Walmart Fooled Us Into Believing It’s an Underdog

And then there’s Amazon, which already accounted for nearly 40 percent of all US online retail sales — that’s around eight times more than its next competitor, Walmart. Before the pandemic, the US e-commerce industry only represented between 10 percent and 15 percent of overall retail. Now, that percentage seems likely to grow, setting up Amazon to... See more

I sometimes think that investors do not appreciate how large and rapidly growing the e-commerce businesses at some of these category leading retailers are. Wal-Mart’s digital revenue in Q2 was an annualized $42 billion, growing 94% — faster than Amazon. Best Buy’s digital revenue in Q2 was an annualized $19.4 billion, growing 242% — faster than Ama... See more

The pandemic will also likely accelerate the big-business takeover of the economy. In the early innings of this crisis, the most resilient companies include blue-chip retailers like Amazon, Walmart, Dollar General, Costco, and Home Depot, all of whose stock prices are at or near record highs.

The difference in margin between e-commerce and advertising has become a much bigger story than Amazon: everyone from Uber to Walmart to Instacart is pushing into ‘merchant media’, and hiring at scale  

Current events and an accelerated consumer shift to ecommerce are fueling Amazon’s growth in a highly competitive market. As consumers turned to online stores (and Amazon in particular) for their everyday essentials during the COVID-19 pandemic, brands and retailers followed with a greater ecommerce presence and competition for shoppers’ dollars. A... See more