What distinguish Wal-Mart from its Rivals:

Wal-Mart (WMT) is a largest retail store that is part of the S&P 500and Dow Jones 30 indices. It is registered as WMT in the Stock Exchange of New York. The founder of the company was Sam Walton who’s headquartered is in Bentonville, Arkansas. Wal-Mart has 11,137 locations around the world. The products of Wal-Mart include Apparel/footwear specialty, cash and carry/warehouse club, discount store, hypermarket/supercenter/superstore, and supermarket.  It is currently owned by Walton family having total number of employees of 2.2 million. Wal-Mart is considered as part of the Top 50 list of World’s Most Valuable Companies.

Wal-Mart may have the low prices and the biggest retailer in the world, but it is not a cool place to shop. Despite of being uncool, Wal-Mart has managed to maintain its position in the world as online retailing. According to the Wal-Mart stores CEO “the sales of Global E Commerce has surpassed the $10 billion mark, an increase by 30% over last year. “ Our local global business is focusing more on customers and serving them according to their wants and needs. Wal-Mart sold exactly as much as online Apple but they did in a very cutting-edge style.

The online sales of Wal-Mart is equal to the Apple’s App store which includes the retail sales through Apple.com and iTunes sales but the App store has an impressive footprint as it includes iPods, ipads and iPhones.

Wal-Mart and Apple are competitors but the fact is that Apple is a leading seller of the digital music in its iTunes store whereas Wal-Mart focuses on the audiences that prefer physical CDs and DVDs.

Amazon increasingly grows its sales from outside its comfort zone of books; however the main competitive advantage of Amazon is its price whereas Wal-Mart certainly has the buying power to compete and possesses other advantages too.

Wal-Mart has the advantage of the physical location that can be used to develop its digital brand. In order to do that, the plan of the company is to use technology that can improve the in-store shopping experience. The company is using both platforms that support each other as around 140 million people visit Wal-Mart store each week.

It is reported that greater than 50% of the customers of Wal-Mart owns the smartphones and also the number of customers has tripled over the last year that go to Walmart.com through their mobile devices, such huge customer base would help the Wal-Mart to catch up with Amazon online. 

Huge Retail audience of Wal-Mart were likely not internet easy adopters as people in worldwide who have an access to an internet and the numbers who are comfortable with online purchasing has increases that ultimately benefitted Wal-Mart.   

Wal-Mart can compete with Amazon on price as it would be able to get support from its physical location to register the customers for the websites. Wal-Mart universal presence and its total volume of stores joined with its low price often gain its customers who prefer to buy things from elsewhere.

Amazon may be the big online boy, but Wal-Mart has the ability to draw the lines between in-store and online shopping that will advantage the company to gain continuously on Amazon.