Walmart

This year, Walmart added 10 million products to the online catalog, but only half a million of that is sold directly by Walmart. The marketplace brought the rest of the assortment as it accelerated in growth by adding 10,000 new sellers since the start of the year. Today Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said, "we need even more progress on Walmart.com with general merchandise," for the past few years that progress came almost exclusively from the marketplace.

On August 31, 2009, Walmart announced the Walmart marketplace, expanding existing assortment by offering additional products from a select group of retailers. At the time it added nearly one million new items to the catalog from just a few sellers. Ten years later, the marketplace has grown to over 28,000 sellers, which all together bring 45 million items to the Walmart online catalog.

This week Walmart has expanded the next-day delivery service to Massachusetts, Missouri, Virginia, and West Virginia, growing the number of states with next-day delivery to 33.

Walmart one-day delivery is available for 130,000 products in four cities: Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Diego, and Los Angeles. Ten million products are available on Amazon one-day delivery, in a lot more cities than four.

Jet website traffic reached new lows in December with 8 million visits, down from 22 million the year before. That's a decrease of 63% in a year. It’s not clear, honestly, why Jet is even still around.

The Year in Review looks at the state of marketplaces and their challenges, and makes predictions on what’s to come next year. It’s a deep-dive report built on our research, highlighting more than twenty different metrics and the context surrounding them.

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.