Following the company’s surprise second quarter profit, Amazon.com Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) market cap jumped over that of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT), the company often described as the world’s largest retailer. That description remains accurate if you’re counting employees or bricks, but as the market cap numbers indicate, all those people and bricks may not be as productive as a website that attracted nearly 182 million unique U.S. visitors in the month of June alone.
That’s the number of visitors to Amazon’s website according to data published on Friday by comScore. The top 5 multi-platform digital media properties are Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) with about 242 million unique visitors, Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) with about 214 million, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) with about 209 million, Amazon, and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) with about 175 million.
Of the top 50 digital media properties, Walmart ranks 23rd with nearly 84 million unique visitors. Ironically, no other traditional retailer even makes the cut. And even though Walmart’s revenues are roughly 5 times Amazon’s, the biggest retailer in the U.S. online economy is Amazon, not Walmart.
Amazon’s second-quarter revenues rose nearly 20% year-over-year. Operating expenses in the second-quarter rose about 17.4%, and pre-tax profit totaled $362 million compared with a loss of $27 million a year ago.
Walmart’s second-quarter revenues dipped 0.1% year-over-year. Operating expenses rose just 0.3% and pre-tax profit fell nearly 14%, from $5.63 billion in the year-ago quarter to $$4.86 billion.
Can Walmart beef up its online sales? It has to. The company just acquired all the shares of Chinese e-commerce business Yihaodian, of which it already owned a controlling stake. That will help, certainly, provided Chinese consumers flock to the on-line retailer. Walmart appears to understand that the game has changed, but it may have waited too long to take full advantage of the new rules.
ALSO READ: Customer Service Hall of Shame
Take This Retirement Quiz To Get Matched With An Advisor Now (Sponsored)
Are you ready for retirement? Planning for retirement can be overwhelming, that’s why it could be a good idea to speak to a fiduciary financial advisor about your goals today.
Start by taking this retirement quiz right here from SmartAsset that will match you with up to 3 financial advisors that serve your area and beyond in 5 minutes. Smart Asset is now matching over 50,000 people a month.
Click here now to get started.
Thank you for reading! Have some feedback for us?
Contact the 24/7 Wall St. editorial team.