Walmart's seamless retail ecosystem

This year, Walmart expects to sell some US$10 billion in goods online. That’s just a drop in the bucket of overall $475 billion in sales.

But Walmart is planning for a future where it operates seamlessly across online and bricks and mortar.

Neil Ashe, Walmart’s CEO of global e-commerce believes customers soon will not want to decide whether to buy online or in a store. They’ll want both options at once.

‘If we demonstrate our organizational structure to them, we’ve lost,” Ashe said recently.

Can Walmart succeed as an omni-channel retailer? Perhaps. For one, it’s already a giant in the one category that people need to buy the most: groceries.

Also, it has thousands of stores that can act as both shopping destinations and mini-warehouses for online buying.

Walmart’s biggest e-commerce rival, Amazon.com, has no such competitive advantage. Unless it invests in opening stores, Amazon must win customers online, or not at all.

Walmart can do both, which could help it win the day.

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