Tom Ward, Walmart | Modern Retail Vanguard 2024
This is part of the Modern Retail Vanguard, a series highlighting the behind-the-scenes talent powering the world’s top retail brands. More from the series →
Besides being the largest big-box retailer in the world, Walmart’s sights have been set on becoming more of an omnichannel retailer, embracing e-commerce and advertising like Amazon. For the supercenter giant, that means bridging together several complex components: more than 4,600 stores across the U.S., a large network of fulfillment centers and a marketplace of third-party sellers.
Tom Ward, executive vice president and chief e-commerce officer for Walmart U.S., is tasked with distilling all those operations into one unified shopping experience, offering tens of millions of products in just one search bar.
Since 2022, Ward has led Walmart’s digital business, from pickup and delivery services to its third-party marketplace. A United Kingdom native, he started his career in Walmart’s U.K. subsidiary, Asda, and moved to the U.S. in 2013. He helped launch the Walmart Academy training program for store and supply chain workers as well as Walmart’s delivery gig network, Spark, in 2018.
“Wherever we help connect the dots between our online and offline assets more seamlessly, we see people reward us with their business,” Ward says. “A lot of the roles I’ve had have been focused on connecting those dots better and optimizing that relationship so that we can produce a great experience.”
Ward has driven significant changes to how Walmart handles pickup and delivery. In 2021, he streamlined order pickup, removing giant vending machine-like towers the company previously used for online orders and focusing on curbside. In 2020, he oversaw the merger of Walmart’s previously separate apps for grocery items and products shipped from fulfillment centers, coincidentally as more customers turned to the retailer for food and essentials.
Under Ward’s leadership, Walmart’s annual e-commerce sales growth in the U.S. has increased from 11% in 2021 to 22% so far this year, led by pickup, delivery and the marketplace, per financial filings.
Moving forward, Ward aims to continue removing friction from the shopping experience by using new technology like generative AI, which the retailer has already started implementing into its search features and product listings.
“There are a lot of things that have changed in retail in the time that I’ve been at Walmart,” Ward says. “The one thing that hasn’t changed is customers’ expectations only go up.”