How to Simplify Small Business Purchasing | Walmart Business SVP Ashley Hubka

How can the Walmart Business procurement portal help your organization scale? In this episode of Experienced Voices, SVP & GM Ashley Hubka shares how this powerful B2B e-commerce platform streamlines purchasing for SMBs and nonprofits.

Hubka dives into the latest Walmart Business Survey findings. She breaks down the mounting pressures today's small business owners face, from rising operational and labor costs to managing supply chain volatility with fewer resources.

Discover how Walmart Business solves critical purchasing pain points like supplier fragmentation and grocery friction. 

Learn how optimizing your vendor selection, delivery schedules, and business supplies can dramatically simplify your workflows and fuel growth.

She explains how Walmart Business solves critical pain points in small-business purchasing, enabling teams to focus on business growth.

Discover how their procurement portal helps companies simplify workflows and scale by streamlining vendor selection, delivery, and business supplies.

Transcript

Jeanne Gray: I am Jean Gray, publisher of American Entrepreneurship Today and host of the podcast series Experience Voices, where I talk with highly accomplished people who share the critical elements that led to their success. 

Ashley Hubka: business owners and operators really want suppliers to feel like an extension of their team.

More like a partner and less like a vendor. More integrated, less arm's length, more joint problem-solving, less throw it back and forth over the fence. 

Jeanne Gray: Ashley Hubka, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Walmart Business, is our guest today on Experience Voices. Ashley oversees the retailer's e-commerce experience built to empower small to mid-sized businesses and nonprofits.

She oversees strategy, operations, and growth drivers. Ashley and I had a wide-ranging discussion about how Walmart business is taking a load off entrepreneurs and small business owners in the area of procurement

Ashley, welcome to Experience Voices. 

Ashley Hubka: Jeanne, it's lovely to be here. Thanks for having me. 

Jeanne Gray: Well, I'm pretty excited about speaking with you, and I've learned a little bit about Walmart Business. So maybe a good place to start is sharing with the listeners, , the mission of Walmart Business and how it marries into their needs.

Ashley Hubka: Perfect. well, to do that, I'll give you just a little bit of history. So we launched Walmart Business in January of 2023, and where this came from is Walmart's overall purpose is to help customers save money and live better, and that includes organizational customers. And we knew from our own data that millions of organizational buyers were shopping in our stores and online every week.

And so we saw an opportunity to better serve those organizations by leveraging our core assets and capabilities, and then building features and functionality that need to be unique for B2B customers. So, for example, we can leverage or reuse assortment because we have all of these great supplier relationships.

We have many, many third-party marketplace sellers. We can leverage our EDLP price position and our store footprint, our supply chain, our omnichannel capabilities, but then we're building things that are much more related to B2B and to purchasing and procurement processes. So multi-user accounts, spend limits, approval flows, spend analytics, credit terms.

And ultimately our purpose is to save businesses, nonprofits, and governments time, money, and hassle so they can focus on their missions. 

Jeanne Gray: Well, that was gonna be my next question was some of the features. Is the emphasis on the portal and getting small businesses to engage directly that way? 

Ashley Hubka: Yes. So that's really-- There's a lot of things that come into it, but we do have Walmart Business, our own website, and our own app that was really tuned to that B2B customer.

And that's where they can create that account with multiple users. They can set up those users. They can set up spend limits, approval flows. They can have visibility to spend across their entire organization. They can have access to bulk assortment, B2B pricing. The way we've organized that website really orients to that B2B buyer.

So We're thinking about janitorial and sanitation, food, break room, office supplies, IT and electronics, the things they purchase most often organized in a way that matches how they think about their operations and how they, run what they do day to day. 

Jeanne Gray: So would you say that the Walmart business and the portal is helping them with their internal workflows? 

Ashley Hubka: Yes. Absolutely, and I think it's primarily around being able to consolidate suppliers and have more visibility in a single location. So we've done some surveying of business owners and decision makers, and 87% of businesses rely on two to five suppliers.

And so when you have multiple suppliers, you've gotta go into different systems, and it can be hard to get a comprehensive view of your spend. So when you use something like a Walmart business portal where you can access those core categories from fresh food to IT and electronics in one place and in one delivery, and then see the spend across your entire org, that really allows you to have a different kind of view and a different ability to act on patterns that you might see in order to optimize inventory, save on your purchases, et cetera.

Jeanne Gray: You mentioned your business survey, so I'm guessing that it revealed to you some of the pressures that small business owners are facing. So maybe share a little bit about what you learned about those pressures that are coming from different directions not necessarily in procurement, but across the organization.

Ashley Hubka: Yeah. I think that's a great intro, and we know that for most businesses, procurement is one piece of the puzzle, right? It's not their mission, it's not their reason for existing, but it's something that they need to do to run their business and run it well. let me share a couple stats from the survey because I think they ground us in then how we think about these small business challenges.

So we surveyed more than 500 decision makers at businesses with 10 to 500 employees, so really the small to mid-market space in the US, and I'd say the headline is that procurement is becoming a significant operational burden. for example, 37% of the businesses we've surveyed spend four to seven hours per week on routine purchasing.

As I said earlier, 87% of them rely on two to five suppliers, so they've got this network and, pool of suppliers they're managing 40% say that managing multiple orders, accounts, and invoices is their top challenge. So now they're juggling all of those aspects of having these multiple suppliers. We also asked them about grocery purchasing, and this actually introduced some new challenges.

Businesses reported concerns around product availability, price fluctuations, and delivery timing. you know, between 30 to 40% plus of businesses had these different worries about grocery. And then where maybe there's the opportunity or the ask or the customer need is 85% of these decision-makers said that suppliers should feel like part of their team, and that reflects this demand for they want partners who engage with them on their business and don't just fulfill orders.

So coming out of that I think there's a few different things that we saw. The first is there's these operational costs, and some of that is hidden time. So we talked about routine procurement becoming more - time-consuming. Because that time is spread across different people and teams and parts of the organization, and it's rarely accounted for directly, the impact on the organization can sort of be a hidden cost.

And one way that really crystallized it for me was our team looked at it, and we said four to seven hours per week on routine purchasing adds up to one month of productivity per year, which is - sort of astonishing, and then you can see, well, this is a real lever. This has real impact on the business.

And then there's an opportunity cost. Every hour that an employer or business is spending on procurement is an hour that they're not spending on what's probably higher priorities: customer engagement team development, operational efficiency, or growing their business. So that came through to us.

 A second piece that really came , through to us was supply chain volatility. Obviously, as we've come out of, lots of macro events, whether it's pandemic or inflation or tariffs, supply chain is, it's come back into a more normal space. But there's still, I think, a higher incidence and risk of volatility.

So SMBs are saying, "Well, in this environment, , I need to be proactive with inventory management so I have enough on hand to meet my customers' needs, but I don't wanna be overstocked." So they're really trying to navigate or thread that needle of having enough on hand for availability, but not tripping into high storage costs or risks of spoilage or other things.

And I'll give you one last one, and then we'll kind of continue the conversation. But everywhere, and I think especially in the small business space, they're tasked with and challenged with doing more with less. So they're trying to stretch their dollars further with inflation and cost pressures.

 They are dealing with rising customer demands where, those customers of these small businesses are saying, "I want fast service. I want clear communication. I want my experiences to be personalized." So those expectations have ratcheted up. and so I think maybe to come full circle, I think in that environment, we are seeing businesses say, "Wait a minute.

Procurement is a strategic priority because it's taking this much time," and seeing the opportunity that if they get it right, it can be a competitive advantage. 

Jeanne Gray: Well, you shared a lot there. 

Ashley Hubka: I did. So tell me , where do you wanna probe in, and we can dive deeper. 

Jeanne Gray: Well, as you were speaking, what was hitting me is that Walmart is such- an important part of our economy and in our communities.

And I'm imagining that there are small businesses that are in a radius of your stores, and that part of a small business is running down to a store to get something at the last minute, which your portal addresses - you know, the digital economy, the digitalization of our, companies. So share a little bit about the strength of the Walmart distribution, because timeliness which you already mentioned four to seven hours a week in opportunity cost.

I've built a couple of small businesses, and your reliance on something at the last minute or being able to predict that something is at hand can have an impact on a major meeting you're having or a product that you're getting out the door. So share a little bit about how the portal is marrying with your distribution.

Ashley Hubka: Yeah, great question. And yeah, you've, lived this and you've, felt this challenge. So one of the things that I think is powerful about Walmart Business is you can order how you want, and then you can receive your product how and when you want. So I mentioned we have a, walmartbusiness.com.

We also have a Walmart Business app. And then our customers have the choice really of, "I'll come get it from the store," or, "Bring it to me." And when we think about that we have a very broad assortment, so ... tens of millions of items, first party and third party, and a real focus on what we think is a core B2B assortment, what's most frequently purchased.

So grocery and food, break room items, office supplies, janitorial, sanitation, IT, and electronics. And we have the best of that assortment in our stores. think about them almost as forward deployed nodes in our supply chain. And so you can order in any of those digital ways that you pointed out and choose how you want to receive the product.

And that can be as soon as less than three-hour delivery from our stores, pick up in a similar timeframe. - You can schedule that for a day out or several days out. And then for our longer tail assortment that might be sitting in our fulfillment centers, that would be shipped or delivered typically within a two-day timeframe.

And we have 90% of the US population is within 10 miles of a Walmart. So to your point, that assortment is available as soon as three hours from those locations. And to bring it back to exactly where you were, that can make a real difference for a business because I don't have to send someone to the store.

I may want to. They may be on their way. They may pick this up on the way to an event. But if I can't take somebody off of the front line, small businesses have these great options to say, "I don't have to send an employee to the store. That delivery can come to me when I schedule it," or because we've run out of something in the afternoon rush at the coffee shop, or because an employee has noticed we are out of copy paper , or some other item we need for client event tomorrow 

Jeanne Gray: Your survey was from employees of 10 to 500, and so you were saying about sending an employee down to pick something up.

Well, if it's 10, 20, or even 50 employees, sometimes the owner gets into the car themselves. 

Ashley Hubka: It s- it sounds like you've done that before. 

Jeanne Gray: I'm not, volunteering any information on my first business, but, I would love offline, I could tell you some stories. So- 

Ashley Hubka: I bet you could 

Jeanne Gray: ... so let's go through some of the buzzwords of procurement challenges that I knew a little bit about, but the buzzwords don't really capture what it's about.

So like for instance, supplier fragmentation. , Explain a little bit to the listener when they hear that and there's an operations person keying in on, procurement, is supplier fragmentation? 

Ashley Hubka: For us, this is really just that you're using lots of different suppliers, and you're managing multiple vendors.

And what that translates into for that person operating or that person on the, small business, medium-sized business team is they probably have to go to multiple ordering platforms. They have to reconcile separate invoices. They have to coordinate varying delivery schedules. And when we think about that, those costs of content switching are real, right?

any of us who do remote meetings now, when we get on Google Meet versus Zoom versus Teams, they all work a little bit differently, and it takes a minute to adjust. So imagine the complexity of you're doing that with your suppliers either to order or to track the delivery or get that invoice. So that switching cost is there, and then it's just really hard to have this comprehensive picture of your supplier landscape or your procurement spend because you've gotta go to all these places, download it, and kinda piece it together to say, "Well, what did we spend in this category last month?"

So we think that a powerful lever for businesses is to try to reduce that supplier fragmentation. Almost no one's gonna get to a single supplier. But if for multiple categories or some of your most frequently purchased categories you can consolidate suppliers, then you get a chance to streamline- your purchasing and you get to have this more comprehensive picture of your spend.

So that's why we've focused so much on this core B2B assortment, these five categories, fresh, grocery, break room, office supplies, janitorial, sanitation, IT and electronics, because if we can provide those as we do really well, then that's an opportunity for businesses to do some consolidation.

And that can be a game changer. When you have one supplier and you can get this in one delivery, that can make a real difference to ordering and your day-to-day operations and your financial reconciliation

Jeanne Gray: Well, as you were speaking, I was thinking of terms that procurement, upon the size of the company, is not necessarily has one person dedicated to it. And often maybe the bookkeeper is also doing the procurement, but by making the system simpler, more efficient, if that person is on vacation that you're answering a training issue in the company because they can more easily train a backup as to multiple platforms versus the one that you're saying is much more user-friendly.

And so again, I'm sharing a little bit of my experience of swapping people out, to get through a two-week vacation, and the hair-pulling that goes on, the password that it can't be found. 

Ashley Hubka: Yes. Yes, and if you only have to do that for one platform, better than having to do it on five, right? 

Jeanne Gray: So- So, What do you define as grocery friction? 

Ashley Hubka: This one is interesting because I think as, - companies have gotten more sophisticated about procurement, I think they've, started more often with larger categories or inputs to manufacturing or things that they turn around and use with their clients.

But we found that categories like grocery, cleaning supplies, and workplace essentials are becoming much more of the procurement conversation because they have a direct impact on day-to-day operations, they have a direct impact on employee experience, and because they're actually ordered fairly frequently.

Again, from our research, we had some good data. 70% of decision-makers purchase grocery items weekly, and 50% say that these food offerings , help improve employee satisfaction and productivity. So they're starting to view this as how they support and engage their workforce. And when they look at how frequent and recurring purchases these are, I think business owners are now saying, "Wait I also wanna seek some efficiencies in these areas that haven't historically been as much of the procurement conversation or as, gotten as much attention."

We think these categories are often overlooked, and what happens is somebody notices we're running low or we've run out, and now you've got this moment of like scramble or sending somebody to the store. And what we think here is that spend analytics, so understanding the patterns of how much do I need of grocery, cleaning supplies, workpla- essentials on what timeframe?

And then the opportunity to use subscriptions can really help businesses anticipate these needs, automate some of the routine purchases, and then going back around, reduce that friction, reduce the disruptions, reduce the chances that they're out of stock on some things that matter to the people that turn up and work there every day.

Jeanne Gray: Sounds like your survey helped you identify a way to tap into how your buyers' needs are changing. 

And you're, able to respond 

Ashley Hubka: Yeah. I think the theme there that really stood out and kind of stuck with me was this idea that business owners and operators really want suppliers to feel like an extension of their team.

More like a partner and less like a vendor. More integrated, less arm's length, more joint problem-solving, less throw it back and forth over the fence. So we think when small businesses or SMBs are looking for partners, really keying in on is this gonna provide reliability, predictable pricing, and tools that are gonna simplify back to their workflows.

so we've talked about some of the things that we think matter there. It's multi-user accounts. You talked about somebody going on vacation, so you want an admin, but you may want the admin to be able to designate a group admin, so somebody who could take certain actions if they're out of the office. Approval workflows, pay by invoice credit terms are ways to let a business manage their spend more effectively while maintaining oversight.

So they're looking to a vendor that lets them, accomplish these things , that are goals for them in their procurement. We also think it's really important to consider total value, right? And that's product quality, availability, delivery reliability. It's how much time does it take to manage procurement or get answers from this vendor, or hopefully out of this portal.

And it dependable supplier that reduces disruptions and reduces unexpected costs really kind of pays back in being a partner and an integrated or extended part of the team. 

Jeanne Gray: Now, I see that your portal in pursuit of giving a, great experience online for procurement, but is Walmart having other ways of engaging with companies like Manna Health, OK Filter?

They give you insight as to what's happening themselves and allows you to grow the relationships, especially in a period where there's so much transformation going on in small business? 

Ashley Hubka: Yeah. , From the beginning, we've really been in dialogue with our customers, and that has taken different forms over time.

when we were starting this business inside of Walmart, each of us was personally going out and interviewing friends, family, our, local shopkeepers to really understand their needs. And as we've grown, we continue to have that kind of dialogue. we commission more surveys like this.

We do primary customer research. We invite customers to come spend time with us. So actually tomorrow, here at the home office, we're having, I think it's our fourth customer advisory board. So we're bringing some of our largest nonprofit customers and growing nonprofit customers to spend time with the leadership at Walmart business, our sales teams, our product teams, our pricing teams, our assortment teams, our delivery and fulfillment teams, so we can deeply understand their needs.

 so for us, that's a really important channel of feedback that does shape what do we need to build and what order do we need to build it in, and how should we prioritize the features and functionality that matter most to our customers so that we continue to offer an offering and a service and an experience that's going to fit with how they run their businesses.

Jeanne Gray: Well, that sort of leads to my wrap-up question as to maybe put you on the spot a little bit, is especially since you have these advisory boards that are tapping into the local community. how do you envision, especially since the portal has really been up only since 2023, and a lot, I imagine, from launch until today, has unfolded for your part of the organization.

So where do you see the next couple of years, , of any changes? Is technology changing and the portal change? What's driving that? 

Ashley Hubka: So yes, e- everywhere. I'll give you a couple examples. I think that We are using, like any business and, you've probably seen a lot about Walmart as a whole, leaning heavily into AI.

And that is both how do we better run our business ourselves? How do we have more insight? How do we move with more speed? How do we work more efficiently? But one of the important ways we're putting that to work for our customers is called Sparky, and Sparky is an AI agent that our customers can interact with on our website and in our app, and it is AI driven, and they can ask anything they want.

Now, Sparky is getting smarter and smarter over time. not gonna answer every question, but people can come and say, "Help me reorder my essentials." I can upload a receipt Maybe it's from a competitor, maybe it's from a vendor I use today. and then see does Walmart carry these items, and what is their price on them, and how much could I save if I were to switch, right?

... And they can ask other questions. What users are on my account? What's my tax exempt status? So really tuning into how do we apply AI to help our users in the portal. I think the other thing that we're very focused on is we have this benefit sitting inside of Walmart of so much leverage, right?

I talked about we can take an existing assortment catalog, we can benefit from existing supplier and seller relationships and a supply chain. But what we're really working on is how do we continue to make our experience more and more B2B specific? So we're bringing on more bulk assortment. We are having more items that have B2B specific pricing.

We are tuning the various ways we fulfill, whether it's last mile delivery out of our stores or from our distribution centers to really meet the needs, requirements, and expectations of how businesses expect delivery to look like, especially when they might have a very large order. That needs to be handled in a different way than your, , family's weekly grocery order.

But all of those for us are in service of our purpose , helping, businesses, nonprofits, and governments save time, money, and hassle so they can focus on their mission. And we think about that then of, how do we help them simplify and save money? How do we help them stay in stock? And how do we help them create efficiencies to operate and grow?

So everything that we're thinking about from a functionality perspective is filtered through those lenses and through that feedback that we're getting from our customers about what matters most to them. 

Jeanne Gray: What you shared are some of the key values that a small business would put into a relationship for them to feel that it's a trusted and growing relationship, reliability, timeliness that you are responding with, best pricing when you go to bulk assortment.

What I'm hearing is, and, we'll maybe learn more in the future, is that Walmart has made this major commitment to business, and specifically small business, which is a big part of our economy. Ashley, I thank you for your time. You took me through a lot digest about the changes that are underway in Walmart business, and we'll be pleased to share a lot of these changes, , in the podcast and in the months to come.

So again, thank you for being a guest. 

Ashley Hubka: Thank you for a great conversation

Jeanne Gray: You have been listening to the podcast series, experienced Voices. To hear more and subscribe, visit american entrepreneurship.com/podcast. Where you will also find a form for listener feedback.