News

Walmart customers now shopping Amazon.com

March 20, 2012

Although most of Walmart’s customers were latecomers to online shopping, they are now trolling for deals at Amazon.com and putting pressure on the retail giant to fix its lagging e-commerce operation, according to a story on Business Week.

Five years ago, only about a quarter of Walmart customers shopped at Amazon, according to research firm Kantar Retail. Now half their customers claim to as bargain hunters making less than $50,000 a year become more tech savvy. Also, less-strapped shoppers who began shopping at Walmart during the recession are now rediscovering Amazon, said Bryan Gildenberg, a Kantar analyst based in Glen Ridge, New Jersey.

“Amazon has moved from being this unusual niche competitor for Walmart to a force that can reinvent the industry,” Gildenberg said in a phone interview. “Young people are tech savvy and they’re unemployed, too. The affluent shopper is trading back out of Walmart and Amazon is a bigger part of their life than before.”

Read more about online retailing.