Walmart Seeks to Unify Bricks and Clicks with new App.

Here's the original article:

Walmart's Store Assistant brings in-store value to mobile app

https://www.retaildive.com/news/walmarts-store-assistant-brings-in-store-value-to-mobile-app/516730/

Here's what it means for marketers:
One of the biggest pushes in e-commerce today is omni-channel or unified commerce.  This means creating a single commerce experience for consumers with multiple touch points.  Consumers don't care if they buy an item online or in-stores, they want marketing and customer service to bridge this into a unified experience.  They want to be able to buy online and return in store, or having a customer service agent in a call center look up their last brick-and-mortar purchase to reorder online.  

This presents a series of channels for brands as they typically do not have consolidated point of sale systems and CRM platforms.  Legacy platforms create redundant entries for consumers making it hard for brands to discern if there's one 'John Smith' or a million.  

Walmart's Store Assistant presents an interesting opportunity for the brand to not only achieve a truly unified commerce experience, but also provide a consolidated customer record and increased customer service touch points.  The mechanism for engagement with the consumer is built of streamlined checkout and order history, but the beauty of this app for Walmart is accurate customer data on an emerging platform.  The app will carry from one device to another and offer a doorway to marketing opportunities and features and enhancements.  Walmart can easily move into push notifications when they become more readily adopted by marketers.  It can also introduce new payment platforms as they come online.  Further more, it gets access to a whole host of customer information that can be used for predictive analysts.  And finally, the app offers additional triggers for marketing journeys that could use geo-locative or beacon technologies.  Suppose a customer looks at an item in-store, a beacon could trigger an email to 'save for later'.