In the United States, Amazon has occupied half of the US e-commerce sales share, eBay ranks second, and Walmart’s e-commerce share accounts for less than 4%. Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, continues to acquire clothing and vertical e-commerce platforms when its own e-commerce platform cannot compete with Amazon, hoping to compete with Amazon in the segmented e-commerce field.
In early October 2018, Walmart acquired Eloquii, an e-commerce platform for plus-size clothing. A week later, Walmart acquired Bare Necessities, an e-commerce platform for underwear.
In the previous year and a half, Walmart also acquired Moosejaw, an e-commerce platform for outdoor sports goods, Bonobos, a men’s fashion e-commerce, Modcloth, a retro fashion e-commerce, Shoebuy, a footwear e-commerce platform (giving it a more awesome domain name: shoes.com), and Hayneedle, a home e-commerce brand.
These acquisitions almost all reflect Walmart’s e-commerce M&A strategy: category leaders, or e-commerce consumer brands that can bring unique products to customers.
According to some analysis and calculation, Walmart has spent $600 million on these six segmented e-commerce platforms.
These e-commerce platforms target young, individualistic people who rarely visit offline Walmart supermarkets. Although it has not been able to catch up with Amazon in the e-commerce battlefield, Walmart seems to want to find a breakthrough again through a new site group strategy. Perhaps these acquired companies can also provide Walmart with a large number of new generation e-commerce talents to challenge Amazon in a new way.
For clothing categories, Walmart, Amazon, and even domestic e-commerce platforms such as Cross-border Communication, Shein, and Club Factory have the same preference.
According to JungleScout’s analysis, of Amazon’s 74 self-operated brands, 87.8% are clothing categories. But it is clear that Amazon is not good at operating women’s clothing. Among Amazon’s 10 worst-performing self-operated brands, 9 of them are women’s clothing. Despite a certain amount of traffic tilt, 82% of all its women’s clothing products have monthly sales of less than 100 sets.
Zaful, a clothing e-commerce platform under Global Easybuy, a subsidiary of Cross-border Communication, uses swimwear as a breakthrough point to drive the sales of fashion sports peripheral categories. It is a vertical shopping website that operates in a fashion sports scenario. Rosegal uses large-size clothing as a breakthrough point to serve the fatter customer group and expand the peripheral categories.
According to Cross-border Communication’s data, Zaful and Rosegal are currently ranked third and fifth among the world’s well-known women’s clothing websites respectively.
New markets, new categories, new talents, and new ideas. A giant like Walmart is always innovating and breaking through when facing the challenge of Amazon.
For the majority of cross-border e-commerce sellers, it is even more necessary to constantly think about how to innovate and find more opportunities under the premise of reducing the traffic dividend of the Amazon platform!
For cross-border e-commerce brands that have supply chain resources and traffic advantages in niche areas, rapid growth and subsequent acquisition by listed companies has also become an option for development. As long as they can prove their absolute advantage in the niche field, even if the scale of operating income is not large enough, there will still be listed companies or investment institutions interested.