PYMNTS Daily Data Dive: Walmart’s Online Gamble

Walmart is about to find out in real time if its billions invested in leveling up its eCommerce capacity is making a dent in Amazon’s online dominance. Walmart is catching more customers with its eCommerce efforts, but its online market share dipped down to 4.1 percent during the “official” holiday retail kickoff weekend post-Thanksgiving, a loss of 1 point.

Walmart is also expanding its lineup of goods. It will carry a digital product assortment of 23 million goods. In the last year alone, the company has built five new “mega” fulfillment centers that use advanced automation to retrieve items. That brings its total to 10 nationwide — small compared to Amazon’s hundreds of millions of marketplace products and 70 fulfillment centers across the U.S.

But Walmart is more profitable than Amazon, generating around $500 billion in worldwide sales annually.

Here are the numbers:

4.1, 1 | Walmart’s online market share during the holiday shopping kickoff weekend, down a point

23 million | Assortment of goods Walmart will carry online over the holiday shopping season

Hundreds of millions | Assortment of goods Amazon carries

5 | New mega fulfillment centers Walmart built in 2016

10 | Total mega fulfillment centers Walmart now has

70 | Number of Amazon fulfillment centers

$500 billion | Value of Walmart’s annual sales worldwide