Case Study: Walmart Shifting In E-Commerce Competitive Strategy

Section One

II. Walmart Shifting in e-Commerce Competitive Strategy

In this new era of retail, lesser people are shopping at brick and mortar stores as consumers’ preference has changed, it is not merely by price but also on convenience. Thus, Walmart has to invest in their e-commerce platform to ensure speedy delivery in a convenient, online experience. Previously, Walmart escorted on price and assortment. To be successful in today’s competitive retail environments, especially with e-commerce. Walmart needs to continue to lead on price, to remain competitive on assortment, to capitalize to differentiate on access, and to deliver a great experience.

As technology becomes mainstream, Walmart embraces the tools its consumers are using daily.

This will be a great challenge for Walmart, as laying off could lead to some social issues such as unemployment, and training for those remaining employees, would mean time and money to be sacrificed. Technology could even reduce Walmart’s profit margin. As network allows people to find all the product information, searching for the best price become rather simple. Technology could lower the competitors’ price; thus, price war between retailers are more intense now. This leads to further reduction in the retail industry’s profit. As Walmart core competitive advantage is low price, it will face more challenges in the

Walmart is expanding their competencies in today’s rapidly rising social commerce environment. As mobile applications and social networking are progressively becoming part of the consumers’ daily lives globally, influencing how they think about shopping. Hence, the alliance of Walmart and Kosmix indeed signals a new and emerging trend for the e-tailing market. As the acquisition of Kosmix helps to explore new ways of connecting shoppers digitally.

Walmart, a retail megastore acquired Kosmix in April 2011, a social media start-up focused on e-commerce that has been powering technologies such as RightHealth and TweetBeat. The company was later renamed as WalmartLabs- the combination of social and mobile with the Kosmix semantic analysis technology i.e. “semantic data to organize real-time tweets around events and displays the most interesting things people are saying about an event as it unfolds.” Walmart is capitalising billions in an attempt to overtake Amazon as it has critically lag behind online i.e. far in e-commerce. Walmart has been focusing on “real-time predictive intelligence” and “big data” technologies that allow the company to collect enormous volumes of data on American shoppers and evaluate it to identify the business choices (Prasad,