Brick-and-mortar retailer Walmart is beginning to beat online retailer Amazon in the game it pioneered, e-commerce.
A recent CNBC report quotes data from advertising technology company Captify showing that Walmart is handily beating Amazon on online searches for deals–in search terms like “Black Friday” and “Black Friday Sales.”
Google Trends display a similar picture. Internet searches for Walmart products for the Nov. 23-25 period exceeded those for Amazon products.
Walmart’s lead in Internet searches for merchandise on the year’s busiest shopping day didn’t surprise retail industry observers like Michael Ashley Schulman, who attributed Walmart’s brief lead to a confluence of events involving marketing, families, competition, and fewer COVID worries.
“A crucial differentiator for Walmart is that consumers are much more willing to shop in-store versus a year ago,” Schulman told International Business Times in an email. “Thus, more people are planning for their in-person Black Friday holiday shopping excursions together as a family, something they can’t do at Amazon. Walmart, as well as Target and Best Buy, are playing into the group entertainment value of shopping in ways that Amazon can’t.”
In addition, traditional brick-and-mortar retailers have been riding a new retail trend, the merger of conventional in-store shopping with online shopping. It allows shoppers to place orders online and pick up the merchandise in the local stores. As a result, they can save time and shipping fees, something Amazon is missing.
Walmart, in particular, has spent big bucks to expand its Internet presence by hiring software developers and acquiring online retailers like Jet.com. In essence, it has “tuned the tables” against Amazon.
Wall Street has noticed. Over the last 12 months, Walmart’s shares have gained 4.6%, while Amazon’s shares have lost 47% of their value. That’s a significant reversal of a long-term trend where Amazon’s shares beat Walmart’s by a considerable margin.
When it came to Black Friday, Walmart did much more than leverage its brick-and-mortar and e-commerce capabilities to compete against Amazon.
Price deals are critical to social media marketing. They hype shoppers’ preferences, fueling WOM and buzz that brings traffic to a site. And so is an aggressive advertisement in social and mass media and the addition of more online sellers.
Walmart has been doing all that.
“Walmart has stepped up its marketing game in 2022 across TV, streaming, social media, billboards, PR, online, newspapers, and magazines,” said Schulman. “And will add an estimated 40,000 new sellers to its Walmart Marketplace this year, thus making it seem a more attractive all-around destination this year.”
Schulman said there’s one more thing that probably hurt Amazon’s Black Friday season this year: their second Prime Day (Prime Early Access Sale) on Oct. 11-12.
“It may have created consumer fatigue with Amazon, especially since many deals and discounts were not as spectacular as usual,” Schulman said.
