Walmart has a major online shopping portal that competes directly with amazon. My assumption is the OP was talking about buying online from Walmart, particularly given the other example was eBay.
> Walmart and Amazon are both huge but it seems just wrong to say a brick-and-mortar store as equivalent to an online market place
Walmart is also an online market place. Walmart.com includes third party reseller products with many significant similarities to Amazon. They've got fulfilled by Walmart, free shipping, and if you join Walmart+ it includes Paramount+ video streaming (also free grocery delivery).
A few points in refutation. I see Amazon as far ahead of Walmart in all ways that promise growth:
1) Walmart may be the biggest retailer in the US, but they don't have half of the US homes as subscribers. Amazon Prime does. I doubt Walmart.com attracts any where near as many e-tail visitors as Amazon, and I suspect the gap is widening.
2) Amazon is decades ahead of Walmart in the online shopper experience. I grit my teeth each time I visit Walmart's website. It's slow and ugly and very clumsy to navigate or search. And it hasn't gotten better after years of this.
3) Walmart's products are mostly middle-to-down-market, even online, and that doesn't seem to have changed all that much even as they've grown their e-tail efforts. Try buying a nice watch or high-end stereo equipment there. No such ceiling applies to Amazon, probably because Amazon welcomes re-sellers (which can span all market niches), while Walmart doesn't.
So I think Walmart has a long way to go to compete equally with Amazon, and isn't a comparable threat as an all 'round monopoly.
And personally, I don't hate Amazon enough to object to a monopoly threat from them the way I do Walmart. I think ill-will does matter when it comes to federal action on anti-competition. If Microsoft were as despised as AT&T was in 1984, they would be in pieces today.
Well to be fair, they don't compete with Walmart. Walmart almost doubled Amazon's revenue last year, and that was during the height of a pandemic, which naturally steered people towards more online orders, something you think would tip the scales in Amazon's favor.
I mean, they talk about Walmart like it's the underdog, but its revenue is twice as large as Amazon's (despite its market cap being much lower). While Walmart is much better at sales via physical stores and Amazon is better at online sales, and while Walmart is investing in heavily in it's online platforms, Amazon is investing heavily in in physical stores.
So i don't think it's Walmart vs Amazon, it's Walmart and Amazon versuses everyone else. They're both building themselves up to be equal competitors in most ways, leaving everyone else behind.
I just want to comment that Wal-Mart isn’t “playing catch-up” to Amazon, but simply plugging up holes in their business plan.
Critics of Wal-Mart’s online competency seem to forget that not only is Wal-Mart the largest company by revenue - on the planet - but Amazon doesn’t even crack the top 20.
As far a business goes - an organization to provide value exchange - they are doing better than almost any other business in the world, depending on the metric you’re measuring with.
Dude...Amazon has been the leading e-tailer for around a decade or so. Wal-Mart is not even in the top 10. Where did you get the idea Wal-Mart did anywhere near Amazon volume online? http://www.internetretailer.com/Top500/list.asp
Walmart perfected large-scale logistics and built a network of one-stop-shops across America, taking out small mom-and-pop shops along the way.
Amazon set out to be the go-to online shopping platform largely by encouraging small mom-and-pop shops to sell through Amazon. Once the platform was big enough, it started making more sense for Amazon to cannibalize vendors instead of just continuing to let the market grow.
Sure, both companies are large behemoths that do their part to decimate local economies and avoid paying taxes, but their strategies were pretty different, IMO.
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