Walmart Launches Baby Section Upgrade Weeks After Babies 'R' Us Closes Stores

Walmart has announced the launch of its new online specialty shopping experience designed to make it easier for parents to shop for nursery items.

The retail chain’s website now offers an updated selection of baby items, including cribs, chairs, bassinets and more the company said Thursday in a blog post. The site now features six curated collections to help parents seamlessly design a nursery for their child.

The new section on the site offers themes called wanderlust, boho chic, mid-century modern, baby boy, baby girl, and gender-neutral nurseries. Once the customer picks a theme, the site then directs shoppers to hundreds of items related to the selected theme. It also allows customers to shop for a specific area in the room such as nursing, diaper changing, and closet storage.

"This new, dedicated nursery experience complements our broader baby assortment online, which we've been growing aggressively by adding more than 30,000 new items over the past year," Lauren Uppington, Vice President and General Manager of Walmart's U.S. eCommerce, wrote. "It also follows efforts to create a new in-store experience in the baby department in more than 2,000 stores across the country."

Meanwhile, searches for baby-related items on Walmart.com have jumped roughly 40 percent in the past year, the company said. That isn’t expected to stop anytime soon as the market for baby-care items is estimated to exceed $13 billion by 2021, up from an estimated $11.4 billion this year, CNBC reported, citing data from Statista.

Walmart’s push to bolster its baby-related items comes weeks after the last Babies "R" Us store closed. It shut its last 200 stores in June after parent company Toys "R" Us announced its plans to close all its U.S.-based stores after it filed for bankruptcy and liquated its business. According to Reuters, the toy giant had accumulated $5.2 billion worth of debt as of 2017.