Wal-Mart Stores and Amazon.com are both such enormous companies that there isn’t even a fitting cliché to clumsily describe their battle for e-commerce supremacy. There isn’t a David in this fight. If Wal-Mart’s Goliath, Amazon is Godzilla.
Both chains dominate their historic areas of expertise. Once just a bookseller, Amazon is now the biggest online store on the planet. Wal-Mart is the world’s largest retailer of any kind, its $469 billion 2012 revenues dwarfing Amazon’s $61 billion.
On the web, though, Wal-Mart lags. The Bentonville, Ark. chain doesn’t break out its U.S. online sales in its financials, but e-commerce chief Neil Ashe recently said the company aims to do $9 billion of its 2013 revenues on the internet. That’s 2% of its overall sales.
Right now, with Wal-Mart’s brick and mortar business booming, it might not matter much, but it will in five years, say experts at market research firm Nielsen.
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