Wal-Mart: What Will It Cost to Compete With Amazon?

The article "Wal-Mart: What Will It Cost to compete With Amazon?" by Miriam Gottfried talks about Wal-Mart's current E-commerce investment. According to the article this is not a new approach the company is taking for competitive advantages. It has been an on going project that just hasn't been highly favored till now with the competitive disadvantage to Amazon. On August Wal-Mart talked about purchasing Jet.com for $3.3 billion dollars, and making the founder Marc Lore the chief of E-commerce for Wal-Mart. The company is aware of the innovation they have to part take in order to keep up with the needs of society. The article expressed a very interesting topic with regards to Amazon, it talked about Wal-Mart having the leading price when it comes to being the most affordable but Amazon has the most customers because of the easy access to our needs. Which as a consumer I completely agree I prefer to purchase online and pay shipping fees than shopping myself and spending gas. The company expects to combine both easy access and affordable prices with their innovated E-commerce investment, and do to this they expect the sales to increase from 20 to 30 percent.With internet being the go to for all of our current needs I personality believe a combination of both will increase the competitive advantage of the company as a whole, and maybe even put them above all the others for a while. However, the company could face problems such as lost specially because they truly have no idea how much it will cause them to develop the kind of project they've decided to invest on. With the size of a company like Wal-Mart they can't afford much lost or a minimum amount of income. Like for instance the article talked about Amazon passing up profitability for years as they grew in popularity, and a small growing company can survive like that but Wal-Mart doesn't have that type of luxury. In addition to that the company's investors are still questioning wether the investment will truly put Wal-Mart above it's competitors or will it just be a huge an expensive company lost.