Walmart

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.

Walmart reported 2017 Q1 results yesterday, and the big story is impressive e-commerce growth. Retailer's online sales jumped 63 percent, and GMV jumped 69 percent. However, we need to point out that Walmart used to report global e-commerce growth which included all of online properties. This means the 63 percent e-commerce sales growth has no base to compare it against.

Walmart marketplace launched all the way back in 2009. But the marketplace wasn't resulting in the only thing which mattered - sales growth. So Walmart went out and acquired Jet.com for $3.3b to bring in new talent and have the founder Marc Lore run Walmart's e-commerce. In many ways Jet.com acquisition happened because everything done before that wasn't working, marketplace included.

Last week Walmart announced a new initiative - discounts for products ordered online, but picked up in stores. By the end of June the program is expected to expand to include over 1 million products. This is the opposite of what Amazon is doing. Amazon is building features for convenience, like same-day delivery in major cities. Thus this change by Walmart raises a question - are shoppers more cheap than they are lazy?

Since Walmart marketplace has been receiving a lot of attention from marketplace sellers, we decided to investigate how big the opportunity of selling on Walmart really is. We found one way to look at it - by comparing seller feedback. By comparing all feedback received by all Amazon sellers, to all feedback received by all Walmart sellers, we could get a relative number.