Faster is Better: How We Are Optimizing Walmart.com

The @WalmartLabs team has been busy delivering the next generation of commerce combining online, mobile and stores to let customers shop when, where and how they want. To do this, we are focused on being one of the top technology companies in the Silicon Valley and the world, and we are expanding our very gifted team to continue creating best-in-class e-commerce technologies.

You may have heard about some of the amazing technologies and talent we have brought in-house recently including Inkiru, OneOps and Tasty Labs. Today, I’m happy to announce that Torbit will now be joining the @WalmartLabs team.

Silicon Valley-based Torbit is a Front-End Optimization (FEO) innovator that has been focused on making the web a faster and better place. They are known for developing measurement, analytics and performance improvement tools to help companies identify and enhance their overall site performance. These advanced tools will help us create a faster, more customized and flexible experience for our online customers.

With Torbit’s Site Optimization technology, we will be able to optimize our website experience no matter where our customers are shopping – be it on a desktop, tablet or mobile phone. Torbit’s technology drastically minimizes the time customers spend waiting for a site to load by applying state-of-the-art optimization to the contents of the Web page on-the-fly, as they are delivered to the customer's browser.  For example, this optimization can dynamically minimize and compress the files the browser downloads to best fit the browser's characteristics.  By rewriting the page to best exploit the performance behavior of the Web browser requesting the page, Site Optimization can help each browser fetch and render each page as efficiently as possible. This is important because image loading results in a site experience that helps customers find what they want faster.  

With the integration of Torbit we are thrilled to welcome four new talented engineers to the @WalmartLabs team. Joining us will be Jon Fox, an avid technology entrepreneur and web developer who has spent the last 7+ years building and scaling companies and providing better content and services for websites; Mike Damm, the current head of network operations and the first engineer at OpenDNS with 14 years of experience in product and backend engineering; Tylor Arndt, a software engineer with experience in product and backend engineering, who also built a map reduce-style framework that is 10X faster than Google's BigQuery; and Frederick Mayle, a software engineer with extensive experience in information technology and computer software. 

Once again, welcome everyone!  

Mobilizing our store customers

As we continue to improve the mobile commerce experience, we’re very excited to roll out major updates to our iPhone and iPad apps for Walmart in the United States.  For the iPhone, it’s all about in-store aisle location and our new In-Store Mode.  For the iPad, we’ve introduced a new interactive Local Ad feature.  These new mobile enhancements put more power at the fingertips of our customers, allowing them to shop our brand anytime, anywhere.

iPhone: In-store Aisle Location

We’ve expanded the in-store aisle location feature to help customers easily find products on their shopping lists in our stores.  As customers add items to their mobile shopping list, they can also see the aisle where they’ll find their product.  Previously a limited beta,  we now offer the in-store aisle location feature for all U.S. stores and thousands of products across consumables, grocery, electronics and toys.

In addition, customers can set their local store within the app, plan their visit and create a shopping list at home by scanning, typing, or speaking items to buy.  One of the unique features of our app is that we pull item prices from your local Walmart store and calculate total price in real-time as items are added to shopping lists.  We’re able to do that for any of our 3,800 Walmart stores across the U.S. so no matter where you happen to be, only our app helps you see the estimated total of your Walmart shopping trip before ever leaving home. 

iPhone: In-Store Mode

This tool was specifically created to help customers while they’re shopping in our retail stores. Now, when you launch the Walmart for iPhone app from one of our stores in the U.S., you will be prompted to enter In-Store Mode.  Features include scanning – price checking from product barcodes or learning more about products and special offers displayed in-store as QR Codes – and easy access to the Local Ad product list and general store information.  

iPad: Local Ad

We’ve introduced an interactive Local Ad experience that presents our customers with a preview of store specials and featured products. The format of our iPad Local Ad will be familiar to customers who are used to flipping through our printed Local Ads. They will be able to browse our Local Ads from their iPad page-by-page, with the ability to tap on a product to view more information, and purchase the item online or by visiting the store.

You can download our iPhone and iPad apps from the App Store.

Walmart for iPhone:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/walmart/id338137227?mt=8

Walmart for iPad:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/walmart-for-ipad/id473539089?mt=8

Happy shopping!

The Community is pushing the Mobile Web Platform

At @WalmartLabs, our focus is to develop technologies that provide an innovative shopping experience to millions of users around the world. Our customers spend their time on a variety of platforms of their choosing, so we aim to be where they are. One of the key platforms is the Web, and much effort has been spent over the last few years to ensure that users visit Web sites via rich Web runtimes. The mobile Web used to be about feature phones getting minimal content, but that world has changed quickly over the last few years and the mobile device in your hand has an amazing engine that has the power to do as much as your desktop computer.

There have been a number of efforts to standardize features for the mobile Web, but none of them have taken off. Partly, this is due to the fast evolution and change from the world of WAP to the world of HTML5 on the phone. Today, it has reached a point of critical mass where people are looking to push development of the mobile Web platform. This push won't happen with only certain perspectives, and needs broad participation across the industry.

We have been talking to Facebook about the issues surrounding the mobile Web for quite some time, and I am very excited to have @WalmartLabs be a part of a new community effort, the forming of W3C Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group whose goals are clear:

Accelerate the adoption of the Mobile Web as a compelling platform for the development of modern mobile Web applications.

The Community Group will bring developers, equipment manufacturers, browser vendors, operators and other relevant members of the industry together to agree on core features developers can depend on; create related conformance test suites; and provide to W3C (and non-W3C) groups use cases, scenarios, and other input to enable successful mobile Web app development.

A critical topic to address is for most important specs to be supported across a wide range of browsers. But, support is only half the battle. The quality and performance of a feature is crucial as well. This is why we are looking forward to seeing rich test suites that go into that side of things too.

We love the Web, but users -- and thus developers -- demand that the platform evolves faster than it has to date. As we push the boundaries of the mobile Web at @WalmartLabs, we look forward to the opportunity to discuss the needs of users and developers as we work with community members to make the Web a better place.

Join us!