How Walmart Delights Half A Billion E-Shoppers Every Month: Turbocharged Cloud, System Design & More

It’s been claimed that 90 percent of Americans can find a Walmart retailer within 10 miles of where they live. In 2017, it was revealed that nearly 95 percent of Americans have purchased at least one item at Walmart.

Walmart is the largest company in terms of revenue, the biggest retailer in the world, and also the largest private employer. Walmart employs over 2.2 million employees across the US. It generated an astounding $600 billion in profits in 2022 and staggering revenue of $9 billion and has a 47 percent market share of wholesale retail transactions in the world.

In 1962, the company was established by the entrepreneur of the past, Sam Walton, Walmart is currently present in 25 countries and has 11,000 stores, in addition to its massive online presence, which has an average monthly traffic of one billion.

In the blog that follows, iTechnolabs will discuss some interesting information about how Walmart can please more than half a billion customers every month through a brief review of its system’s layout, backend, and IT infrastructure.

Let’s start by giving an introduction to Walmart’s website and online presence.

Walmart Delights: Online Presence

Okay, maybe not as huge as Amazon, however, Walmart has a huge online presence and also has millions of customers and online shoppers who purchase their goods through Walmart.com as well as their mobile app.

Walmart Mobile App

Between 300 and 550 million people go to Walmart.com as well as their mobile apps each month. (December 2021 data)

According to Investing.com, the Walmart mobile app sold $14 billion worth of goods during the twelve months of 2022, which amounts to 2.3 percent of its total revenue. Within the US, Walmart.com and its mobile application have snatched the 6.3 percent market share of all e-commerce sales.

Evolution Of Walmart.com

Walmart.com was launched in 2000. However, the management wasn’t thinking too about the potential of online sales until the year 2016, when they purchased Jet.com and boosted their online presence with just one step.

Then, Walmart started acquiring various major e-commerce giants in various nations (which includes the purchase of Flipkart in India at $16 billion)

Over 50 million items on Walmart.com and the mobile app include products that are marketed and sold by Walmart as well as a separate section on Walmart Marketplace that allows third-party sellers to sell their goods.

For Walmart’s online marketplace, Home, Books, Jewelry, and Electronics are the four largest product categories which include more than 30 million items that are listed under them.

About 150,000 sellers are listed in the Walmart Marketplace.

In the past, Walmart has adapted, changed, and redesigned its mobile and website intending to provide better-designed and personalized items for customers. For instance, in September 2022, Walmart launched “Choose Your Own Model” for online customers who are shopping for clothing, in which customers could select a model to see how the particular item will appear on their body.

A little bit of innovation here, but okay!

Walmart’s Big Push For 10X Growth: Turbocharged Cloud

In 2020 Walmart’s system engineers and developers transformed the performance and capacity of their platforms online through the transformation of these into cloud-native architecture platforms.

Initially, the Walmart mobile app was based on Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) monolith software, which couldn’t scale, and proved to be quite expensive as well.

Through the adaptation to a turbocharged Native Cloud technology, Walmart was able to increase their PVM (Page views per minute) as well as OPM (Orders per minute) by 10x and save a significant amount of time and money.

• Walmart took advantage of the scale and the power of Cloud computing, deploying Azure as well as Google Cloud Platform.
• Critical processes like Catalog Search, Cart Checkout Promotion, Payment Inventory Return, Order, and Catalog were separated and managed using Microservices to enable Containerised deployments managed by the Kubernetes platform.
• NoSQL databases were developed with features including the absence of the shared state, unlimited scalability caching when required, and a multi-region active-active deployment topology.
• From containers to databases, auto-scale was able to be used
• A more resilient system that is free of outages and errors for the user
• The service architecture owned by a single team or STOSA
• A massive automation system for system redesign as well as optimization and monitoring

For more information read How Walmart Delights Half A Billion E-Shoppers Every Month: Turbocharged Cloud, System Design & More