Walmart is teaming up with Adobe to offer small-and-midsize retailers to offer e-commerce and logistics capabilities, another weapon in the ongoing battle with Amazon’s marketplace offerings.

The world’s biggest retailer has partnered with Adobe to offer its suite of cloud-based subscription services, allowing smaller businesses to add products to the Walmart online marketplace and enable Buy Online Pick-up In Store capabilities as well as leverage Walmart’s Fulfillment Services to offer 2-day shipping nationwide.

The pitch, according to John Furner, CEO of Walmart US, is:

We’ve built new capabilities to serve the evolving needs of our own customers, and we have a unique opportunity to use our experience to help other businesses do the same. Commercializing our technologies and capabilities helps us sustainably reinvest back into our customer value proposition.

As per a blog post from Peter Sheldon, Senior Director of Strategy for Magento at Adobe, the alliance will:

Provide Best-in-class Store Pickup Experiences: Offering omni-channel services can be a complex process for retailers. By leveraging Walmart’s industry-leading fulfillment technologies, Adobe Commerce customers will be able to:

• Show store pickup eligibility and available pick-up times online.
• Offer multiple pick-up options including curbside and in-store pick-up.
• Provide store associates with advanced mobile tools to optimize pick path, multi-order pickups, validate item selection and manage substitutions.
• Enable compelling collection experiences for consumers, including order pickup communications, check-in options to notify store associates, accurate customer ETA, and arrival detection.
• Reach New Customers through Walmart’s Marketplace: Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source retail customers will soon be able to syndicate and sell their products on Walmart’s rapidly growing Marketplace, giving them access to millions of new customers who frequently shop on Walmart.com. By joining the Marketplace, our retail customers will also have access to Walmart’s Fulfillment services to offer two-day shipping to customers nationwide.

Lastly, we’re already working on consolidating our other channel solutions into a single, unified extension to enable our retail customers to easily manage multiple sales channels via a single integrated tool that provides easy, straight-forward account setup and catalog syndication.

Adobe’s retail customers in the US will be able to integrate Walmart’s omni-retail technologies in their own storefronts starting in early 2022.

My take

It’s clear why this alliance appeals to both Walmart and Adobe.

According to the latest data from Adobe Digital Economy Index, BOPIS spend now accounts for 22% of total retail activity, up from seven percent back in 2018. That’s clearly been driven in part by COVID as consumers looked for a safe way to purchase and collect goods and services, but it’s a trend that’s only likely to continue to thrive in the Vaccine Economy, on the basis of convenience alone.

Both Walmart and Adobe bring strengths to the mix. Adobe already boasts a healthy customer base in the SMB retail sector, while Walmart's much vaunted store proximity to 90% of the US population makes click-and-collect a highly viable option for such smaller partner retailers to reach their local audience as well as the scale of Walmart also opening up new market reach.

And chumming up with Walmart in this way is a win for Adobe in the increasingly competitive commerce cloud sector.