Retail

Walmart's No Prime Day

Douglas A. McIntyre

Published: July 15, 2018 7:29 am

Last Updated: January 11, 2020 9:00 pm

As Amazon.com, Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN) launches its largest event of the year, rival Walmart Inc (NYSE: WMT) is ignoring it. Amazon’s Prime Day runs for 36 hours which begin on July 16 and the e-commerce and cloud company expected to sell well over $1 billion in items. The event is also likely to add tens of thousands of people who want the deals to become new Prime members to the tune of $119 a year each.

Walmart has probably ignored setting sales and plans to bring people to its stores or shop at walmart.com because Prime Day’s traffic to Amazon is overwhelming. According to Foursquare:

Foursquare uniquely has a pulse on how people move through the world and how these data points emerge as behavioral patterns, we decided to take a look at how people shopped in the weeks around Prime Day last year. The results? Pretty eye-popping. While more than 90% of shopping still happens in the real world, the week of Prime Day 2017 was the lowest foot-traffic week for retail stores for the entire summer.

The tide against Walmart and smaller retailers depressingly is too strong. Better to surrender than be slaughtered while fighting.

Walmart’s lack of plans to get bricks-and-mortar traffic over Prime Day is understanding. What is not is that walmart.com  is doing nothing. Walmart has invested billions of dollars in building up its online presence. It bought Jet.com for over $3 billion in 2016 and has made smaller M&A deals since then. These are aimed directly at a heightening battle against Amazon.

Walmart can’t spoil Prime Day. However, silence is not a strategy when the world’s largest retailer wants to post rising success online