THOUGHTS

Counting Down the Pioneers of the eCommerce Business

Feb 14, 2018

The shopping habits of the consumers across the world has changed significantly. Today, they prefer to make purchases from the comfort of their home. Online shopping is rapidly replacing traditional store shopping. Although traditional retailing still accounts for a significant portion of the retail sales, the trend has been shifting with digital retail growing at an unprecedented rate. The increasing use of internet and smartphone has also fueled the growth of the e commerce business. In order to attain further growth prospects and provide the best possible customer IR_Brochureexperience, top players have been continually tinkering with the e commerce business models.

Top players in the global e commerce business

#5 – Alibaba

Alibaba is a Chinese e-commerce giant which executes about 80% of China’s e-commerce transactions. The company was founded by Jack Ma in 1999 as a business-to-business (B2B) sales platform. Today however, they offer a wide range of products and services including electronic payment services, shopping search engines, and data-centric cloud computing services. The company also runs a business to consumer marketplace under the brand name Tmall and a consumer to consumer marketplace similar to eBay called Taobao. The company also pioneered the concept of Single’s day which generated record sales of $25 billion in 2017.

#4 – Walmart

Walmart, the largest retailer in the world, makes it to number four on the list. The presence of the American retailer signifies the growing importance of the e commerce business. Walmart’s focus on e commerce business was even more solidified by the fact that it shut 154 stores in the US and another 115 across the globe in 2016. In order to fight its competitor Amazon, Walmart has invested heavily in their e commerce business and introduced Walmart Pay and OpenOps, a cloud administration service. However, the online business of Walmart currently accounts for 3% of their total revenue.

#3 –  Macy’s

Macy’s is an American department store chain owned by Macy’s Inc. The company owns more than 780 retail establishments across the US, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guam. In 2017, Macy’s restructured their retail business to focus on their digital business as they poured in $550 million of investment and also closed down about 68 store locations. The retailers also used services from SAP to gain better insight into customer behavior with predictive analytics.

#2 – JD.com

JD.com, previously known as 360buy, is a Chinese B2C e-commerce company headquartered in Beijing. The company is a member of the Fortune Global 500 and had 266.3 million active users as of September 2017. The company also possess the largest drone delivery system along with superior technology for robotic delivery services, drone delivery airports, and autonomous trucks.

#1 – Amazon

It comes as no surprise that Amazon tops the list of the biggest e commerce business. The company started out as an online book delivery service in 1994 by Jeff Bezos. The company now provides a host of products and services including Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Prime Music, Amazon Web Services, Amazon Kindle, Amazon Alexa, and Amazon Echo. In 2017, the company generated revenues of $178 billion with 566,400 employees across the world. The company owns multiple subsidiaries including Zappos, Diapers.com, Audible, Goodreads, IMDb, and Kiva Systems.

For more information on the top e commerce business, e-retailer, ecommerce solutions, and retail industry:

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