Luminate Charter is the paid version of Luminate that offers deeper insights into the customer’s interaction with the brand in the retailer. (For more on the difference between Luminate Basic and Charter, see the section DSS, Luminate Basic, and Luminate Charter of this eBook).
The pricing for Luminate Charter is determined on a supplier-by-supplier basis, and it is derived from a percentage of the total sales that Walmart makes off of the supplier’s product (i.e. NOT a percentage of the total sales that the supplier makes to Walmart). Charter is split into three primary apps/programs:
- Shopper Behavior
- Channel Performance
- Customer Perception
In the end, all of these are designed to give special insight into the customer/supplier relationship that other competitors might not have or that some suppliers might have a hard time accessing without the insight of the retailer.
To see more detailed information and official training about these apps and programs, visit Walmart Luminate > Resources > Learn.
Shopper Behavior
The Shopper Behavior feature of Luminate Charter is an app within the Walmart Luminate domain. Its main function is to track customer behavior and consolidate that behavior into insights into which profile of shopper the supplier’s brand and/or category appeals to most.
The app is designed to:
- Show what kind of customer behavior drives brand performance
- Give suppliers a sense of their benchmark across the category
- Understand and optimize “white space” of current customers to track the impact of events on customer behavior
The shopper behavior reports are designed to address (1) Performance, (2) Trends, and (3) Profile.
Performance
This section is the one most relevant to the first bullet point listed above; it is designed to isolate the customer behaviors that impact changes in sales trends over time. The Key Measures table is the most relevant resource in the app to measure Performance.
The data in the Key Measures table is displayed in a KPI Tree, which is itself visible in identified customers (card) and hybrid (all data or total).
Exporting the data into an Excel file will give suppliers a great deal of flexibility for isolating findings and insights. Drill down into customer contributors, change across products or product groups.
Trends
Looking at KPI trends over time helps to gauge seasonal changes in customer behavior/sales. The trends module has five visualizations:
- Weekly
- Monthly
- Quarterly
- Weekly Latest vs Previous
- Rolling Contribution Chart
In Shopper Behavior, the terms “shopper data” and “customer data” are the collected data from anonymous surveys of customers. Individual surveys are not available for viewing, so that anonymity can be kept.
Shopper Behavior also utilizes a tool called Customer Segmentation, which breaks customer behavior down into groups around a single defining attribute (i.e. “Less Affluent,” “Mid-Market,” and “Upmarket”).
Profile
This section helps to identify customers by contrasting them with others across the wider category and the retailer at large. This is the benchmarking tool that Walmart has talked about as one of the major value adds of Charter.
Track which customers are most engaged with your products over time, how certain products and/or categories do over time with particular demographics, and a variety of other permutations (i.e. age, income, gender).
NOTE: At the bottom of the Profile report, Walmart has a disclaimer about the availability of shopper demographics that indicates that not all demographics are available to all suppliers:
However, the full range of demographic attributes are laid out elsewhere and available in fifteen Shopper Behavior reports:
- Performance in Detail
- Performance 100K
- Profile Express
- Multichannel
- Test and Control Evaluation
- Control Store group creation
- Basket
- Best Customers
- Cross-Shop (Products)
- Source of Value (Come From)
- Switching
- Trial and Repeat
- NPE
- Promotions
- Assortment
Each demographic is broken down into different ranges:
- Age
- 18-29
- 30-39
- 40-49
- 50-59
- 60-69
- 70-79
- 80-89
- 90+
- Unclassified
- Income
- Less than $50K
- $50K to $150K
- $150K+
- Unclassified
- Gender
- Female
- Male
- Unclassified
These demographic levers can be pulled in the Profile section of a Performance in Detail, for example, or by as a dropdown in the Profile Module or the Profile By dropdown menus across a variety of reports.
When paired with other reports, these demographics can give insights, once again, at a wide variety of granular levels. For example, if used with the Best Customers report, it could give insight into which demographics your most loyal Walmart customers belong to.
Shopper Behavior Reports and Competitor Analysis
The Shopper Behavior Reports are split into three major categories, with a number of subsets. We will cover these at a high level and highlight some of the special features of specific reports below.
- Performance Reports
- Performance (mod changes & price changes)
- Multichannel
- Hour/day
- Test & Control
- Customer Behavior
- Shop over time (recommended to use continuous panel)
- Basket
- Best Customer (recommended to use continuous panel)
- Trial & Repeat (recommended to use continuous panel)
- Switching & Switching over time
- Source of value
- Cross-shop
- Levers Diagnosis
- New Products
- Promotions
- Assortment
- Stores
The Basket Report and the Custom Groups creation function in Performance in Detail and Assortment are most helpful–when used in tandem with external data–for analyzing competitor performance across categories.
Channel Performance
The Channel Performance module is split into two main features: the Insights Dashboard and the Report Builder.
Report Builder
This section is covered in greater detail in the section “How to Pull Reports in Walmart Luminate” in this eBook. However, for suppliers who are paying for Charter, there is also the option to create up to five custom attributes.
Insights Dashboard
The Insights Dashboard gives access to in store and online data from high (channel) to granular (item) level. It consists of three main features: Global Filters, Summary View, and Tabular View.
The Global Filters section is designed to help suppliers customize the data around four major filters:
- Time Range (i.e. Walmart Last 26 Weeks)
- Channel Type (i.e. Omni, Store, or eComm)
- Department or Category (i.e. custom made from WM Departments like “40 Pharmacy OTC,” Categories within those Departments like “1806 First Aid,” or even some sub-categories like “3574 Major Wound”)
- These can be customized and defaulted as well, making access to that information easier to filter out for; however, this will only apply to the Department or Category/Hierarchy filter, not to the other filters.
- UPC
The Summary View section is broken down into three main visuals, each of which display the information already filtered through the Global Filter default or customizations:
- Net Sales: This is the revenue as recorded financially, calculated at an item level and aggregated as a sum across the levels of item, location, and time range hierarchies.
- Units: Walmart defines this as the “total number of units sold to customers for transactions online and in store” across the same hierarchy levels as Net Sales.
- Channel Breakdown: This varies significantly from supplier to supplier, based on what the Walmart business is like, but it could contain some channels like “Buy in Store (BIS)” or “Ship to Home (S2H)” (eComm).
The Tabular View is even more granular than the other two. Just like the Summary View, it also shows only the data that the Global Filters have already applied. It’s default setting is to show the same breakdowns in the Summary View (i.e. Net Sales, Units, and some of the individual channels) over the Globally filtered time span next to the same time span’s year over year (YoY) $ change and % change.
The Tabular View is helpful for isolating some data by a second degree beyond the Global Filters.
For example, if you would like to compare the YoY performance of a number of subcategories against the category in which they belong, you can add a “Breakdown By” filter (see the image below that Walmart provides). That way, you could keep your Global Filters broader for the general data in the Summary View while still using the Tabular View to break down to the subcategory level.
All of the same filters in the Global Filters section can be applied here and exported to a .XSL sheet for isolated reporting that can vary greatly depending on the team members’ needs.
The Channel Performance API
Also included in the Channel Performance component of Luminate is the API capabilities for doing back-end data pulls from Luminate into suppliers’ own databases.
There are a variety of different API capabilities available through Charter, but it is only applicable to Channel Performance data, not Supplier Behavior. There are a few capabilities available that Walmart describes on their walmart.io website:
- Data Feeds API: Subscription
- Near Real Time API: Subscription
- Inventory Action Capture API: Public
- Walmart Luminate API Certified Partners: Public
These APIs are designed to create better access to “light-touch on-demand data.” For more information about access and integration, see walmart.io/apirefservices.
Customer Perception
This is not an app but a service that Walmart provides for suppliers that helps them conduct “primary research with real customers” to help them get a better sense of what, in the actual omni shopping experience, is most important to their customers.
The Customer Spark Community
The Customer Spark Community is an invite-only group of Walmart customers designed to be a sample size of the entire Walmart customer population. It is composed of members aggregated across 749 attributes calculated through machine learning analysis. Walmart claims that this analysis “took into consideration personal and household demographics and geographic, psychometric, behavioral, and transactional variables.”
These attributes are used to create customer “clusters,” subsets within the greater population of Walmart customers. These clusters are meant to represent larger trends of shopper behavior from which suppliers can draw customer insights.
Customer Surveys
The surveys available to suppliers in Customer Perception exist along a range from the most qualitative to the most quantitative.
The more qualitative surveys will have more anecdotal evidence, giving a lot of depth into a particular issue, but not necessarily containing a wide breadth of applicability. Contrarily, a qualitative survey will give a considerable breadth of information without the same level of depth.
Like many of the reports suppliers can pull in the other Luminate apps, the target audience for a survey can be selected by a variety of demographic filters (i.e. purchase behaviors, geographics, and psychometrics).
In terms of what sorts of questions to ask, these will obviously vary significantly depending on the needs of the supplier/region. Still, Walmart lists a few particular examples:
- How much would you expect to pay for X?
- Why might you purchase X instead of Y?
- Compared to other products like it, would you say that ____?
Conclusion
Luminate Charter is an invaluable resource for retailer teams that have the resources to be able to dedicate a large number of work hours to data aggregation, analysis, and research. It can be very helpful for suppliers who are heavily invested in competitor research.
It is very helpful for drilling down into customer profiles by age, income, and gender, and it can provide a lot of helpful cross-examination opportunities that can help to prioritize decisions well beyond the scope of just the Walmart business.
That being said, Charter is priced based on a percentage of Walmart’s sales to their customers not supplier sales to Walmart, which has been something of a frustration to some suppliers. Obviously, suppliers should make the decision to purchase Charter or not based on their own needs and vision.