13 ms·

Conflict at Walmart threatens its ecommerce battle with Amazon

127 points by laurex 7y ago

droithomme 7y ago
Walmart's done a good job of trying to carry as many things on its site as Amazon. I find most things listed on both sites. I also like the idea of free ship to store and use that. The problem is the same that Target, and Barnes and Noble all have in competing with Amazon. Their sites aren't as good. They are spartan, uninteresting, hard to navigate, difficult to find things, and often so slow as to be unusable. In short their developers, development managers, server staff, etc, aren't good enough. On Amazon I can find what I need, the site looks good in all browsers including old ones, it doesn't bog down the CPU, stall or crash the browser, and products can be found using their own search mechanism without having to resort to using Google.
- theli0nheart 7y ago
  I have to disagree. Target is awesome. Their iPhone app is far better than Amazon's (which feels like an embedded webview).
- softwaredoug 7y ago
  Barnes and Noble probably needs to realize it’s core value is the in store experience of leisurely browsing at a kind of “third place” away from home/work. Honestly I don’t know anyone who has bought a book on B&N online, but know lots of people who just want to hang out at a Barnes and Noble and read/explore. That was the appeal in the 90s, that’s still the appeal. Nook and e-commerce are just distractions from that main differentiator. I wonder how many other places are just being bad amazon clones when their core value is something different...
  - TYPE_FASTER 7y ago
    Yes, I’ve definitely been stopping in at B&N to browse more recently. Honestly even though I read library books electronically, I still browse and buy physical books too. And of course magazines...and notebooks...there’s a market there.
  - krapp 7y ago
    >Barnes and Noble probably needs to realize it’s core value is the in store experience of leisurely browsing at a kind of “third place” away from home/work. Being a place to wander around and browse but never purchase the merchandise is not a "core value" any retailer wants to have. Barnes and Noble is not a home away from home, it's a store, no different than any other. You're meant to buy something and get out.
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      If you’re going to compete with Amazon on a “buy something and get out” basis, you’re going to have to offer me something better than Amazon. If that’s “you’re expected to drive over here and park”, you aren’t winning. If it’s “you can drop in, have a look around, maybe get a coffee in the cafe, chat with a semi-knowledgeable associate, crack a book open and sample a few pages before buying”, then you’ve got a fighting chance.
      - krapp 7y ago
        >If it’s “you can drop in, have a look around, maybe get a coffee in the cafe, chat with a semi-knowledgeable associate, crack a book open and sample a few pages before buying”, then you’ve got a fighting chance. The key part of that being "before buying." Many people will literally just browse and use the free wi-fi and some will read entire books and magazines in the store without buying anything.
        stale2002 7y ago
        A store should still want that. Starbucks, for example, makes lots of money from people who are just there for the free WiFi.
        kbenson 7y ago
        A certain type of store should want that. I doubt a store that spend huge amounts of money in stocking their shelves with books will get as much out of it as a coffee shop. That said, my local B&N has a Starbucks inside (and a Peets 40 feet away directly across a small street), but I doubt they get more than a small fraction of the revenue from the Starbucks, and at around 4-5 times the floor space as the Peets.
  - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
    > know lots of people who just want to hang out at a Barnes and Noble and read/explore. Maintaining a large inventory of books is a financial burden for bookshops. For that reason, most massive bookshops in North America and Western Europe have slashed their book inventory heavily compared to the 1990s. In the place of books, they prefer to sell trendy things like vinyl records, Kikkerland products, teas, etc.. However, while a customer can spend a few minutes looking at what’s available, this kind of inventory does not offer many opportunities for “exploring”. Also, even if customers would not order from B&N online, they might still order a book they see at B&N from Amazon, perhaps even while they are inside the B&N. Smartphones allowing customers to browse in your store and then order a desired item for cheaper from your competitor, were not yet a thing back in the 1990s when B&N was in its heyday.
    - softwaredoug 7y ago
      This may all be true, but I feel like the solution is somewhere in building on the brands strength (as a 3rd place) instead of trying to be bad Amazon.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- sidlls 7y ago
  It's far more likely that their tech staff are simply not given sufficient resources, and are constrained by business leadership than that they "aren't good enough". Walmart is notorious for having terrible compensation for their tech staff--staff who are motivated to look elsewhere due to poor compensation aren't going to do good work no matter how good they are.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    If you play out the terrible comp, you are almost sure to get the “not good enough”. People work for a variety of things, but comp and colleagues are high on my list. If you give me crap for both and I have options to go elsewhere, you’ll be left with people who don’t have options to go elsewhere. They’re probably not going to end up being the cream of the crop.
    - pixl97 7y ago
      Eh, surprisingly enough if you give people power they accept lower compensation. Even a well paid person leaves their job if there is an ineffective structure at implementing change at a reasonable basis.
      - kbenson 7y ago
        And if you make change to easy, you get weird Frankenstein technology stacks urdened with technical debt, so you need competent managers to hit a good middle ground. And you need competent executives that can set good goals and provide enough resources to achieve them. Basically, you need competent people at every level. That said, since the competence of a level is directly controlled by the level above it, I guess it does just boil down to bad execs now or at some point in the past (or a good strategy not just working. The world isn't that deterministic).
    - realusername 7y ago
      That's exactly why companies still don't understand that you get very crappy code by using cheap outsourcing companies. If they were better developers, they would just work at a company with better compensation. In this situation you only getting people who don't have any choice.
- skellera 7y ago
  You find things on both sites because they both have marketplace vendors who list on both sites.
robertAngst 7y ago
I read this article and I love the capitalism. A company is losing money to give customers better service. Its not selfless, but its a phenomena. I have never enjoyed shopping more than with Walmart grocery pickup. And Walmart online is superior to Amazon (cost alone). Is it bad to employ low wage workers?
fredsanford 7y ago
Loading walmart.com on most of my machines reminds me of loading image heavy sites in the early '90s over a 9600bd modem... I am unsure how they reach this "achievement." I didn't think any close to modern website could act like ESPN in loading 32453235 scripts per page... And please... Fix it so I can search for in-store only items.
- lkbm 7y ago
  I just tried Walmart.com (with uBlock Origin). It's 2.4MB, with 32 scripts loaded. Amazon.com (logged in) was 12MB, with 28 scripts.
  - majewsky 7y ago
    What I find more significant: walmart.com takes 9 seconds to start displaying meaningful content, amazon.com is finished loading in 3 seconds. (Disclaimer: Anecdata for my system, obviously.)
    - deanCommie 7y ago
      Probably cuz Walmart refuses to use AWS...
      - cameronbrown 7y ago
        I can imagine funding their direct competitor (which they're losing to) might not be a great idea.
        Kocrachon 7y ago
        I wonder if that mentality with change if/when AWS splits from AMZN.
        cameronbrown 7y ago
        Amazon Retail would be an unsustainable mess without AWS.
digitaltrees 7y ago
What a crazy world where Walmart is the underdog. Two vicious monopolistic predators battling for ultimate pricing power.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  It's a good thing there aren't more monopolistic retailers vigorously battling each other in the market...
  - digitaltrees 7y ago
    I get your snark at my use of monopoly for two companies but think about it. One has a monopoly on physical retail in most of America. The other has a monopoly over most e-commerce. Which ever wins will have a true monopoly over commerce in general. Scary. And not “free market” capitalism.
    - sokoloff 7y ago
      Walmart has a monopoly on physical retail? I can almost understand your position on Amazon e-commerce, but I don’t think Walmart is anywhere close to monopolizing physical retail.
      - digitaltrees 7y ago
        Have you been to a small town in rural America?! Walmart In many communities is the town square and effectively the only retailer other than maybe a dollar store.
        seanmcdirmid 7y ago
        Does most of America live in small towns? With a 82% urbanization rate, it doesn’t really seem that way.
        blihp 7y ago
draw_down 7y ago
If you’re in a fight with Amazon in a corporate culture that can’t stand losing money... good luck with that.
ENOTTY 7y ago
Wait, so Walmart is about to give up on a 3-year-old strategic bet because they're losing to a competitor that had a 20 year head start[1]? This seems like classic short-term thinking in an ossified organization. That said, credit to them for identifying an area of strength (grocery delivery) and leaning into it hard. [1]: Amazon was founded in 1994, Jet.com founded in 2014. EDIT: Also wow, this article needs an editor. Is the CEO's last name McMillon (5) or McMillion (2)?
- skybrian 7y ago
  To me, it doesn't sound like a question of giving up. There is a dispute over how much money to spend on infrastructure while pursuing growth. Do they spend lots and lose money for a while, or go with a slower build that's profitable? Apparently the high-spend advocates talked to the press as a way of pressing their case? There's no way for us to know who is right based on reading one article.
  - tracker1 7y ago
    Given Vox's hyperbolic nature in terms of articles and agendas, I'm not sure how big an issue it actually is. Beyond this, I'm frankly surprised it's only 1b this early on... Compared to most startup initiatives, accounting for scale, it's really not bad at all.
- pm90 7y ago
  > This seems like classic short-term thinking in an ossified organization. Yeah, unfortunately this is very common. There are good reasons for this. If you're a public company, your financial health is being constantly scrutinized by wall street which will punish your stock price (and thus, executive compensation as well). Which incentivizes short term planning, and long term investments need to pay some sort of dividend, or else it will become a closely scrutinized and wildly unpopular.
vishnugupta 7y ago
There's no mention of Walmart's recent acquisition in India[1] where they poured $16 billion to buy 77% stake in Flipkart. What's interesting is that there's no profit in sight for Flipkart (or Amazon.in for that matter). Which means they'll continue to bleed money. Especially as the Indian economy is showing signs of a major slowdown.
- Blackthorn 7y ago
  They can afford it. It's a good idea to buy in to such a big economy as India, even if they'll lose money on it for a while.
- tsjq 7y ago
  I too have similar thoughts . worse is soon after Walmart's acquisition of Flipkart, the govt came up with new ecommerce rules & regulations that made things really tougher for Amazon and Flipkart (there are widespread rumors that these rules were brought in to help Reliance Retail's ecommerce wing) . and not a single mention of this situation. 16Billions isn't small, even at Walmart's scale.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
forinti 7y ago
I stopped buying online at Walmart Brazil because its third-party sellers were awful and Walmart just ignored my last complaint (I bought a keypad and got one that was different from the one advertised). I guess I wasn't the only one who was unhappy with their service. Their stores are also pretty shabby. They entered Brazil buying Bompreco (which was not well run at all) and then they bought the Portuguese Sonae (which was reasonably efficient) and proceeded to weed out the good parts in order to homogenise the whole operation at the lowest possible quality. Sonae had a really good POS on which you could even sell advertising space. It was replaced by a POS that looks like a 40 column DOS application.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  Walmart and Magazine Luiza were the only 2 large stores that I accepted buying online from (Walmart doesn't sell online anymore in Brazil). I just never brought anything from 3rd party sellers, on any site (except the ones that only sell 3rd party things, that have good reputation management systems). I have to say, I know of no large store with any passable POS on Brazil. They are all horrible.
  - muliwuli 7y ago
    im from europe and never seen wallmart in my life, but i wonder why are people commenting on POS system ? how is this related to your experience as a customer ? Do you mean POS system when doing self-checkout or something else? i'd be curious to know what you mean by that or by "no large store with any passable POS in brazil" ? thank you.
    - forinti 7y ago
      With regard to the Sonae buyout, the old POS had more options. You could even pay your bills or buy cellphone credits. The new one didn't even accept payments from the state bank (AliExpress, from the other side of the world is integrated into the state bank of Rio Grande do Sul). It seems that WM just goes into markets with not enough planning.
    - 7y ago
gedy 7y ago
I'm genuinely curious why an established business with supply chains, etc would lose 1 billion dollars a year in an ecommerce effort. Why? Selling below cost?
cavisne 7y ago
Was jet.com ever a thing? The brand means nothing to me, where walmart.com does at least have some brand presence. I suspect it was simply the founders ego that kept jet.com as a separate site (rather than focusing on walmart.com). That alone is a bad sign, how many years have been wasted promoting Jet?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- slips 7y ago
  It was a thing. I actually used it frequently to get household items and save money on bulk orders. Then it got acquired by Walmart and I stopped shopping there. Same with Bonobos.
- lammalamma25 7y ago
  Jet spent heavily on acquiring urban millennial spenders. If that doesn't fit your profile, your comment makes sense. They also had a cart algorithm that changed your shipping price as you added things to it that was pretty cutting edge at the time.
zmix 7y ago
“It’s taking longer than I thought it was going to,” McMillion told analysts in October of the e-commerce unit’s profitability, “and I have been surprised at just how many brands there are out there to get signed up. ... Who knew we needed 2,000 of them. I didn’t.” What a naive CEO!
Alupis 7y ago
The problem with Walmart and ecommerce are one of self-cannibalism. Walmart.com is not Jet.com. They actually compete against each other! Why any corporation would run two separate ecommerce operations that compete is beyond me. - When Walmart bought Jet.com, they already had Walmart Marketplace, which is very much like Amazon in that it's products stocked, sold and shipped by Walmart themselves - but also many 3rd parties which stock, sell and ship on Walmart.com too. - Just like on Amazon - most customers are not aware they're not buying directly from Walmart. Unlike Amazon, there's no built in messaging system (you end up directly emailing customers, and until recently they didn't even proxy the email addresses - meaning you obtained customer's real email addresses). Returns are sloppy and painful for the seller to handle, and the Seller Central UI hasn't changed in years. It's a "modern SPA" website, but each button click must be doing some poorly designed queries or something terrible, because each view takes multiple seconds to display (showing a busy spinner gif while waiting). This makes doing trivial things very painful in the UI. - Walmart.com's API isn't stable either. It's on version 3 now, and still seems to lack important features like advanced reporting - features Amazon has had for the decade we've been selling there. When version 3 of the API rolled out, they gave everyone a months notice that all previous versions would be "deprecated" - although someone at Walmart things deprecated means turning it off completely. This left anyone foolish enough to integrate with this clunky API 1 month to rewrite everything since it was a major change. - You still have to be invited to sell on Walmart.com. Unlike Amazon - not anyone can just apply for an account and start selling. This is a two-edged sword, of course. While it cuts down on random people selling out of their garage - it does limit the diversity of products and sellers on Walmart's Marketplace - and ultimately revenue Walmart.com can bring in. - Walmart offers no "Fulfillment" options for their 3rd party sellers. While this is currently not necessary, since you must be a legit ecommerce business of a considerable size to even be invited to Walmart.com, it would be a great option for many to help cut down on delivery times and shipping fees by stocking some products on the other coast, or throughout the country. Many large operations on Amazon take advantage of the FBA program specifically for these reasons. Now speaking about Jet.com - I'm not sure why Walmart didn't fold them into the Walmart.com branding. It's a disaster. It's been 2 years since we seriously looked at Jet.com, perhaps some things have changed - although I have my doubts due to how Jet.com wanted to operate. We also have a Jet.com account - but chose not to participate because the barrier to entry was too high for such low projected sales. - Jet.com requires API use to do anything. There is no Seller Central UI to manage products or orders. This requires an API to even list a product. No CSV or Flat File uploads, which both Amazon and Walmart allow. No manually editing product details for a listing, or manually reviewing your orders via an Order Manager page. While that may be good in that it makes the barrier to entry high enough to keep out casual garage sellers - it also kept out larger profitable operations like us. We took one look at it, reviewed their API, and decided it wasn't worth the development effort to get a handful of sales each week. At the time, there were no good integrations that we could just pay for either - not to mention they wouldn't integrate with our ERP software either - so we'd still have to spend the development time anyway. Essentially, Walmart Corp is trying to run two, competing ecommerce websites - both with serious flaws that prevent either one from being easy or enjoyable for their sellers. Being customer-centric is great, but you have to at least make sure it's easy for your sellers to manage their operations on your platform - otherwise they will just choose to not participate or put enough energy into the platform to make it really great.
taneem 7y ago
Stories like this are often instigated by someone inside the organization with an agenda. They reach out to a journalist, give some quotes anonymously, and put them in touch with others in the company that are allies and will also give supporting quotes. This article feels like an article designed to pressure Marc Lore to leave. Losing $1B on $22B in revenue, after just 3 years of really starting this bet is nothing!
- elchief 7y ago
  Didn't amazon lose billions for years?
  - username444 7y ago
    Not really. They were profitable, they just invested heavily in infrastructure (warehouses) and developing new services (AWS). They may have been unattractive by wall street's standards (eg. Pay outs) but they were far from unprofitable.
    - 300bps 7y ago
      Not really. They were profitable, they just invested heavily in infrastructure (warehouses) and developing new services (AWS). Amazon lost about $2 billion in their first six years of operations. And Walmart's online presence would be profitable now if they weren't investing heavily in infrastructure (20 fulfillment centers trying to catch up to Amazon's 110) and new services (online catalog to match Amazon's).
    - simonebrunozzi 7y ago
      That's a really big claim. No, technically they were not profitable for several years. Then, in the last 10-12 years, you are right that they invested heavily in R&D and everyone knows that one story.
  - adventured 7y ago
    Amazon's early operating losses by year: 1996: -$6.4m on $15.7m sales || 1997: -$32m on $147m sales || 1998: -$109m on $609m sales || 1999: -$605m on $1.63b sales || 2000: -$863m on $2.76b sales || 2001: -$412m on $3.12b sales In 2002, as a forced result of the dotcom crash and stock market plunge (their ability to continue to fund such red ink was in question), they had to expedite getting to operating break-even and turned off the spending spree they were using to get big artificially fast. They turned a $64m operating profit in 2002 on $3.9b in sales. Positive operating income climbed to $440m by 2004.
ilaksh 7y ago
The Amazon model doesn't "scale" to multiple companies because it is winner take all. It's a platform. What could become an alternative would be a public decentralized protocol that many different retailers, warehouse operators, and delivery drivers could plug into. That is the sort of thing that could give consumers the selection of Amazon without putting control over everything in the hands of one company.
tracker1 7y ago
I'm not sure Walmart really needs "millions" more products. Amazon's largest problem are low grade, poor quality goods and actually being able to choose between them all. If Walmart can cover a significant number of categories with a couple of known and quality options, they can definitely make inroads. Walmart also has a huge network of actual stores, and I've ordered more than once for delivery at a store. The bigger issue is mindshare and branding. I often don't think to look for something at Walmart and it's often only in frustration of Amazon's abundance of choice or other issues I'll think of Walmart. Beyond this, there are lots of other things that are just there at Walmart, and often don't need delivery to me, the store is enough. Walmart, iirc, covers something like 85% of the U.S. population with a store within 5 miles. That shouldn't be underestimated.

127 points by laurex 7y ago

Walmart's done a good job of trying to carry as many things on its site as Amazon. I find most things listed on both sites. I also like the idea of free ship to store and use that. The problem is the same that Target, and Barnes and Noble all have in competing with Amazon. Their sites aren't as good. They are spartan, uninteresting, hard to navigate, difficult to find things, and often so slow as to be unusable. In short their developers, development managers, server staff, etc, aren't good enough. On Amazon I can find what I need, the site looks good in all browsers including old ones, it doesn't bog down the CPU, stall or crash the browser, and products can be found using their own search mechanism without having to resort to using Google.

theli0nheart 7y ago
I have to disagree. Target is awesome. Their iPhone app is far better than Amazon's (which feels like an embedded webview).
softwaredoug 7y ago
Barnes and Noble probably needs to realize it’s core value is the in store experience of leisurely browsing at a kind of “third place” away from home/work. Honestly I don’t know anyone who has bought a book on B&N online, but know lots of people who just want to hang out at a Barnes and Noble and read/explore. That was the appeal in the 90s, that’s still the appeal. Nook and e-commerce are just distractions from that main differentiator. I wonder how many other places are just being bad amazon clones when their core value is something different...
- TYPE_FASTER 7y ago
  Yes, I’ve definitely been stopping in at B&N to browse more recently. Honestly even though I read library books electronically, I still browse and buy physical books too. And of course magazines...and notebooks...there’s a market there.
- krapp 7y ago
  >Barnes and Noble probably needs to realize it’s core value is the in store experience of leisurely browsing at a kind of “third place” away from home/work. Being a place to wander around and browse but never purchase the merchandise is not a "core value" any retailer wants to have. Barnes and Noble is not a home away from home, it's a store, no different than any other. You're meant to buy something and get out.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    If you’re going to compete with Amazon on a “buy something and get out” basis, you’re going to have to offer me something better than Amazon. If that’s “you’re expected to drive over here and park”, you aren’t winning. If it’s “you can drop in, have a look around, maybe get a coffee in the cafe, chat with a semi-knowledgeable associate, crack a book open and sample a few pages before buying”, then you’ve got a fighting chance.
    - krapp 7y ago
      >If it’s “you can drop in, have a look around, maybe get a coffee in the cafe, chat with a semi-knowledgeable associate, crack a book open and sample a few pages before buying”, then you’ve got a fighting chance. The key part of that being "before buying." Many people will literally just browse and use the free wi-fi and some will read entire books and magazines in the store without buying anything.
      - stale2002 7y ago
        A store should still want that. Starbucks, for example, makes lots of money from people who are just there for the free WiFi.
        kbenson 7y ago
        A certain type of store should want that. I doubt a store that spend huge amounts of money in stocking their shelves with books will get as much out of it as a coffee shop. That said, my local B&N has a Starbucks inside (and a Peets 40 feet away directly across a small street), but I doubt they get more than a small fraction of the revenue from the Starbucks, and at around 4-5 times the floor space as the Peets.
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  > know lots of people who just want to hang out at a Barnes and Noble and read/explore. Maintaining a large inventory of books is a financial burden for bookshops. For that reason, most massive bookshops in North America and Western Europe have slashed their book inventory heavily compared to the 1990s. In the place of books, they prefer to sell trendy things like vinyl records, Kikkerland products, teas, etc.. However, while a customer can spend a few minutes looking at what’s available, this kind of inventory does not offer many opportunities for “exploring”. Also, even if customers would not order from B&N online, they might still order a book they see at B&N from Amazon, perhaps even while they are inside the B&N. Smartphones allowing customers to browse in your store and then order a desired item for cheaper from your competitor, were not yet a thing back in the 1990s when B&N was in its heyday.
  - softwaredoug 7y ago
    This may all be true, but I feel like the solution is somewhere in building on the brands strength (as a 3rd place) instead of trying to be bad Amazon.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
sidlls 7y ago
It's far more likely that their tech staff are simply not given sufficient resources, and are constrained by business leadership than that they "aren't good enough". Walmart is notorious for having terrible compensation for their tech staff--staff who are motivated to look elsewhere due to poor compensation aren't going to do good work no matter how good they are.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  If you play out the terrible comp, you are almost sure to get the “not good enough”. People work for a variety of things, but comp and colleagues are high on my list. If you give me crap for both and I have options to go elsewhere, you’ll be left with people who don’t have options to go elsewhere. They’re probably not going to end up being the cream of the crop.
  - pixl97 7y ago
    Eh, surprisingly enough if you give people power they accept lower compensation. Even a well paid person leaves their job if there is an ineffective structure at implementing change at a reasonable basis.
    - kbenson 7y ago
      And if you make change to easy, you get weird Frankenstein technology stacks urdened with technical debt, so you need competent managers to hit a good middle ground. And you need competent executives that can set good goals and provide enough resources to achieve them. Basically, you need competent people at every level. That said, since the competence of a level is directly controlled by the level above it, I guess it does just boil down to bad execs now or at some point in the past (or a good strategy not just working. The world isn't that deterministic).
  - realusername 7y ago
    That's exactly why companies still don't understand that you get very crappy code by using cheap outsourcing companies. If they were better developers, they would just work at a company with better compensation. In this situation you only getting people who don't have any choice.
skellera 7y ago
You find things on both sites because they both have marketplace vendors who list on both sites.

robertAngst 7y ago

I read this article and I love the capitalism. A company is losing money to give customers better service. Its not selfless, but its a phenomena. I have never enjoyed shopping more than with Walmart grocery pickup. And Walmart online is superior to Amazon (cost alone). Is it bad to employ low wage workers?

fredsanford 7y ago

Loading walmart.com on most of my machines reminds me of loading image heavy sites in the early '90s over a 9600bd modem... I am unsure how they reach this "achievement." I didn't think any close to modern website could act like ESPN in loading 32453235 scripts per page... And please... Fix it so I can search for in-store only items.

lkbm 7y ago
I just tried Walmart.com (with uBlock Origin). It's 2.4MB, with 32 scripts loaded. Amazon.com (logged in) was 12MB, with 28 scripts.
- majewsky 7y ago
  What I find more significant: walmart.com takes 9 seconds to start displaying meaningful content, amazon.com is finished loading in 3 seconds. (Disclaimer: Anecdata for my system, obviously.)
  - deanCommie 7y ago
    Probably cuz Walmart refuses to use AWS...
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      I can imagine funding their direct competitor (which they're losing to) might not be a great idea.
      - Kocrachon 7y ago
        I wonder if that mentality with change if/when AWS splits from AMZN.
        cameronbrown 7y ago
        Amazon Retail would be an unsustainable mess without AWS.

digitaltrees 7y ago

What a crazy world where Walmart is the underdog. Two vicious monopolistic predators battling for ultimate pricing power.

sokoloff 7y ago
It's a good thing there aren't more monopolistic retailers vigorously battling each other in the market...
- digitaltrees 7y ago
  I get your snark at my use of monopoly for two companies but think about it. One has a monopoly on physical retail in most of America. The other has a monopoly over most e-commerce. Which ever wins will have a true monopoly over commerce in general. Scary. And not “free market” capitalism.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    Walmart has a monopoly on physical retail? I can almost understand your position on Amazon e-commerce, but I don’t think Walmart is anywhere close to monopolizing physical retail.
    - digitaltrees 7y ago
      Have you been to a small town in rural America?! Walmart In many communities is the town square and effectively the only retailer other than maybe a dollar store.
      - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
        Does most of America live in small towns? With a 82% urbanization rate, it doesn’t really seem that way.
        blihp 7y ago

draw_down 7y ago

If you’re in a fight with Amazon in a corporate culture that can’t stand losing money... good luck with that.

ENOTTY 7y ago

Wait, so Walmart is about to give up on a 3-year-old strategic bet because they're losing to a competitor that had a 20 year head start[1]? This seems like classic short-term thinking in an ossified organization. That said, credit to them for identifying an area of strength (grocery delivery) and leaning into it hard. [1]: Amazon was founded in 1994, Jet.com founded in 2014. EDIT: Also wow, this article needs an editor. Is the CEO's last name McMillon (5) or McMillion (2)?

skybrian 7y ago
To me, it doesn't sound like a question of giving up. There is a dispute over how much money to spend on infrastructure while pursuing growth. Do they spend lots and lose money for a while, or go with a slower build that's profitable? Apparently the high-spend advocates talked to the press as a way of pressing their case? There's no way for us to know who is right based on reading one article.
- tracker1 7y ago
  Given Vox's hyperbolic nature in terms of articles and agendas, I'm not sure how big an issue it actually is. Beyond this, I'm frankly surprised it's only 1b this early on... Compared to most startup initiatives, accounting for scale, it's really not bad at all.
pm90 7y ago
> This seems like classic short-term thinking in an ossified organization. Yeah, unfortunately this is very common. There are good reasons for this. If you're a public company, your financial health is being constantly scrutinized by wall street which will punish your stock price (and thus, executive compensation as well). Which incentivizes short term planning, and long term investments need to pay some sort of dividend, or else it will become a closely scrutinized and wildly unpopular.

vishnugupta 7y ago

There's no mention of Walmart's recent acquisition in India[1] where they poured $16 billion to buy 77% stake in Flipkart. What's interesting is that there's no profit in sight for Flipkart (or Amazon.in for that matter). Which means they'll continue to bleed money. Especially as the Indian economy is showing signs of a major slowdown.

Blackthorn 7y ago
They can afford it. It's a good idea to buy in to such a big economy as India, even if they'll lose money on it for a while.
tsjq 7y ago
I too have similar thoughts . worse is soon after Walmart's acquisition of Flipkart, the govt came up with new ecommerce rules & regulations that made things really tougher for Amazon and Flipkart (there are widespread rumors that these rules were brought in to help Reliance Retail's ecommerce wing) . and not a single mention of this situation. 16Billions isn't small, even at Walmart's scale.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

forinti 7y ago

I stopped buying online at Walmart Brazil because its third-party sellers were awful and Walmart just ignored my last complaint (I bought a keypad and got one that was different from the one advertised). I guess I wasn't the only one who was unhappy with their service. Their stores are also pretty shabby. They entered Brazil buying Bompreco (which was not well run at all) and then they bought the Portuguese Sonae (which was reasonably efficient) and proceeded to weed out the good parts in order to homogenise the whole operation at the lowest possible quality. Sonae had a really good POS on which you could even sell advertising space. It was replaced by a POS that looks like a 40 column DOS application.

marcosdumay 7y ago
Walmart and Magazine Luiza were the only 2 large stores that I accepted buying online from (Walmart doesn't sell online anymore in Brazil). I just never brought anything from 3rd party sellers, on any site (except the ones that only sell 3rd party things, that have good reputation management systems). I have to say, I know of no large store with any passable POS on Brazil. They are all horrible.
- muliwuli 7y ago
  im from europe and never seen wallmart in my life, but i wonder why are people commenting on POS system ? how is this related to your experience as a customer ? Do you mean POS system when doing self-checkout or something else? i'd be curious to know what you mean by that or by "no large store with any passable POS in brazil" ? thank you.
  - forinti 7y ago
    With regard to the Sonae buyout, the old POS had more options. You could even pay your bills or buy cellphone credits. The new one didn't even accept payments from the state bank (AliExpress, from the other side of the world is integrated into the state bank of Rio Grande do Sul). It seems that WM just goes into markets with not enough planning.
  - 7y ago

gedy 7y ago

I'm genuinely curious why an established business with supply chains, etc would lose 1 billion dollars a year in an ecommerce effort. Why? Selling below cost?

cavisne 7y ago

Was jet.com ever a thing? The brand means nothing to me, where walmart.com does at least have some brand presence. I suspect it was simply the founders ego that kept jet.com as a separate site (rather than focusing on walmart.com). That alone is a bad sign, how many years have been wasted promoting Jet?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
slips 7y ago
It was a thing. I actually used it frequently to get household items and save money on bulk orders. Then it got acquired by Walmart and I stopped shopping there. Same with Bonobos.
lammalamma25 7y ago
Jet spent heavily on acquiring urban millennial spenders. If that doesn't fit your profile, your comment makes sense. They also had a cart algorithm that changed your shipping price as you added things to it that was pretty cutting edge at the time.

zmix 7y ago

“It’s taking longer than I thought it was going to,” McMillion told analysts in October of the e-commerce unit’s profitability, “and I have been surprised at just how many brands there are out there to get signed up. ... Who knew we needed 2,000 of them. I didn’t.” What a naive CEO!

Alupis 7y ago

The problem with Walmart and ecommerce are one of self-cannibalism. Walmart.com is not Jet.com. They actually compete against each other! Why any corporation would run two separate ecommerce operations that compete is beyond me. - When Walmart bought Jet.com, they already had Walmart Marketplace, which is very much like Amazon in that it's products stocked, sold and shipped by Walmart themselves - but also many 3rd parties which stock, sell and ship on Walmart.com too. - Just like on Amazon - most customers are not aware they're not buying directly from Walmart. Unlike Amazon, there's no built in messaging system (you end up directly emailing customers, and until recently they didn't even proxy the email addresses - meaning you obtained customer's real email addresses). Returns are sloppy and painful for the seller to handle, and the Seller Central UI hasn't changed in years. It's a "modern SPA" website, but each button click must be doing some poorly designed queries or something terrible, because each view takes multiple seconds to display (showing a busy spinner gif while waiting). This makes doing trivial things very painful in the UI. - Walmart.com's API isn't stable either. It's on version 3 now, and still seems to lack important features like advanced reporting - features Amazon has had for the decade we've been selling there. When version 3 of the API rolled out, they gave everyone a months notice that all previous versions would be "deprecated" - although someone at Walmart things deprecated means turning it off completely. This left anyone foolish enough to integrate with this clunky API 1 month to rewrite everything since it was a major change. - You still have to be invited to sell on Walmart.com. Unlike Amazon - not anyone can just apply for an account and start selling. This is a two-edged sword, of course. While it cuts down on random people selling out of their garage - it does limit the diversity of products and sellers on Walmart's Marketplace - and ultimately revenue Walmart.com can bring in. - Walmart offers no "Fulfillment" options for their 3rd party sellers. While this is currently not necessary, since you must be a legit ecommerce business of a considerable size to even be invited to Walmart.com, it would be a great option for many to help cut down on delivery times and shipping fees by stocking some products on the other coast, or throughout the country. Many large operations on Amazon take advantage of the FBA program specifically for these reasons. Now speaking about Jet.com - I'm not sure why Walmart didn't fold them into the Walmart.com branding. It's a disaster. It's been 2 years since we seriously looked at Jet.com, perhaps some things have changed - although I have my doubts due to how Jet.com wanted to operate. We also have a Jet.com account - but chose not to participate because the barrier to entry was too high for such low projected sales. - Jet.com requires API use to do anything. There is no Seller Central UI to manage products or orders. This requires an API to even list a product. No CSV or Flat File uploads, which both Amazon and Walmart allow. No manually editing product details for a listing, or manually reviewing your orders via an Order Manager page. While that may be good in that it makes the barrier to entry high enough to keep out casual garage sellers - it also kept out larger profitable operations like us. We took one look at it, reviewed their API, and decided it wasn't worth the development effort to get a handful of sales each week. At the time, there were no good integrations that we could just pay for either - not to mention they wouldn't integrate with our ERP software either - so we'd still have to spend the development time anyway. Essentially, Walmart Corp is trying to run two, competing ecommerce websites - both with serious flaws that prevent either one from being easy or enjoyable for their sellers. Being customer-centric is great, but you have to at least make sure it's easy for your sellers to manage their operations on your platform - otherwise they will just choose to not participate or put enough energy into the platform to make it really great.

taneem 7y ago

Stories like this are often instigated by someone inside the organization with an agenda. They reach out to a journalist, give some quotes anonymously, and put them in touch with others in the company that are allies and will also give supporting quotes. This article feels like an article designed to pressure Marc Lore to leave. Losing $1B on $22B in revenue, after just 3 years of really starting this bet is nothing!

elchief 7y ago
Didn't amazon lose billions for years?
- username444 7y ago
  Not really. They were profitable, they just invested heavily in infrastructure (warehouses) and developing new services (AWS). They may have been unattractive by wall street's standards (eg. Pay outs) but they were far from unprofitable.
  - 300bps 7y ago
    Not really. They were profitable, they just invested heavily in infrastructure (warehouses) and developing new services (AWS). Amazon lost about $2 billion in their first six years of operations. And Walmart's online presence would be profitable now if they weren't investing heavily in infrastructure (20 fulfillment centers trying to catch up to Amazon's 110) and new services (online catalog to match Amazon's).
  - simonebrunozzi 7y ago
    That's a really big claim. No, technically they were not profitable for several years. Then, in the last 10-12 years, you are right that they invested heavily in R&D and everyone knows that one story.
- adventured 7y ago
  Amazon's early operating losses by year: 1996: -$6.4m on $15.7m sales || 1997: -$32m on $147m sales || 1998: -$109m on $609m sales || 1999: -$605m on $1.63b sales || 2000: -$863m on $2.76b sales || 2001: -$412m on $3.12b sales In 2002, as a forced result of the dotcom crash and stock market plunge (their ability to continue to fund such red ink was in question), they had to expedite getting to operating break-even and turned off the spending spree they were using to get big artificially fast. They turned a $64m operating profit in 2002 on $3.9b in sales. Positive operating income climbed to $440m by 2004.

ilaksh 7y ago

The Amazon model doesn't "scale" to multiple companies because it is winner take all. It's a platform. What could become an alternative would be a public decentralized protocol that many different retailers, warehouse operators, and delivery drivers could plug into. That is the sort of thing that could give consumers the selection of Amazon without putting control over everything in the hands of one company.

tracker1 7y ago

I'm not sure Walmart really needs "millions" more products. Amazon's largest problem are low grade, poor quality goods and actually being able to choose between them all. If Walmart can cover a significant number of categories with a couple of known and quality options, they can definitely make inroads. Walmart also has a huge network of actual stores, and I've ordered more than once for delivery at a store. The bigger issue is mindshare and branding. I often don't think to look for something at Walmart and it's often only in frustration of Amazon's abundance of choice or other issues I'll think of Walmart. Beyond this, there are lots of other things that are just there at Walmart, and often don't need delivery to me, the store is enough. Walmart, iirc, covers something like 85% of the U.S. population with a store within 5 miles. That shouldn't be underestimated.