Throughout the Christmas season, Clavis is documenting the Amazon vs. Walmart battle through the lens of local product availability, price, and promotions (see the first instalment in this series here).
This week, we saw a continuation of the local availability trends from Black Friday. Amazon’s local availability platform, Amazon Prime Now, is proving more adept at keeping hot toys & electronics in stock than Walmart’s Click & Collect local ecommerce offering.
Walmart’s availability was hobbled out of the gate by 13 products that were out of stock across all 24 local stores monitored, throughout the entire week. These include Disney’s Lightning McQueen remote control car, Roomba’s 980 WiFi Connected Vacuum, and LEGO’s Star Wars X-Wing Fighter. Given this difficult baseline, Walmart was only able to hit overall local availability rates of 47% for Electronics, and 75% for Toys.
In contrast, Amazon’s Prime Now again demonstrated remarkably consistent availability in local markets, achieving overall availability rates above 94% for our tracked Toy & Electronics products in San Francisco, Seattle & Orlando. By Category, Amazon saw overall availability rates of 86% for Electronics, and 90% for Toys.
Each retailer continued to see difficulties for individual products in local markets. As mentioned, 13 different products were unavailable for pickup in all 24 local Walmart store locations throughout the entire week. Beyond that, Walmart had sporadic availability problems. Garmin’s GPS Smartwatch started the week strong, with 100% availability across all monitored locations on the 1st of December. By the next day, the product was nowhere to be found, in any location. The Smartwatch surfaced again on the 4th, available at NYC, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose and Tampa locations, only to disappear again from all Walmart locations on the 5th and the 6th of December.
Amazon Prime Now had troubles with many individual hot Christmas products as well – many of the same culprits as last week. Again, Audio Technica’s popular turntable had difficulties – it was completely unavailable in 11 cities all week, including New York City, LA and Chicago. Mattel’s Hot Wheels 9-Car Gift Pack was only available in Atlanta, Seattle and Sacramento at the beginning of the week. By Sunday the 3rd, Sacramento went out-of-stock, too.
More to Come!
These out-of-stocks can weigh heavily on manufacturers’ balance sheets, as they look to the Christmas season to drive overall profitability. As shoppers continue to move towards local ecommerce options, it is increasingly important that manufacturers monitor ecommerce availability at the local level - in order to minimize lost sales due to stock issues.
We’ll continue track the products over the coming weeks to see how the online retailers keep up with demand, so look for more updates in the future.
