Walmart kicks off Cyber Week with Jason Derulo event

Walmart is adding another tool to its arsenal this holiday season to drum up online sales: More than 30 livestreaming events, including one with musician Jason Derulo that kicks off Cyber Week.

Over the past year, the retail giant has tested the shoppable events on different social media platforms. It hosted its first livestream last December, when it had a holiday shop-along. It enlisted influencers to host a spring beauty event on TikTok. It featured celebrity chef Ree Drummond to talk about her Pioneer Woman line of cookware and more on Facebook. In total, it has had 15 events so far.

Now, Chief Marketing Officer William White said the live events will become a bigger piece of Walmart’s digital strategy.

“If you think about the number of livestreams that we’ll be doing, the number of social commerce partners that we have, we’re really building scale at this point,” he said in an interview with CNBC. He said the retailer will step up the frequency, but does not have a set number in mind on a weekly or monthly basis.

White, an alumnus of big-box competitor Target, said he sees the events as a way to strengthen the retailer’s brand, build an emotional connection with shoppers and “shorten the distance between inspiration and purchase.”

He declined to share sales numbers, but said Walmart is seeing high conversion rates, watch times and social media followers with each event.

For Walmart, the strategy could help drive e-commerce sales. The retailer’s digital sales accelerated during the pandemic, but that growth rate has slowed significantly as more shoppers have returned to stores. E-commerce sales in the U.S. grew 79% in the fiscal year ended Jan. 31.

Yet in the most recent quarter, that growth rate dropped off and fell short of expectations. Walmart’s U.S. e-commerce sales rose by 8% year over year in the third quarter compared with estimates of 20.5%, according to Refinitiv. That was up slightly from the second quarter’s growth rate of 6%.

On a two-year basis, its U.S. e-commerce growth is large, however. That 8% growth in the third quarter is on top of 79% growth in the year-ago period. E-commerce has not yet become a profitable business for the retailer, however, and it is competing for sales with digital behemoth Amazon.

That’s one of the factors weighing down Walmart shares. The stock is down about 1% this year as of Friday’s close, compared with the S&P 500’s growth of 31% this year.

Livestreaming has become a sales driver for retailers in China, where it has been popularized by Alibaba. In the U.S., however, retailers from Macy’s-owned Bloomingdale’s to Petco have been trying to crack the code and turn the events into a more meaningful part of their businesses. Amazon has a rotating slate of QVC-like live events on its website at nearly all hours of the day.

In the U.S., the livestreaming market was worth about…