Walmart

Walmart online assortment has over 42 million products, but only 3.5 million products are sold by Walmart. The rest are by one of the over 20,000 marketplace sellers.

Achieving nationwide free two-day shipping is hard and expensive. Even Walmart can't do it perfectly - customers on the west cost have access to 20% less products with two-day shipping available than customers on the east cost.

Walmart has grown the catalog and has built the marketplace, the challenge now is to offer free nationwide two-day shipping. Amazon has made its Prime program the gold standard for all other online retailers. For Walmart too.

The Walmart marketplace is frustrating because it is two different experiences sharing one website. CNBC broke the news that Walmart is working on fixing this. Walmart is finally addressing the flaw which existed since the marketplace inception in 2009.

Jet.com website traffic declined to 10.5 million visits in February, down from 35.5 million visits in February 2017. That's a decrease of 70% in a year.

It would be interesting to ask how many people inside Walmart, and Amazon have used, and understand Snapchat. And by induction how many understand the people who do. Because the new generation, for whom Snapchat is the most used app, will be shopping differently. There is not going be innovation in e-commerce if the people building it don't understand their users.

Last week Walmart held the annual Investment Community Meeting. The most interesting was Marc Lore's presentation as he shared new insight into their e-commerce operations.

Last week Walmart passed the milestone of 15,000 Walmart marketplace sellers. On average a seller has 2,550 products listed for sale. And yet it is hard to know what any of these mean in terms of the potential of the marketplace since none of these figures are performance related.

Walmart reported 2017 Q2 results today. As many brick-and-mortar retailers are struggling to grow, or to even avoid bankruptcy, Walmart posted same-store sales growth for the 12th consecutive quarter. However this is only the third quarter Walmart reported US e-commerce growth. Since there is no history to compare these numbers against we have no idea how to take them.

Marketplaces are not created equal, and one of the biggest differences is how they treat sellers on the platform. While technically all marketplaces consist of a list of sellers, different marketplaces approach them differently.