Amazon’s headstart in e-commerce – as much as ten years before other retailers began to take their online efforts truly seriously – has enabled it to pick up a market share that may be unprecedented in American retailing. It is estimated that more than four out of every ten dollars U.S. consumers spend online goes into Amazon’s very big pockets.
More recently Walmart – still the world’s largest retailer – has emerged as the clear number two in e-commerce with a market share estimated at somewhere between 6 and 10 percent, depending on who is doing the estimated.
But new research shows that while Walmart is a distant number two, its shoppers spend more than those who buy on Amazon. “On average, customers spend about twice as much per year at Walmart’s web store than Amazon customers,” the online newsletter Modern Retail recently reported, citing research from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, which it says has tracked and analyzed U.S. Amazon Prime memberships over the past decade. Modern Retail recently launched a weekly feature called Amazon Briefing focused on the online giant.
One of the new features that is helping to drive Walmart’s business, the newsletter wrote, is Walmart Realm, “which lets consumers shop digital replicas of products sold at real-life Walmart stores via virtual bazaars designed to look like outlandish, make-believe worlds.” It said, “It's the latest sign that Walmart is still betting on the future of the metaverse.”
Last year Walmart did $611.2 billion in sales, of which 69 percent, or $421 billion was registered at stores in the U.S. It is estimated that it did $53.4 billion online, which represented an increase of about 12 percent compared to the year before.
Amazon’s 2023 revenues were $575 billion, about $444 of which was done in the U.S. But this overall number includes many non-retail divisions, including Amazon Web Services, Amazon Prime entertainment, and advertising-generated revenue. Plus, it is believed the majority of Amazon’s retail revenues now come from third-party sellers of which the company takes a commission but does not directly own or process the merchandise.