Wal-Mart Is Getting Really Serious About Tracking Customers

“We’re building a global technology platform whose goals are as simple, frankly, as they are audacious,” Neil Ashe, CEO of e-commerce, told Women's Wear Daily. “We want to know what every product in the world is. We want to know who every person in the world is. And we want to have the ability to connect them together in a transaction.”

Wal-Mart CEO Mike Duke admitted last year that he regrets not moving into online faster. The company's hesitation created an opportunity for Amazon to snap up new customers.

In addition to building a new e-commerce platform, Wal-Mart is building on its vast network of brick-and-mortar stores, writes Evan Clark at WWD.

"The company is going to continue to look to innovate in new areas, tap into its trove of data on consumers and stay attuned the mobile part of the market ... half of the firm’s customers have smartphones," Clark writes.

In the past, Wal-Mart's e-commerce business has been criticized for being behind the times.

But now, the retailer is catching up, trying out lockers (which Amazon put on the map), and testing same-day delivery.

Wal-Mart is at an advantage because it has nearly unlimited resources with which to recruit talent and implement new programs.

It also has more customers, and thus more customer data, than any other retailer in the world.

But the company will give e-commerce the same careful attention it applied to its brick and mortar locations.

“We started in the discount stores. We moved into warehouse clubs, we moved into grocery and now international. The abilities that we built in the other waves of retail we’re building at e-commerce now,” Ashe told WWD.