Immersive Commerce: Early Lessons From Walmart

Retailers must constantly adapt to shifting consumer trends, demographics, and technological advancements. Walmart, like many other retailers, needs to connect with younger generations to ensure its future. Today, the typical Walmart shopper in the U.S. is late middle-aged and purchases products primarily through the company’s retail stores and e-commerce websites.

While older generations make most purchasing decisions in-store and on e-commerce websites, many consumers under 25 make most of their purchasing decisions based on social media recommendations and spend over 12 hours per week in virtual reality (VR) environments. To engage with them, Walmart is exploring immersive commerce, a form of online shopping that combines VR with 3D visualizations and gamification, to provide customers with an immersive way to engage and shop.

So far, the company has created immersive commerce experiences across three VR platforms, prioritizing learning and experimentation as its primary objectives. Marketing leaders and others interested in exploring immersive commerce can consider Walmart’s early lessons, ranging from the power of community input to the need for new analytics.

Walmart Meets Roblox

Walmart’s first foray into virtual worlds was Walmart Land, launched in September 2022 on the Roblox platform. The retailer selected Roblox because of its large Gen Z user base (nearly 60 million daily active users in the fourth quarter of 2022, and now more than 80 million.) But the Roblox community had a lukewarm reaction to Walmart Land, giving it only a 53.8% postexperience approval rating. Walmart’s analysis of the data — including the number of unique users, average time spent per visit, percentage of return visitors, and discourse on social media — taught its marketing team a valuable lesson: Involve the community in the creation and evolution of the virtual experience.

The company applied this lesson to improve its subsequent immersive experiences. In 2023, it launched Walmart Discovered on Roblox. This time, it designed the experience with the Roblox community by partnering with leading creators and developers to help create virtual items that users could earn during gameplay.

Next, Walmart invited select Roblox creators from its community to make virtual twins of Walmart products that they could choose from a curated list. When Roblox started testing commerce on its platform, Walmart become the first company to pilot real-world commerce.