more information. 

These additions show our commitment to delivering best-in-class technology by attracting some of the best people in Silicon Valley…because we offer the unique opportunity to innovate at a massive, global scale and solve interesting challenges that improve the lives of millions of people at a time.  Our journey continues, with even more wind in our sails.

@WalmartLabs has Good Taste

In November 2010, three ex-Mozillians founded two different start-ups in Palo Alto: Set Direction and Tasty Labs. The former, created by Dion Almaer and myself, joined Walmart just six months later as part of a series of acquisitions that have formed @WalmartLabs, the technology arm of Walmart Global eCommerce.

The other start-up, Tasty Labs, was founded by our fellow Mozilla colleague Nick Nguyen together with del.icio.us creator Joshua Schachter and HousingMaps creator Paul Rademacher. Dion and I compared notes with Nick as we progressed on our journeys, and we watched with interest as Tasty Labs released a series of innovative products over the past two years.

I'm pleased to announce that as of today, @WalmartLabs gains some additional flavor as Walmart Global eCommerce has acquired Tasty Labs.

It's hard to overstate my excitement to work with this crew! Nick is a super-star product leader who made his mark at Yahoo! and later Mozilla, gaining the respect of his colleagues and the loyalty of his teams for his hard-working, humble approach to getting great results.

While working on animated features like Shrek 2 at DreamWorks, Paul Rademacher created a little side project named HousingMaps, that combined Craigslist and Google Maps to plot rentals on a map. HousingMaps was a pioneer of the Ajax revolution and spawned the mash-up category that Douglas Crockford has called the most exciting development in modern web development. Both he and Nick are joining as full-time associates.

Joshua Schachter is also well-known for a side project: he created del.icio.us, itself a highly influential innovation that pioneered what Tim O'Reilly and others have called "folksonomies." He will join as a consultant. 

With this acquisition, we're accelerating our efforts to bring delightful and innovative e-commerce experiences to our customers worldwide.

OneOps is joining @WalmartLabs

We are delighted that OneOps is now part of @WalmartLabs, the technology arm of Walmart Global eCommerce! This company has put an innovative twist on the way product releases are managed – offering technology that automates and accelerates many processes related to environment management, application deployment and the monitoring of datacenter operations. OneOps will help us deliver on our plans to bring together best-in-class retail with best-in-class e-commerce to create amazing experiences for customers. We are proud to have them on-board and joining our talent-filled team.

                 

We’re not the only ones who think this technology is great. OneOps was a finalist in the GigaOM LaunchPad Competition and was recognized as one of the 12 Hot Cloud Computing Companies Worth Watching by NETWORKWORLD.

Co-founders Kire Filipovski, Vitaliy Zinchenko, and Mike Schwankl – technology veterans with proven experience developing software automation solutions – have re-imagined application management in the era of cloud computing. Their expertise and track record for success are welcome additions to a high-performing team helping millions of people “save money and live better.”

With OneOps, we will continue to find new and exciting ways to serve customers. Please join us in welcoming OneOps to Walmart!