Walmart has reached an exclusive agreement letting viewers use their Roku remotes and stored payment information to buy products directly from the retailer's ads on the platform.

Viewers won’t be whisked away to Walmart.com or need to capture QR codes on their phones to complete orders while they watch. They can transact on the screen with their remotes while their shows are paused. Ads will initially come from Walmart, but the retailer’s U.S. Chief Marketing Officer William White said in an interview that he expects supplier brands will also participate.
 

“As we launch, this will be Walmart advertising,” White said. “But it certainly creates opportunities to think about how we partner with our key suppliers to bring their products and brands to life.”

The deal unites a streaming platform used by about half of U.S. households, according to Roku Head of TV Commerce Peter Hamilton, with a retailer shopped by about 90% of the U.S. households, according to White. The executives declined to provide details on revenue sharing or payment terms.

This appears to be a first-of-its-kind partnership between retailer and streaming platform (not counting Amazon, which is both retailer and streaming platform), and opens the door for more such arrangements.

Hamilton said the ease of making purchases using a Roku remote far outstrips the relatively cumbersome process of scanning QR codes to get to a website to complete purchases on mobile devices.

For Walmart, the deal creates a counterweight to Amazon Prime, which is both a major online retail and streaming platform presence. For Roku, the deal with Walmart is exclusive now, but not necessarily forever.

“Walmart is the exclusive retail partner today,” Hamilton said, “and we plan to begin testing with other brands that sell through Walmart later in the year. So, as it stands, this is an exclusive partnership.”

Walmart’s shoppable ads will be activated and measured via Roku’s OneView ad-buying platform, and the platform is offering up its Roku Brand Studio to design custom creative and branded content for TV streaming and shopping.

While the initial focus is a “seamless checkout experience through the ads,” White said, “there’s a tremendous runway in terms of how this can continue to evolve.”

That includes the possibility of social commerce and influencer content backed by Walmart via Roku, he said. “Walmart was the first to market with shoppable livestreams on TikTok, Twitter and Youtube. We were the first to market with shoppable recipes on Pinterest and first to market with Twitter native checkout. And I think it’s a natural evolution for us to move into TV.”