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. Visitors can now connect from Roblox directly into Walmart’s e-commerce platform to buy the physical products, such as purses, water bottles, or headphones. After purchasing a physical product, the buyer unlocks a virtual item for their Roblox avatar to hold or wear. This approach gives Roblox creators a platform to showcase their work and to engage with their fans in new ways.

“If you’re building something for the community, they need to have a seat at the table in terms of what you’re building,” said Justin Breton, director of brand experiences and partnerships at Walmart. “For Walmart Discovered, it’s no longer Walmart saying, ‘Here’s a virtual item.’ It’s Walmart saying, ‘We’ve partnered with a creator you know and trust, and this is their virtual item.’”

The community engagement strategy worked: Walmart Discovered had a 96% approval rating, with 24 million total visits, as of September 2024. In a December 2023 report that Walmart commissioned in partnership with Roblox, YouGov Research found that nonshoppers (people who had never shopped at Walmart before) were 2.85 times more likely to shop at Walmart in-store or online after visiting the virtual world.

Concurrently with its Roblox implementations, Walmart launched another VR digital destination, called The Cultureverse, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of hip-hop in 2023 and complement the company’s Black & Unlimited initiative. For this immersive experience, Walmart chose the Spatial platform, which had 2 million users in 2023. This virtual world was also cocreated with the community.

Walmart, in partnership with POC Lab, commissioned Black artists to create works inspired by the questions “What does Black & Unlimited mean to you?” and “What is the future of hip-hop?” Their art, words, and sounds are featured in the virtual world. According to Spatial data, The Cultureverse has been visited nearly 100,000 times, making it the most-visited brand experience on the platform, with average visits lasting more than seven minutes.

Walmart Launches Its Own Immersive Commerce Platform

For those early experiments, Walmart selected existing VR platforms because of their large communities. However, the company launched its own immersive commerce platform, Walmart Realm, in May 2024. It is the first social trend-inspired and creator-curated immersive commerce platform to be created by a brand.

To develop Walmart Realm, the retailer commissioned female social influencers to curate three fantastical virtual worlds, each inspired by social trends identified in the annual Pinterest Predicts report. One virtual storefront is a magical aquarium where users are in the water; another is a gothic version of the United States’ Wild West frontier; and the last is a chromatic, metallic, and glitzy realm in outer space. These virtual storefronts have a consistent layout that displays each influencer’s curated products from Walmart’s fashion, beauty, and home collections. The influencers use their social media channels to drive traffic to the platform.

Walmart Realm launched with about 100 products across the three virtual storefronts. The company then used analytics to inform revisions and expansions, such as better navigation features to help shoppers find other virtual storefronts. In August, Walmart partnered with influencers to add five virtual storefronts featuring college dorm room designs for back-to-school shoppers.

Five Early Lessons on Immersive Commerce

If your company is exploring the potential of immersive commerce, consider these five lessons that emerged from Walmart’s experience.

1. Align immersive commerce strategy with business strategy.

Marketing leaders need to design immersive commerce experiences that support the company’s strategic direction. Walmart’s three immersive commerce initiatives support its strategic aims to build a positive brand association with the next generation of consumers and to be viewed as a digital destination.

The marketing team focused on the company’s strategic priorities in fashion, beauty, and home collections for the launch of Walmart Realm and identified social influencers who aligned with the brand. Within each category, the team curated a list of products based on strategic partnerships with the suppliers and presented that list to influencers to make the final selections. Building on insights gained from these early investments, Walmart could further expand the platform by inviting affiliate marketers and content creators to develop and manage their own storefronts.

2. Create more than a digital twin of your brick-and-mortar store.

With immersive commerce, marketing leaders must decide not only the products to feature but also how to display those products to customers. Some retailers may see creating virtual stores that resemble physical stores as the simplest solution (because current customers are already familiar with store layouts). Furthermore, plenty of merchandise can be displayed in a virtual version of a traditional store format.

Walmart, however, wanted to create imaginative destinations that would give the next generation of shoppers reasons to visit frequently. Roblox users, for example, often express themselves beyond the real world in creative ways with their avatars.

“You can’t create an aquarium in a real Walmart parking lot,” Breton said. “In Walmart Realm, we can invite customers into our underwater environment where they’re discovering colorful jumpsuits and beach-inspired hair accessories. We’re pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. It’s nascent, but our goal is to shorten the distance between inspiration and commerce.”

3. Design accessible, frictionless, and secure experiences.

Marketing leaders have to choose how immersive commerce experiences will be accessed — through web browsers, mobile apps, or VR headsets. The first two options are more accessible and familiar, whereas VR headsets offer the deepest level of immersion.1 Walmart decided to prioritize accessibility and familiarity, making its immersive commerce experiences available through web browsers and mobile apps.

However, while visitors can’t explore Walmart Realm using a VR headset today, the company is using technology that can be ported to VR headsets later, as adoption of wearable devices grows.

To offer frictionless checkout to Realm shoppers, Walmart used its own e-commerce shopping cart, APIs, and product recommendation system to help shoppers discover similar products. So while the front end looks futuristic to the visitor, the back end is built on the retailer’s established technology, for security’s sake.

4. Leverage new analytics to drive the creative concept and inform expansion.

Marketing leaders exploring immersive commerce will need strong analytics capabilities, including new metrics that are specific to virtual worlds.

Walmart’s marketing team analyzes data from social media to inform the creative concept. Walmart Realm was driven by social trends and Pinterest influencers; Walmart Discovered on Roblox was driven by a variety of statistics. For example, Walmart had data that showed that younger generations positively associate Walmart with a physical shopping cart, which informed its Glide & Seek game in Walmart Discovered.

Once an experience launched, Walmart used a variety of analytics to inform revisions and expansions. The marketing team analyzed traditional social media metrics, like the number of daily visitors and average time spent in the experiences, but it also needed to build new analytics capabilities specific to immersive commerce. For help with this, the team engaged GEEIQ, a company that provides a platform, expertise, and insights for brands in virtual worlds.

Immersive commerce metrics Walmart is using include the following:

• Percentage and frequency of visitors who change the appearance of their avatars.
• Number of customers who try virtual items on their avatars before purchases.
• Visitor engagement points (where people go and what they do in the experience).
• Effectiveness of “portals” (the gateways that let avatars enter and exit virtual worlds).

These analytics inform decisions about how to change the experience. For example, data indicating that visitors change their avatars frequently led Walmart to also provide them with the ability to customize their virtual shopping carts for further self-expression. Walmart also changed where avatars enter in Walmart Discovered to improve navigation.

Overall, Walmart prioritizes actions that improve experience quality — like changes that increase the time spent in the experience and the percentage of repeat visitors — over actions that simply increase the quantity of daily visitors.

5. Seek continual input from the community.

Walmart learned to engage with community members throughout the life cycle of an experience’s ideation, creation, launch, and expansion. For the Roblox platform, the marketing team’s guiding principle is now “for the community, by the community.” Walmart Discovered has featured more than 300 Roblox creators and developers and actively engages with 34,000 members on its Discord channel. Walmart hadn’t previously engaged with consumers via Discord, a popular social media platform for Roblox users.

“It’s important to have a plan before launching on a new social media platform,” Breton said. “You need a road map for content and engagement.” Over time, Walmart added features to its Discord channel to further engage the community, such as organizing Glide & Seek tournaments where users race personalized virtual shopping carts. These tournaments feature “creator of the month” and “cart of the month” titles. Additionally, active members on Discord get early access to new features and virtual items before they’re widely introduced, an approach that provides Walmart with early feedback.

For the creators who selected and built the digital twins of physical products for real-world commerce on Walmart Discovered, one benefit has been an increase in Roblox followers. “It’s hard for somebody who aspires to be an influencer to become an influencer overnight,” Breton said. “We are helping members of the Roblox community to be discovered on a platform they know and love.”