What Walmart eCommerce Sales Growth Tells You About Retail

Walmart grew eCommerce sales by 29% in Q4 yet total sales grew by only 3%. The fact of the matter is that all the growth in retail is in eCommerce and online sales, yet most retailers are struggling to catch up online. When the largest retailer by far is showing such disparities in growth rates between online and offline, its time for retailers to truly wake up.
So what does this mean?
Retail growth is almost exclusively online, however, in-store sales are still the vast majority of sales!
How do you go about growing a business if you are still reliant on in-store sales?
Well if one area is growing and one is stagnant, doesn’t it make more sense to invest in online? The answer, for the most part, is yes.
However, that does not mean you can neglect in store sales. Thus my suggestion is to better integrate online and in-store sales to grow your retail business.
Where to invest more resources:

• Multichannel sales via marketplaces
• In-store pickup
• Better delivery time routed via closest store or warehouse

Improving these areas can greatly enhance your online sales and take your company to the next level online. I would look at leveraging a solution like Channel advisor or Volocommerce for marketplace integration and improving marketplace sales. Solutions like Sales Layer and Salsify can also help you better manage product data for the future and push accurate product data to marketplaces and other places you may want to sell.
In-store pickup is huge for retailers and should be leveraged for every location via integration with your website. There are extensions for eCommerce platforms that offer this and many ways to implement appropriate in-store pickup functionality via custom development.
Lastly, I would look at solutions like Hublogix or Spark Shipping to integrate with your warehousing and delivery to speed up the time to delivery. Solutions like ShipperHQ can also help you better manage the complexity of many shipping options and freight shipping.