It has had lockers at stores like 7-Eleven for about a year, though in September, RadioShack and Staples stopped participating in the program.
It is trying same-day delivery in five markets, and grocery delivery in the Bay Area and Denver.Įxecutives say Walmart wants to become almost as fast as Amazon, but for people who can’t afford the $79 fee of Amazon’s Prime service, with its free two-day shipping.Īmazon has been building warehouses throughout the United States as it tries to expedite its shipping and conquer online grocery delivery. It is also allowing customers to pick up online orders in stores or, in a test in Washington, in lockers. Countries in which it has a physical presence for e-commerce include Brazil, China and Britain. Two-thirds of the United States population is within five miles of a Walmart, according to the company, and more than 10 percent of items ordered online are shipped from stores. These days, though, it is trying to turn its 4,100 stores in the United States and many of its 6,200 stores overseas into e-commerce assets. Walmart was slow to embrace online shopping, keeping its Web operations separate and haltingly adopting new technology. “Amazon is the Walmart of the post-2000 period,” said Matt Nemer, an analyst at Wells Fargo. had 62.5 million unique visitors in August, compared with Amazon’s 133 million, according to Compete, which tracks Web use. While Walmart’s total revenue is close to $500 billion, it has said it expects just a fraction of that, $10 billion, in e-commerce revenue for the year ending January 2014. Amazon is a much bigger player online, with $74.4 billion in revenue expected for 2013. Borrowing a page from Google and Twitter, the company offers hack days when engineers can work on whatever they want.Īmazon, which is based in Seattle, also has a Silicon Valley presence its Lab126 research company, located a few miles from Apple’s headquarters, developed the Kindle and is working on other mobile devices. At a recent event in San Bruno, it was white asparagus panna cotta with house-smoked salmon tartar, morel mushroom macaroons and charcuterie from a whole pig. It is trying hard to prove it is one of the cool kids.įor example, at press events in Bentonville, Ark., Walmart’s headquarters, the menu tends to be ham sandwiches, chips and iced tea. It signed a lease three years ago for the San Bruno office, north of the valley - and across the street from YouTube - and is opening another this fall in Sunnyvale, home of Yahoo, in the heart of the valley. The company has had a small presence near Silicon Valley for more than a decade, but until recently, engineers in the area barely knew it existed. “They’re just playing a game, which is, ‘We’re just going to wait out the world.’ ”Īlthough the fierce competition between Walmart and Amazon is occurring in all areas, to get the technological edge Walmart has to succeed in San Bruno. Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon, in low prices and paper-thin margins. Ashe, chief executive of Walmart Global E-Commerce, said of the belief of Mr. “Don’t think for a second that Jeff Bezos is not a capitalist,” Neil M. Both companies’ moves indicate that they believe the future of commerce is not just stores and not just online but a combination of the two.įor the first time in decades, Walmart, which drove company after company out of business, has a competitor it sounds a little scared of.
Even as Walmart pours money into technology, Amazon is building a physical presence across the nation, adding warehouses and pickup locations. They want to control not just Internet shopping but all shopping. The two retail behemoths, one the king of the physical store and the other the conqueror of the online world, are battling over e-commerce - competing for the most talented engineers, trying to gain the upper hand in the new frontier of same-day delivery and warring over online pricing. The country’s largest retailer, which for years didn’t blink at would-be competitors, is now under such a threat from Amazon that it is frantically playing catch-up by learning the technology business, including starting at Walmart Global E-Commerce, its dot-com division. A plucky Silicon Valley company, forced to compete for talented engineers, is trying it all - recruiting billboards on Highway 101 workplace perks like treadmill workstations and foosball tables and conference rooms named after celebrities like Rihanna and Justin Bieber.