Amazon wants to become Walmart before Walmart can become Amazon

Excerpts from an article by Sarah Perez in TechCrunch

The future of retail will be a combination of both online e-commerce and a brick-and-mortar retail presence – as recent moves from both Walmart and Amazon have shown, including today’s back-to-back announcements from the two rivals, which sees Amazon buying a chain of popular grocery stores with a Whole Foods deal for $13.7 billion, and Walmart picking up yet another online apparel vendor with Bonobos for $310 million.

Walmart is the only retailer with the size, scale and funds to take on Amazon, and it’s been making aggressive moves to compete with Amazon’s online business for years. Amazon, on the other hand, has been trying to figure out how to merge brick-and-mortar stores into its world of online shopping.

What both retailers understand is that shopping will not fully transition online – at least not in the foreseeable future; nor will it operate entirely offline, either. It needs to be a mix. There are times when people still want to shop out in the real world – whether that’s because they like the experience of seeing products in their hand, because it can be more convenient or even just quicker to just shop in a store at times, rather than searching a website and waiting for delivery.

The question is, which retailer will figure out the perfect mix of online and offline, and get there the quickest?

Read the full article in TechCrunch

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