Should Amazon Worry About Walmart's New Ecommerce Initiative?

March 03, 2010
By the ZippyCart Ecommerce Software Content Team

A new ecommerce initiative from Walmart is being dubbed Global.com, which they created to help focus on increasing overall online sales worldwide. However, there is not much insight why Walmart would brand an ecommerce initiative as Global.com, which is a domain that they do not own and has no relation to the company. Amazon does not seem too worried about Walmart, but they definitely are keeping a close eye on this ecommerce unit looking to unify the online business so that expansion can continue across the world. Currently, Walmart only has online ecommerce sites in the U.S., U.K., Brazil, Canada, and Mexico, however they are looking to quickly expand to many other countries as soon as possible. Although many wonder if this global ecommerce push by Walmart is a bit too late to compete with Amazon, who has been doing extremely well lately with their international efforts and Kindle ereader. This head start that Amazon has on Walmart is not scaring them away, as they plan to use their brick and mortar retail stores in ways which Amazon cannot to differentiate themselves in the market.

The method of brick and mortar retail operations combined with an online ecommerce site is not that inventive and has been going on for years, so the exact strategy to surpass Amazon is still unclear. One technique, that Walmart may try to use in the integration of the online and offline worlds, would be to appeal to the consumers in the US who are fearful about using their credit card online, or who do not have a credit card to use. Outside of this idea, there are not many unique techniques which Walmart has announced that show investors why they can leverage the offline stores to help grow the online ecommerce sales.