The article highlights Amazon’s dominance in the online retail field as well as Walmart’s ongoing efforts to overcome it and its effects. The brick-and-mortar giant has gained the favor of a majority of online shoppers in 2020, while Amazon’s approval rating fell from 53% to 45% in the same timeframe. In part, the author attributes this shift to Walmart’s lower delivery practices and its introduction of unlimited free delivery packages, which Amazon later imitated with its Prime subscription. At the same time, he highlights Amazon’s strengths, such as ease of use and range of services, usage of cashier-free physical stores, and overall high customer satisfaction rating. He also notes that the newer retailer’s warehousing capabilities and processes are considerably superior to Walmart’s, especially with regard to the online model. Moreover, the author expects that company that loses the competition to sustain substantial losses despite the considerable innovation that they have introduced to the field. He concludes that the field of e-commerce warrants attention from entrepreneurs, both due to its uncertain outcome and because of its demonstration of how competition benefits consumers.
I found the article quite interesting, as I was unaware of Walmart’s deployment of an extensive online retail branch. I expect that, with its extensive experience in procuring inexpensive goods and delivering them to customers as well as nationwide reach, the company has strong grounds for competition. At the same time, Amazon is more specialized and better adapted to the current situation, as the author outlines. The possibility of a third company coming in with an innovative idea to disrupt the market also remains, so it is challenging to make predictions about the outcome of this confrontation. The more interesting aspect is the effect of this competition on the customers and the market as a whole. The companies’ services are highly interchangeable, so they effectively have to compete in a fair fashion. The resulting growth in the quality of products and services, accompanied by price reductions for deliveries, demonstrates the advantages of free-market competition. At the same time, both companies’ records of worker mistreatment make me curious as to where the price cuts are coming from.