Walmart has created an e-commerce group to drive global online sales as part of significant structural changes at the company.
The organization, called Global.com, will be responsible for bolstering online growth in markets where the retailer has stores and a Web presence, as well as those where it doesn’t. The company will also be split into three geographic business units — Walmart West, Walmart South and Walmart North.
Raul Vazquez, president and CEO of Walmart.com, will become EVP and president of Walmart West.
Wan Ling Martello, former CFO of Walmart International, will serve as EVP and COO of Global.com. Her responsibilities will include developing a global e-commerce strategy, establishing cross-border Walmart relationships to increase online sales efficiencies and creating technology platforms and applications that can be used in each Walmart market.
Walmart’s product management, application development, platform engineering and strategy teams will become part of Global.com and report to Martello.
“Online shopping has continued to significantly outpace the growth of traditional retail channels around the world,” said Eduardo Castro-Wright, Walmart’s vice chairman, in a memo available on the company’s Web site. “In order to fully evolve into a multichannel retailer here in the US, we need to make our organization, particularly in merchandising and marketing, channel-agnostic.”
The retailer has e-commerce Web sites in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, Japan, Mexico, Puerto Rico and the UK.
Phone calls to Walmart seeking comment were not immediately returned.
