Walmart is out to dominate in e-commerce, but while finding ways to deliver as few orders as possible to customers using the postal service or private carriers. Instead, the company wants to draw customers to its stores with pickup towers or grocery pickup points, or dispatch store employees to make deliveries.

Towers of E-Commerce Dominance

During today’s quarterly earnimgs conference call, Walmart CEO Doug McMilon was pleased with the company’s increased sales growth. Its comparable store sales just keep increasing, and Walmart is using those online sales, which include grocery orders for pickup, to bring customers to the store. Or at least the parking lot.

“Customers are responding to the improvements we’re making to deliver a seamless shopping experience that saves them time and money and that’s exciting to see,” McMillon said during this morning’s quarterly earnings call.

This is a practical matter. The company notes that 91% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart. That means stopping by one is usually convenient, and changes the way that the company approaches e-commerce compared to its competitors.

This year, the retailer is going hyper-local, storing more than a million supply lists for teachers, delivering full sets of school supplies to customers’ doorsteps (or local Walmart store) even before the academic year begins.

A long way for Amazon to go

We know that Walmart and Amazon are locked in a battle for national sales dominance, so it’s notable that while Amazon is working hard to expand its private label offerings and its food offerings, it has an obvious role model in Walmart.

Amazon’s biggest brand in sales, the private-label electronics line AmazonBasics, sold $210 million in the first half of the year. Compare that with Walmart’s biggest proprietary brand, Member’s Mark, consists mostly of food items, and does $10 billion per year in sales.

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