Visits to Amazon Twice Those of Wal-Mart

The size of a company’s Web traffic is not always a measurement of online revenue. However, in the case of Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT), the data do show how dominant the e-commerce company is and how far Wal-Mart would need to go to catch up. Amazon’s visits per month are more than double Wal-Mart’s.

According to comScore, Amazon sites had 189.8 million unique visits in October across desktop, tablets and mobile devices. That makes it the fourth most visited family of sites in America. Wal-Mart’s total was less than half of that at 88.3 million.

A visitor to Amazon finds a great deal more than a visitor to Wal-Mart sites, which is why the traffic disparity is only one part of Amazon’s advantage. Amazon offers its own consumer electronics devices, primarily offered under the Fire brand. It offers its own TV service, dubbed Amazon Fire TV, which includes a hardware attachment that makes the system run, as well as access to dozens of cable channels. This puts the product in the vanguard of the cord-cutting surge, wherein people kill their cable or fiber TV subscriptions and watch the entertainment they want over broadband. The trend has been called the most dangerous challenge to cable since its technology became broadly available over three decades ago.
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At the top of the list of advantages Amazon offers over Wal-Mart is its Prime service, which combines free shipping options with streaming premium videos and televisions shows, and it allows people to store massive amounts of video and photos. The service costs $99 a year and is believed to be one of Amazon’s most important sources of revenue.

Amazon’s visitor base is much larger than Wal-Mart’s, but even larger is the list of what it offers to those visitors.