Is Amazon.com being set up to become the showroom for Walmart's Supercenters?
New research from Kantar Retail that looked at 36 items from four categories — including edible grocery, non-edible grocery, health and beauty care and general merchandise — found that Amazon.com's market basket basket was 20.5 percent higher than the same items sold in one of Walmart's stores. The research also looked at Walmart.com and found that the same items sold online were seven percent more than if consumers made a trip to their nearby Supercenter.
One advantage that Amazon may have over Walmart's brick and click operations is stock. Kantar found that 14 percent of the items on Walmart.com were out-of-stock while three percent were missing from the Supercenter's shelves. Amazon did not have any holes in its inventory.