Walmart Inc. Case

Q1: How is Wal-Mart’s Web site different from Amazon and Office Depot?

1, Wal-Mart has different business focus with Amazon and Office Depot. Office Depot is an office supplier. Its website sell items related with office daily need. Amazon is an online retailer, but different from Wal-Mart, Amazon’s own business focus is on electronic item or books. Even though Amazon sells general cargo, the percentage in the total sale is quite low. Wal-Mart is a groceries retailer more than an online retailer. It sells almost everything that related with customers’ daily life. But that means Wal-Mart won’t have so much space or room to sell electronic item or office supplies especially on its website.

2, Another difference from Amazon is Wal-Mart has offline store. It seems weird when I talked about the different of web site. But the fact is, it really relates with the website. Consider about the area coverage of Wal-Mart’s offline store, it makes customers could buy things that Wal-Mart offers anytime. If customer wants to get something Wal-Mart offers as quick, the best choice is drive to the nearest Wal-Mart. Online buying and waiting for delivery is not an option in this case. This reason makes Wal-Mart’s website gives a choice that “buying online and taking at store”. But for there are not so much special deals online, this choice is meaningless when customers can buy something directly at store.

3, Wal-Mart’s Web site has business structure different from Amazon and Office Depot. Wal-Mart builds its web site as an online retailer platform for itself. But Amazon built its website as a combination of retailer platform (“Sales by Amazon”) and trading platform (“Sales by users”). Amazon can gain profit from direct retail and gain commission from its users, such as Target outsourced all its online business to Amazon. Office Depot is kind of a trading platform for manufacturers and customers, too.

4, Wal-Mart’s web site is lack of pushing notifications and advertisement....