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Wal-Mart’s E-Commerce Success

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Wal-Mart’s E-Commerce Success
Possibly the single greatest success story of e-business and B2B implementation is that of the rise to dominance by Wal-Mart in the North American retail market. Love them or hate them, you have to hand it to Wal-Mart for their impressive growth in such a short time span. And arguably the single most important factor in this rise was their harnessing of the power of e-business, e-procurement, and the adjustment of internal processes to maximize this advantage.
So, why does Wal-Mart think e-business is important? Wal-Mart's focus on its e-commerce strategy not only allows the retailer to reach customers who don't have stores nearby, but, more importantly, the online customer is a significantly better customer than one that only shops at a store. “Wal-Mart believes eCommerce Brings Access to Customers Anytime, Anywhere (eCommerce 1)”. As customers not only do we expect to have great prices; we have grown to consumers who want products anytime no matter where we are.
Can Wal-Mart successfully adapt their model online to challenge Amazon? While Wal-Mart’s total revenue is projected to be over five times greater than Amazon’s, the e-commerce return for Amazon’s all revenue is over seven times greater than Wal-Mart’s e-commerce revenue. Wal-Mart has gone as far as establishing Wal-Mart labs in California in order to prepare to challenge the online retail king, Amazon. These labs are designed to primarily compete against tech companies by taking pages out of each of their books.
“Wal-Mart has revolutionized supply chain management by using a “pull” model where customer demands drive the suppliers (Supply 1)”. Inventory control is finely honed and purchasing trends are available to suppliers, whom now must be able to quickly respond to the needs of millions of customers. The business decision to decentralize the procurement

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