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Two days after Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday witnessed huge spikes in sales at retail and online stores. Now, if I were to ask you to name a representative of each — a popular retail store and a popular online store — the majority of you would likely list Walmart as your retail representative and Amazon.com as your online representative. This, however, could soon be changing.

For years, Amazon has had practically no competition online, but this year Walmart made significant progress in becoming a possible head-on competitor. Walmart has increased its investments in online advertising and spawned an online marketplace similar to Amazon’s. Their online store also has an increased merchandise selection and with deep discounts on books and DVD’s, Walmart is starting to close the gap with Amazon. This past October, 29% of Amazon.com customers also shopped at Walmart.com, a figure that is up from 25% last year.

Over the course of 2009, Amazon.com held the most number of shoppers, with over twice that of Walmart.com, its closest competitor. As Black Friday approached, however, this gap began to close. Much to Walmart’s credit, primarily via online deals offered specifically on Thanksgiving Day, Walmart.com actually had more shoppers than Amazon.com.

On Black Friday, though Walmart.com continued to fare very well, Amazon.com was back on top. Walmart.com had about 20% fewer shoppers that day than Amazon.com. On Cyber Monday, however, Amazon showed its online supremacy in overt fashion, being favored 2:1 over Walmart.com and its own numbers were actually higher than on Black Friday.

AmazonVsWalmart

So is Amazon.com in trouble? If Walmart can keep the pressure on, they may continue to close the gap, but it seems unlikely that Walmart will ever regularly be ahead of Amazon. For Walmart, having customers come to the stores themselves will continue to be their most effective means of retail, but the Internet could become more interesting with another somewhat prominent online market in addition to Amazon.

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