Amazon Vs. Walmart: Which Giant Will Dominate E-Commerce?

Case Study: Amazon vs. Walmart: Which Giant Will Dominate E-Commerce?

1. What concepts in the chapter are illustrated in this case:

Walmart.com and Amazon.com are considered the biggest in retail marketing. Amazon been always a leader in on-line retail, while Walmart was and still a leader in physical retail where physical stores spread widely across regions and countries that provides a low competitive price.

Walmart stepped further and went beyond its physical stores to offer retail marketplace that sells various goods and merchandise online. Both companies are doing their best to improve their services to provide convenient solution, low prices and variety of products to gain market share.

The concepts illustrated in this case are business value chair model and Micheal porter’s competitive forces model, both companies are utilizing models to achieve competitive advantage and excellence:

A. Utilizing company’s set of software such as ERP solutions, Databases and business processes to collect data from various departments to achieve operational excellence, customer intimacy and assist in decision-making.

B. Analyzing activities and categories them into primary and secondary activities to introduce competitive strategies.

C. Benchmarking services and finding best practices to improve services.

D. Analyzing general view of the firm, competitors and environment to highlight traditional competitors, new market entrants, substitute services/products, customers and suppliers.

2. Analyze Amazon and Walmart.com using the value chain and competitive forces models.

Walmart.com and Amazon both used value chain model to form their strategies and maintain competitive advantage.

For example Amazon used Michael Porter’s Value chain model to determine which activates are value added activities or non-value added activities. For example amazon has found that some of these activities are needed to provide superior products and services such as: Inbound logistics, operations, out-bound logistics, Sales, marketing and after sale services. While Procurement, HR management, Technological development and infrastructure are considered support activities.

Same applies to Walmart, Walmart .com utilized the value chain model and used the model to set primary activities such as Finding new product suppliers to reduce cost, purchasing and inspection (identify the relationship with suppliers), In-bound logistics to improve supplies from warehouses to stores, stocking, marketing and sales throughout advertising to improve traffic into stores, as well Implementing advance POS, inventory-control and other technologies to speed up delivery and improve security.