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Walmart also sells everything, and it actually sells more of everything than Amazon by quite a lot. Just not online. The gap is not even close. Walmart sells a

Walmart also sells everything, and it actually sells more of everything than Amazon by quite a lot. Just not online. The gap is not even close. Walmart sells almost $500 billion in goods every year in the US alone. Amazon sold less than $200 billion in 2017. You could fit more than 2 Amazon.com's into Walmart. This is admitted by the article halfway down but a lot of people don't really take this into account when they think about Amazon. Amazon may be a very exciting stock, but it is not the leading retailer. It is only the dominant retail website online, and that dominance in market share is actually quite misleading because the Amazon Marketplace is not a 1:1 comparison with how Walmart retail stores work. The Amazon Marketplace is hundreds of thousands of independent retailers daisy chained together to supply the website with valid, high quality offers combined with a small number of conventional vendor suppliers. Walmart is Walmart. When you buy from Walmart you buy from Walmart (unless it's through the online Walmart Marketplace which aspires to be an Amazon Marketplace clone). Amazon has had some breakout successes in entirely different markets from retail, like their leading cloud business.

SandersAK 9y ago
Amazon will do about 50% of online sales this year. Regardless of whether it's marketplace or not, it means that they see 50% of online sales in the US. If you think Amazon is competing on just "goods sold" then yes, at this fixed point in time, Walmart is much bigger and better at that. If you are thinking that online sales will eclipse retail in the near future (even groceries: http://www.nielsen.com/tz/en/insights/news/2017/grocery-e-commerce-sales-growth-set-to-eclipse-offline.html http://www.nielsen.com/tz/en/insights/news/2017/grocery-e-co...), and that this is an inflection point in buyer behavior, then Walmart is a leader who will run out of gas soon, and Amazon is just hitting their stride.
- j-c-hewitt 9y ago
  Yes it does do roughly half of online sales. >If you are thinking that online sales will eclipse retail in the near future (even groceries: http://www.nielsen.com/tz/en/insights/news/2017/grocery-e-co... http://www.nielsen.com/tz/en/insights/news/2017/grocery-e-co...), and that this is an inflection point in buyer behavior, then Walmart is a leader who will run out of gas soon, and Amazon is just hitting their stride. That is not likely. The report you are citing does not support the projection you are making. >then Walmart is a leader who will run out of gas soon, and Amazon is just hitting their stride. This kind of fantasy is almost ubiquitous among people who write articles about tech-y business or who run non-ecommerce internet businesses. However it is not supported by actual breakdown of online vs. physical retail sales. See Nielson on what that breakdown is: http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2017/as-us-retail-shifts-continue-e-commerce-thrives.html http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2017/as-us-retail... You can't necessarily draw a straight line based on the growth or even compare the US directly to China which has a much greater proportion of online vs. retail sales. There are various complications across many different product types that make it challenging for pure online mail order to completely displace physical retail. The complete lockstep faith in this 'inflection point' stuff that I have seen and heard from people leads me to be extra-skeptical of it. Just because Marc Andreessen said it doesn't make it so. Pretty much every dollar my household brings in comes directly or indirectly from ecommerce. I am very personally invested in the continued growth of ecommerce. But I am also quite aware of the many difficulties and risks that the industry faces.
pm90 9y ago
It was really surprising to me that Walmart, being as anal about logistics as they are, didn't invest all that much in their digital marketplace. Even now their website is not ideal.
- j-c-hewitt 9y ago
  They are now. But before ecommerce as a whole was such a tiny fraction of the overall retail market. They do still have one of the largest online retail websites.
- _rpd 9y ago
  For traditional retailers, e-commerce is an upstart that 'steals' sales from established geographically-based territories. To support the e-commerce project is to betray all established players. It cannot gain support until it is much too late. This is true of almost all 'disruptive' technologies, and is the reason that startups can win so big.
  - pcnix 9y ago
    A topic very well explored in "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen.
    - machinehermit 9y ago
      Looks interesting, thank you. Just bought it on amazon.
MIKarlsen 9y ago
With stores like Toys'R'Us shutting down in UK, the market for Amazon will grow bigger I guess. More and more traditional retailers will go out of business, and I don't think all of them will be able to pivot to online. And that's when Amazon steps in.
joering2 9y ago
> [...] to supply the website with valid, high quality offers [...] hahah! have you ever shopped at Amazon??
purple-again 9y ago
When you buy from Walmart you buy from whoever outbid the competition for that shelf space this month not Walmart. When you buy from Amazon you buy from whoever is offering products in that space right now.
sparrc 9y ago
I think you've overlooked this bit of the article: > (Amazon's) roughly $180 billion in annual sales remains dwarfed by Walmart’s $500 billion, but sales at the big-box retailer inched up 3 percent in the year ended on Jan. 31. Amazon’s revenue rose at least 25 percent in 2017, excluding sales from Whole Foods. That also means Amazon is growing faster than it did three years ago, when it was half its present size. So to sum up: (1) Amazon doubled it's revenue in 3 years (2) It's growing faster now than it was 3 years ago (3) None of that even includes Whole Foods; and (4) Walmart's revenue grew only 3 percent. So if it continues on it's current path it seems that Amazon could pass Walmart within 5 years. I'm not saying this will surely happen but I wouldn't at all be surprised if it does. As an aside it's also worth noting that Amazon has a significant non-USA presence, AFAICT Walmart has none.

SandersAK 9y ago

Amazon will do about 50% of online sales this year. Regardless of whether it's marketplace or not, it means that they see 50% of online sales in the US. If you think Amazon is competing on just "goods sold" then yes, at this fixed point in time, Walmart is much bigger and better at that. If you are thinking that online sales will eclipse retail in the near future (even groceries: http://www.nielsen.com/tz/en/insights/news/2017/grocery-e-commerce-sales-growth-set-to-eclipse-offline.html http://www.nielsen.com/tz/en/insights/news/2017/grocery-e-co...), and that this is an inflection point in buyer behavior, then Walmart is a leader who will run out of gas soon, and Amazon is just hitting their stride.

j-c-hewitt 9y ago
Yes it does do roughly half of online sales. >If you are thinking that online sales will eclipse retail in the near future (even groceries: http://www.nielsen.com/tz/en/insights/news/2017/grocery-e-co... http://www.nielsen.com/tz/en/insights/news/2017/grocery-e-co...), and that this is an inflection point in buyer behavior, then Walmart is a leader who will run out of gas soon, and Amazon is just hitting their stride. That is not likely. The report you are citing does not support the projection you are making. >then Walmart is a leader who will run out of gas soon, and Amazon is just hitting their stride. This kind of fantasy is almost ubiquitous among people who write articles about tech-y business or who run non-ecommerce internet businesses. However it is not supported by actual breakdown of online vs. physical retail sales. See Nielson on what that breakdown is: http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2017/as-us-retail-shifts-continue-e-commerce-thrives.html http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2017/as-us-retail... You can't necessarily draw a straight line based on the growth or even compare the US directly to China which has a much greater proportion of online vs. retail sales. There are various complications across many different product types that make it challenging for pure online mail order to completely displace physical retail. The complete lockstep faith in this 'inflection point' stuff that I have seen and heard from people leads me to be extra-skeptical of it. Just because Marc Andreessen said it doesn't make it so. Pretty much every dollar my household brings in comes directly or indirectly from ecommerce. I am very personally invested in the continued growth of ecommerce. But I am also quite aware of the many difficulties and risks that the industry faces.

pm90 9y ago

It was really surprising to me that Walmart, being as anal about logistics as they are, didn't invest all that much in their digital marketplace. Even now their website is not ideal.

j-c-hewitt 9y ago
They are now. But before ecommerce as a whole was such a tiny fraction of the overall retail market. They do still have one of the largest online retail websites.
_rpd 9y ago
For traditional retailers, e-commerce is an upstart that 'steals' sales from established geographically-based territories. To support the e-commerce project is to betray all established players. It cannot gain support until it is much too late. This is true of almost all 'disruptive' technologies, and is the reason that startups can win so big.
- pcnix 9y ago
  A topic very well explored in "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen.
  - machinehermit 9y ago
    Looks interesting, thank you. Just bought it on amazon.

MIKarlsen 9y ago

With stores like Toys'R'Us shutting down in UK, the market for Amazon will grow bigger I guess. More and more traditional retailers will go out of business, and I don't think all of them will be able to pivot to online. And that's when Amazon steps in.

joering2 9y ago

> [...] to supply the website with valid, high quality offers [...] hahah! have you ever shopped at Amazon??

purple-again 9y ago

When you buy from Walmart you buy from whoever outbid the competition for that shelf space this month not Walmart. When you buy from Amazon you buy from whoever is offering products in that space right now.

sparrc 9y ago

I think you've overlooked this bit of the article: > (Amazon's) roughly $180 billion in annual sales remains dwarfed by Walmart’s $500 billion, but sales at the big-box retailer inched up 3 percent in the year ended on Jan. 31. Amazon’s revenue rose at least 25 percent in 2017, excluding sales from Whole Foods. That also means Amazon is growing faster than it did three years ago, when it was half its present size. So to sum up: (1) Amazon doubled it's revenue in 3 years (2) It's growing faster now than it was 3 years ago (3) None of that even includes Whole Foods; and (4) Walmart's revenue grew only 3 percent. So if it continues on it's current path it seems that Amazon could pass Walmart within 5 years. I'm not saying this will surely happen but I wouldn't at all be surprised if it does. As an aside it's also worth noting that Amazon has a significant non-USA presence, AFAICT Walmart has none.