Since Walmart Data Ventures launched in Canada in 2024, its Scintilla platform has helped democratize Walmart’s first-party data and empowered suppliers and merchants to keep the customer at the heart of every decision.
While Scintilla’s Channel Performance and Shopper Behaviour solutions have been available in the market, Walmart Data Ventures has launched its Scintilla Digital Landscapes solution in Canada.
Powered by pre-purchase behavioural data from Walmart.ca and the Walmart mobile app, Scintilla Digital Landscapes can reveal meaningful insights, like how customers enter the sales funnel and where they might fall out of it, uncovering new ways to attract customers and grow a business, said the retailer.
With Scintilla Digital Landscapes, users can answer key questions like:
- How are shoppers finding my brands and products?;
- What does the shopper’s path-to-purchase look like, and how likely are they to buy?;
- When are my potential customers in-market?;
- How are my products performing compared to the category at large?
With this launch, Walmart Data Ventures continues to scale its Scintilla platform — delivering innovative, market-relevant solutions that help suppliers grow alongside Walmart Canada while improving the shopping experience for customers at every touchpoint, it said.
Jaed Khan, VP, Data Office, Walmart Canada, said Scintilla is a platform that Walmart developed globally.
“And what it does is it allows our suppliers and our merchants to really understand what the customer is doing and how we’re performing in meeting the customer’s needs,” he said.
“We have several modules in there. We have Shopper Behaviour, which is focusing on what the customer is buying and who they are. We have Channel Performance, which is showing where the products are performing across our channel — how we are performing in store, e-commerce, etc. We have Customer Perception, which is coming soon, which really helps you hear directly from the customer in terms of why they’re buying certain products.
“And the one that was recently announced is Digital Landscapes, which really is driving into our online business, our e-commerce business.
“It allows suppliers and our merchants to really understand that path to purchase — from how did they search for something, how did they come into the ecosystem, how did they land on the product — all the way down to what they’re buying. It allows us to make really informed decisions around: do we have the right product? Are we serving the customer the way they want to be served? Are we serving them where they want to be served?”
If you think about the age we’re in right now, where data is driving decisions, we’re relying more on data to really understand customer behaviour — to understand whether we’re serving the customer in the right place, for the right product, at the right time, explained Khan.
“If we think about the industry shifting, customers want speed and they want choice. What this allows us to do is have that first-party understanding of what is really happening — what does the customer really want? Where are the key friction points? Are we serving them with the right thing at the right pace, in the right moment?
“The more we can understand that, we’re able to serve the customer better because we can tune and respond to that need.”
Khan said the retailer’s mission in terms of getting data and making that available so it can make decisions around a single source of truth and a trusted data set just continues.
“This is just another module, and we’ll have other modules launching soon that really help us build out that ecosystem of what the key data points are that we need to make those decisions and help serve our customer,” he said.
“We have Customer Perception, which will be launching (in the future).
“After that, we have a plan to roll out other modules as they come out.”
As a retailer, 15 or 20 years ago, what did retailers know? They knew that they put some stuff on the shelf and it sold. They didn’t know why, to who, where, or when.
“Today we can really understand that journey. Technology is moving at an accelerated pace. When it comes to something like Scintilla, it becomes key as we’re changing that pace,” added Khan.
“Twenty years ago, technology would change at a much slower pace, and customer adoption would be slower as well. Today that is increasing exponentially. What Gen AI was doing six months ago is totally different from what it can do today. That’s an exponential shift in terms of speed.
“That also means customer behaviour and adoption are changing at an equally exponential rate. Having the data through platforms like Scintilla, which allows us to stay on top of those changes, becomes absolutely critical — to map back to how we serve the customer, where we serve the customer, and when.”
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