Walmart Invests In Its Warehouse To Compete Online With Amazon

I announced it at the beginning of the year, but it is for use an important year for brick & mortar tycoons which invested a lot in gaining market shares on the Ecommerce playground. Walmart is for sure the retailer that invested the most.

This summer, Walmart has opened a brand new warehouse for that matter. Indeed, to compete with Amazon or other pure players, you need to have the same tools. This is the reason why they opened a 110 000 square meters warehouse dedicated 100% to their Ecommerce business. Why is this warehouse more adapted to the Ecommerce competition?

• Because of its sized: it is bigger than usual Walmart's buildings, in order to stock more products, and offer a wider product range online.
• It has automated systems allowing the operations to be more efficient. "The new warehouses each will ship hundreds of thousands of orders daily, four to five times its dozens of existing smaller warehouses. Each new warehouse has several million items, five times the network of older warehouses. That will enable Wal-Mart to offer more consolidated orders arriving in fewer boxes."
• Faster delivery: The goal is to counterattack the Amazon Premium service by delivering in 2 days products for free.

Walmart plans to open 4 other warehouses by the end of 2015 to reach 95% of the US population. Furthermore, obviously, Walmart owns a large store network that can complete and offer more versatility to customers to get their goods.

This example shows you clearly that supply chain and logistics are key elements in the Ecommerce business that needs to be mastered. It is different to ship goods in full trucks than couple of packages to a home. And Walmart is working actively to fill the gap.

Amazon Dash Button: Is It The Future of Retailing?

I read a very interesting article on Retail Dive about the Amazon Dash. Amazon dash is a connected object that you place on your washing machine in order to signal to Amazon that you are running out of clothing soap. The interest of the thing? This is the real question. The advantage for the customer is to be able not to forget to get Dash the next time he does shopping. But is it really an efficient way to do it? 

I highly recommend you to read the article, as it points out well the limit of the idea. Actually, I love the way Auchan is thinking about using connected objects to help customers shop and setting up their grocery list with Hiku. 

But the move shows clearly that both world (Ecommerce and Brick & Mortar), are on their hedge to a big fight this year.