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| VIEW EVENT INFORMATION: Walmart |
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Amazon Wants To Become Walmart Before Walmart Can Become Amazon |
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About the organization Walmart:
Type: Business
Sub-Types: Store, Retailing Agent, Chain, Shop, Website, Internet, E-Commerce, Online Store, Application Software, Finance |
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Notable Organizations: Walmart, Techcrunch
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| The future of retail will be a combination of both online e-commerce and a brick-and-mortar retail presence – as recent moves from both Walmart and Amazon have shown, including today’s back-to-back announcements from the two rivals, which sees Amazon buying a chain of popular grocery stores with a Whole Foods deal for $13.7 billion, and Walmart picking up yet another online apparel vendor with Bonobos for $310 million.
Walmart is the only retailer with the size, scale and funds to take on Amazon, and it’s been making aggressive moves to compete with Amazon’s online business for years. Amazon, on the other hand, has been trying to figure out how to merge brick-and-mortar stores into its world of online shopping.
The question is, which retailer will figure out the perfect mix of online and offline, and get there the quickest?
As of late, Walmart been targeting Amazon’s Prime business – launching free, two-day shipping on millions of items, without requiring an annual membership, for example. The move hasn’t been lost on Amazon, which in turn has gone directly after the Walmart shopper, by making it easier for lower-income consumers to pay with cash on its site. It even discounted Prime for those on government assistance, arguing that a Prime membership is not a luxury, but a need.
The truth is, Amazon needs to capture the Walmart shopper as it has saturated the middle to high-end of the market with Prime memberships; approximately 60% of U.S. households now have Prime, with lower-income households the only place it can still grow Prime stateside.
Beyond its Prime cash cow, Amazon has also made moves to better tackle the grocery business – a tough area to compete as an online-only retailer, given the need to keep fresh items cold, and others frozen. Amazon has slowly ramped up in this area over the years via its delivery service AmazonFresh, but it has not been able to widely scale grocery deliveries due to the logistics and economics (or “enormous money pit,” more colloquially) involved with delivering perishable items. |
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