Wal-Mart to enter the electricity business unfavorable annual revenue less than the total revenue 2%

On line business lukewarm swallow behind, Refract is Wal-Mart "net" desolate.

It is reported that Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) has restructured its e-commerce business, with two senior executives in charge of advanced market electric business to leave.

Coincidentally, the July issue of the U.S. "Business weekly" report also said that 15 years ago began to enter the network Wal-Mart still struggling. The Wal-Mart website (Walmart.com) has an annual revenue of $6 billion trillion, less than 2% of its total revenue, while Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) 's retail revenue for 2010 was 34 billion dollars. According to ComScore's report, the Wal-Mart site had a total of 35.8 million visitors in June, only slightly above Amazon's One-third, about half the size of EBAY (Nasdaq:ebay). Even Wal-Mart's real-world store-proud price advantage has been lost on the Web: Amazon is "significantly ahead" of online prices, according to a March report by US investment company William Blair.

The dismal performance of Wal-Mart's online business is thought to be related to its long-term focus. In the past two years, Wal-Mart's domestic business, which has been slashed by the economic crisis, has cut the size of U.S. stores by nearly half, compared with Walmart's new stores every year in the late 90. Before the rapid development of physical stores so that Wal-Mart lack of a sense of crisis, and the popularity of the current network and E-commerce rapid growth is rapidly changing, rebuilding people's consumption habits. The explosive growth of E-commerce has resulted in the loss of many low-income home users, which are the core users of Wal-Mart.

On the other hand, Wal-Mart's online business development has its profound corporate cultural roots. Wal-Mart has long been subject to physical store managers who fear that E-commerce will threaten real-store revenues and affect their bonuses, Businessweek reported. In the early years of the Wal-Mart Web site, the shop leaders refused to even print the website's web site on a shopping bag. Network market price sensitivity is very high, if the line under the same price, the online store on the loss of competitiveness, if the line below the line price to obtain competitiveness, it is bound to the real store business caused a certain damage. The question of how to balance the two hands and the willingness to sacrifice and invest in the new business is something Wal-Mart must confront.

In June 2010, Eishwahr (Eduardo castro-wright) took over the Wal-Mart online division as the chief online strategist and was seen by some former executives and retail analysts as Wal-Mart did not understand another manifestation of the internet. They think the company is applying for a real e-commerce expert, rather than the Eishwahr, who was in charge of the American retail business in 2005-2010. However, Wal-Mart also began to pay attention to the voice of these criticisms, the online business reorganization, the developed market e-business managers will no longer report to the global E-commerce team, but directly to the host country's entity store executives reporting. This will result in a decrease in the direct reporting to Iswar China. Wal-Mart says it has now restructured its e-commerce business in the US, UK, Canada and Japan to provide a better online shopping experience.

Wal-Mart has also made a lot of efforts to enhance its online business strength. such as the new Wal-Mart Laboratory (@WalmartLabs), the lab is responsible for helping Wal-Mart keep up with the new trends in the Internet, technology, corporate social and mobile business strategy, the physical store and e-commerce better integration. This April, Wal-Mart bought a social media platform, Kosmix, for 300 million dollars and joined Wal-Mart Laboratories. Through Kosmix technology, Wal-Mart may be able to connect online retailing with social media such as Facebook and Twitter to achieve social search. For example, in Wal-Mart online store Search "smartphone", search results will recommend your friends on Facebook "like" smart phone.

On the other hand, Kosmix's two founder Harinayahan (Venky Harinarayan) and Annade Rajaraman (Anand Rajaraman) are pioneers in the field of E-commerce, both famous Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and active angel investors. Their joining with the team will undoubtedly provide more online genes for Wal-Mart's corporate culture.

Wal-Mart's emphasis on online business is a pleasure to see, but what must be seen is that all the links of online transactions, browsing, payment, distribution, return and replacement ... and offline channels are different, to the supply chain, payment system and network matching docking is very difficult, but also not in the short term can be achieved. And these issues are equally tricky to put in Wal-Mart China, which will take time to advance online business.