Walmart has long been the biggest and trustworthy marketplace business for a lot of countries. The shift in consumers’ behaviour due to the pandemic, however, is inclining more people to online shopping than going to a physical store, signing a green light to Amazon. How will the “new normal” further affect the rivalry between Amazon and Walmart in the future?
Is Walmart slowly losing to Amazon?
Noted from Reuters, Walmart Marketplace currently hosts around 70,000 sellers in 2020. The surge in online shopping is making Walmart resort to adding more sellers in its shops. Walmart’s recent investments in technology and vendor relationships are also adding more shelves in the retail company. This, according to data firm Marketplace Pulse, might still rise 146% by the end of 2022.
Walmart’s rapid expansion is, unfortunately, does not always come as good news. Several merchants have expressed their concern about the pace, fearing that it could soon hurt Walmart’s reputation for selling quality products from quality sellers.
Cal Chan, a seller in both Walmart and Amazon told Reuters, “A year or two ago, every brand on Walmart.com would be trustworthy but now it’s getting very similar to Amazon and that’s a huge risk”. Chan continued, “Amazon let everyone under the sun in – that helped them grow, but now they’re trying to clean up the riff-raff and it’s very hard to close Pandora’s Box”.
In response to this, an Amazon spokesman wrote in an email that the company itself has been upgrading its vetting process for the site. More than 8,000 additional employees are now responsible for removing counterfeit products, false listings and identity intellectual property theft. Amazon’s effort didn’t go to waste. Amazon managed to stop over 2.5 million suspected bad actors from entering its site. Additionally, Amazon also blocked over 6 billion suspicious accounts from its system.
Accordingly, Amazon recorded a total of $189 billion from sales by its third-party vendors. The figure accounts for the record from the previous year in the United States only. This alone stands for nearly 60% of the company’s total US retail e-commerce sales, eMarketer data from Insider Intelligence quotes.
Walmart: some things remain unmatchable
Despite the heating up rivalry, Walmart is still gaining the upper hand through its branding and reputation. The public has been long trusting Walmart as a safer, less crowded marketplace than its rivals, including Amazon.
Walmart has also been actively partnering up with foreign vendors. The retail company has also announced to be investing in Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce that even managed to exceed Amazon.
With the expansion, Walmart still promises to maintain quality control. Jeff Clementz, Vice President of Walmart Marketplace affirms, “We do not plan to lower our bar or change our vetting standards, our monitoring or management of sellers”. “We are aiming to attract the best from around the world,” Clementz added.
Additionally, Bradley Sutton, a third-party seller in Walmart also commented, “Walmart has something Amazon can’t match: brick-and-mortar stores. If you do well on Walmart.com, there’s potential you can get into a regular Walmart”. “It’s like the Holy Grail for vendors,” he continued, assuring Walmart’s future.
Read also: Jeff Bezos’ Opinion About The Fate of Amazon Worker’s Union
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