Slashdot Mirror
Domain: internetretailer.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to internetretailer.com.
Stories · 2
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Walmart Plays Catch-Up With Amazon
HughPickens.com writes: According to James B. Stewart in the NY Times, for the past 16 years Walmart has often acted as though it hoped Amazon would just go away. When Walmart announced last week that it was significantly increasing its investment in e-commerce, it tacitly acknowledged that it had fallen far behind Amazon in the race for online customers. Now, the magnitude of the task it faces has grown exponentially as e-commerce growth continues to surge globally. "Walmart.com has been severely mismanaged," says Burt P. Flickinger III. "Walmart would go a few years and invest strategically and significantly in e-commerce, then other years it wouldn't.Meanwhile, Amazon is making moves in e-commerce that's put Walmart so far behind that it might not be able to catch up for 10 more years, if ever."
In 1999, Amazon was a fledgling company with annual revenue of $1.6 billion; Walmart's was about $138 billion. By last year, Amazon's revenue was about 54 times what it was in 1999, nearly $89 billion, almost all of it from online sales. Walmart's was about three times what it was 15 years before, almost $486 billion, and only a small fraction of that — 2.5 percent, or $12.2 billion — came from Walmart.com. Walmart's superefficient distribution system — a function of its enormous volume and geographic reach — was long the secret to Walmart's immense profitability. Ravi Jariwala, a Walmart spokesman, says that Walmart is building vast new fulfillment centers and is rapidly enhancing its delivery capabilities to take advantage of its extensive store network to provide convenient in-store pickup and adds that 70 percent of the American population lives within five miles of a Walmart store. "This is where e-commerce is headed," says Jariwala, which is to a hybrid online/in-store model. "Customers want the accessibility and immediacy of a physical store," along with the benefits of online shopping. -
Buy.com Brags About SN+E-commerce Patents
RBAE writes "In an article in InternetRetailer.com, buy.com CEO Scott Blum brags about how they will protect and enforce their (pending) patents that link social networking and e-commerce, so that anyone trying to integrate these two fields will have first to pay them a handsome fee, or else. Mind that buy.com hasn't even started to offer such service, while other sites like Overstock and eGrupos have already launched services integrating ecommerce (online auctions) and social networking. A quote from buy.com's CEO: "We'll stand out with our patents on e-commerce and social networking, and we're big enough to protect them". Finally an interesting way to apply social networking, and Buy.com wants it all for themselves."