Walmart is the largest retailer in the world, located in Arkansas, United States, founded in 1962 by Salem Walton. Over the last fifty years, Walmart has grown to be the largest low-priced retailer in the world. The company has about 11,200 stores in 27 countries and has e-commerce sites in 10 countries.
Its revenue for financial year 2018, reached to $ 500.3 billion. The domains of its stores vary from Supercenter, Neighborhood stores, and Discount markets. The company’s business is divided into three segments: Walmart US, Walmart International and Sam’s Club. It has business in sustainability, charity, job opportunities and value proposition for customers all over the world.
Walmart made its website and started in e-commerce in 1999, and through innovation Walmart made its website and started in e-commerce in 1999, and through innovation, it creates an easy experience to facilitate shopping on the Internet for its customers.
E-commerce has grown significantly since 1990 and most retail companies benefit from their sales through their websites. Nevertheless, there are challenges to electronic commerce such as ethical issues. The enormous evolution of e-commerce causes ethical issues that perform immoral behavior by the Internet.
Ethics is the fundamental element of all social and political considerations for doing business through the Internet or e-commerce. Privacy and control of the customer’s personal data is a critical issue in e-commerce. Concerns of privacy grow because information is computerized and can be easily processed, transferred, gathered and reported. E-commerce gathers a massive amount of data about customer preferences, shopping patterns, and information search across sites.
Online privacy is essential for e-commerce customers and posting the privacy policy statement is an important way to gain customer confidence, protect against security breaches and improper use of customer data. Customer privacy is at risk because of many problems such as identity theft and personal information, fake site, or spyware and infiltration.
Looking at the privacy in Walmart, it strives to maintain the privacy of customers’ data to achieve its strategic goal of being the most trusted retailer. According to Walmart founder Sam Walton, Walmart appreciates the trust of customers they put in it, respects their privacy of the information they share and tells customers how to collect, use, share, and protect information.
Walmart collects two types of information from customers: (1) information received from the same customer and (2) information received from other sources. Information received from customers includes information shared by customers, such as when an account is created on the Walmart Website or information provided by the technology through a cookie on the client computer when visiting websites.
The company also collects technical information when visiting their websites or using applications such as IP address, client mobile device type, browser, and device operating system. For information from other sources such as consumer reporting agencies, they are designed to help them complete their records, improve customer service distribution, and discover rigging.
For marketing purposes, Walmart uses customer information either by text or telephone, where it will only be contacted if the customer approves the preferences page on the website or by email where Walmart sends the e-marketing messages until the customer has determined ‘unsubscribe’ Located below the promotional email.
Walmart shares the personal information of customers with their service providers, such as companies of shipping, invoice vendors, and processors of payment card. Personal information may also be shared when required by law, and when involvement implies the protection and integrity of the ownership or rights of Walmart or its customers and partners.
Walmart uses two types of cookies – session cookies and persistent cookies to improve shopping and browsing experience, and allow the site to identify the customer as they move from page to page.
Many consumers presume that their privacy violates from cookies because unscrupulous entities have sabotaged the original intent of the cookie to track customer traffic across the web by secretly planting their cookies then retrieving them in a way that allows building detailed features about customer interests, spending habits and lifestyle (Hill, 2015).
Concerning the protection of children’s privacy on the Internet, Walmart gathers children information under the year of 13 with previous parents’ approval or according to the law. For payment cards protection, Walmart uses confident physical and logical access controls like networks or encryption to protect cardholder data, and security systems monitoring (Walmart, 2018).
In addition to security and privacy, intellectual property is the most widely discussed issue of e-commerce in terms in ethics. The value of intellectual property in electronic commerce has increased recently because of the evolution of the Internet and technological innovations in the modern economy.
For example, when someone with access to the Internet copies the original works of others directly such as works of art, texts, music, and ideas and uses them without permission (Nguyen, 2016).
Walmart and its affiliates respect the intellectual property and copyright of others and aims to address and check allegations of violation of intellectual property rights and take adequate action under viable laws. It provides the IP Claim Form for owners with the right to submit legitimate claims in violation of intellectual property rights, including copyrights, trademarks, and patents.
