Communications is at the heart of e-commerce and community.  ~ Meg Whitman

Have you used your smart phone or tablet to enhance your shopping experience?  Walmart, a powerhouse in the retail space, has been focused on making a splash in e-commerce, having been selected by U.S. News & World Report as one of America’s Most Connected Companies.  After all, the largest retailer already has a significant online customer pool from which to draw upon, with 1.5 billion annual website visits and 10% of its global customers shopping on the Internet.  According to David Hatch’s reporting Walmart hopes to best its rival Amazon, by taking its “bricks and clicks” strategy a step further via its innovative research division WalmartLabs.

Retail is all about connections, noted Anand Rajaraman, an acclaimed Silicon Valley entrepreneur, during an interview on NBC’s Press:Here.  To cash in on the shopping trends of mobile and social media, WalmartLabs is developing an e-commerce toolkit that maximizes the product to customer connection.  It all starts with The Social Genome, Walmart’s search for elementary relationships amongst the social universe of tweets, Facebook messages, blog posts, YouTube videos; you name it.  The result is an app such as Shopycat, designed to create a unique gifting experience by analyzing the likes of your Facebook friends.  Not to mention, its social Get on the Shelf competition, offered contestants a golden opportunity to get their products on Walmart shelves.

So, do you check your cell phone for the latest deals?  Have you used any social gifting apps, such as Shopycat?  Share your thoughts on e-commerce and social media.

Vanaja R.

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