Walmart, which for years has been notching billions of dollars in profits annually with a retail business centered on thousands of brick-and-mortar stores across the U.S., in recent years has been chasing Amazon online.
It has been dawning on many retailers and brands that e-commerce is an expensive way to sell to shoppers, and several online pure-players have turned to wholesale partnerships with legacy players or opened stores of their own. Amazon itself has leaned on its profitable AWS cloud services business to balance out its less profitable retail business.
Moreover, while e-commerce sales surged at the height of the pandemic, that growth has slowed as consumers have returned to shopping in stores and pulled back on discretionary purchases amid high inflation.
Source: Retail Dive