Retail

Amazon Online Visits Double Wal-Mart's

Douglas A. McIntyre

Published: April 21, 2016 6:42 am

Last Updated: January 13, 2020 10:31 am

Amazon.com Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) dominance in the e-commerce market is part of the company’s rapidly expanding revenue growth and market value. That is despite the effort of every brick-and-mortar retailer to have success only to offset stagnant or worsening store sales. Amazon’s dominance shows up again in new research of unique visitors a month. Amazon had about 181 million in March, compared to Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s (NYSE: WMT) 91.2 million.

The data come from comScore, one of the largest researchers of online activity. The universe of the study was unique visitors to sites in the United States. It includes both desktop and mobile activity. In the March results, no other traditional retailer broke into the top 50.

Amazon’s growth cannot be matched by any other major retailer, a likely byproduct of its online audience. In the fourth quarter of last year, its revenue grew 22% from the same quarter in the previous year to $35.7 billion. The figure included revenue from the company’s cloud computing business, AWS, which totaled $2.4 billion in the fourth quarter. To make matters worse for traditional retailers, Amazon expects revenue in the first quarter of 2016 to grow between 17% and 28%. Most traditional retailers expect the most modest growth, if not stagnant or falling sales.

Amazon’s success in e-commerce is permanent. No other retailer can come close to matching its online presence, at least as measured by visits, and that is probably so forever.