E-Commerce
Just like any other company, Walmart faces problems. Walmart commands hundreds of billions in revenue, but falls short in e-commerce; against the likes of Amazon, Walmart is an infant in the internet’s domain. This is critical; the growing influence of the internet means that to stay competitive, a company must have a strong standing in the web. Amazon’s stock price has risen 80% while Walmart’s stock price has declined by 30% in this past year, a phenomenon that can be at least partly attributed to lackluster attention to e-commerce. Indeed, only 2.5% of Walmart’s revenue (compared to nearly all of Amazon’s revenue) comes from internet retail. Despite employing 2,200 engineers, Walmart still doesn’t have a system that facilitates free shipment within a week (again, something that Amazon has in place). Certain market analysts believe that a better approach might be for Walmart to partner with an established tech firm rather than try to build its own.
There are several interesting parallels that we can draw to the study of networks. The evidence of the growing influence of the internet fits perfectly with a shift from the Web to Web 2.0. There is clearly a growing influence of the internet on more functional activity. Once wholly independent of the web, delivery of goods and the economy are constructs that are now deeply tied to the web. Secondly, price competition is highly analogous to attention given by search engines; the introduction of the web changed the nature of both dramatically. The web increased price transparency, thus introducing more unstable price competition. The web also introduced an increase in competition over favorable search engine results; this competition can be just as unstable as the nature of search engine mechanisms are ever changing. In both, the web has brought about greater reactivity to comparable changes in circumstance.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/23/business/walmart-plays-catch-up-with-amazon.html?ref=business&_r=0