Walmart.ca Grocery and Marketplace

Walmart Canada expanded its e-commerce capabilities by launching both Marketplace and Grocery delivery services.

Walmart Canada was established in 1994 and has grown to more than 400 locations, serving over 1.2 million customers daily. Its online store, walmart.ca, draws 600,000 customers daily. And with more than 95,000 associates, Walmart Canada is one of Canada’s largest employers and ranks among the most influential brands. 

Overview

Walmart Canada’s online presence was already substantial, attracting over 10 million unique monthly visitors. However, expanding the platform to include both grocery delivery and a third-party marketplace presented a significant UX challenge: seamlessly integrating these complex, distinct experiences into a unified checkout flow.

Key Challenges

The primary challenge was seamlessly merging three very distinct shopping experiences—Marketplace, Grocery Delivery, and standard Walmart.ca products—into a single cohesive checkout flow. Each experience brought its own unique set of complexities:

• Marketplace Integration: Third-party sellers each had unique shipping policies, varying delivery fees, shipping timelines, and return protocols. Clearly communicating this varied information to users, without overwhelming or confusing them, required careful UX consideration and precise information architecture.
• Grocery Delivery: Introducing grocery products added the complexity of rapid, same-day fulfillment, with users needing clear visibility into available delivery windows, order cutoff times, and real-time inventory updates. Balancing this level of urgency and transparency with the existing checkout flow created additional UX constraints.
• Unified Checkout Experience: The ultimate UX challenge was ensuring users could effortlessly navigate scenarios where their carts might contain products from all three categories simultaneously. Our team had to design a streamlined, intuitive solution that communicated all relevant details—such as different delivery dates, shipping costs, and restrictions—clearly and concisely, while maintaining Walmart’s existing checkout standards.

Roles and Responsibility

My role involved deeply analyzing business requirements and user needs to define and design an intuitive checkout experience accommodating three distinct shopping scenarios: standard Walmart products, grocery deliveries, and third-party marketplace offerings. Given that each marketplace seller had unique policies, shipping timelines, and additional fees, clear communication was essential to maintain customer trust and avoid confusion.

To achieve this, I facilitated collaborative workshops involving multidisciplinary teams and stakeholders from various internal departments. These sessions ensured alignment on business goals, risks, constraints, and requirements early in the design process.

My responsibilities included:

• Conducting extensive user journey mapping to clarify complex user scenarios.
• Regularly presenting design rationale and progress updates to stakeholders to secure alignment and buy-in at every stage.
• Creating detailed user flows to visualize and align stakeholders on the checkout process.
• Producing iterative, high-fidelity prototypes for continuous validation.
• Leading rigorous user testing sessions to quickly identify friction points, refine usability, and enhance clarity before development began.

Impact

The redesigned checkout experience launched successfully, immediately allowing Walmart Canada to debut its marketplace with an impressive initial offering of 650,000 SKUs across 20 handpicked sellers.

Within a year, the effectiveness of this streamlined UX became clear as Walmart.ca rapidly scaled, reaching over 3.5 million SKUs and onboarding 400 third-party sellers.

“Expanding into online groceries and a seller marketplace has been central to Walmart Canada’s growth strategy, driving significant online traffic and sales. These initiatives have strengthened Walmart’s competitive position in Canadian e-commerce.”

This growth propelled Walmart Canada to become one of the highest-grossing online marketplaces in Canada, particularly for merchants using Shopify and BigCommerce platforms, significantly enhancing Walmart’s competitive edge in both e-commerce and online grocery markets.