On Sunday there was an article about Google in the New York Times in which a Wal-Mart board member was quoted as saying, “We watch Google very closely at Wal-Mart.” In the offline world, Wal-Mart’s vendors are dependent on it for a large portion their product volume, while online, the tables are reversed, with Wal-Mart being dependent on the online search giant for a large portion of its traffic. Hitwise data shows that 11.18% of Wal-Mart visits in October 2005 originated at Google, and it was the single biggest source of traffic for Wal-Mart. In October 2004, Google accounted for only 7.72% of Wal-Mart’s upstream. Thus Wal-Mart’s dependency on Google has grown in the past year.
At least 41% of the search volume from Google sending visits to Wal-Mart came from navigational terms containing some form of the word “walmart” for the four weeks ending November 5, 2005. Here are the top 10 non-navigational terms from Google that sent visits to Wal-Mart in that time period:
music downloads
download music
psp
mp3 players
diabetes
mp3 player
toys
ab lounge
target
mattresses
All of the above terms, except for “target,” are paid listings, for which Wal-Mart is competing for traffic with Amazon, eBay, comparison shopping engines, other multi-channel retailers, manufacturers, and small online pure-plays. Even though Wal-Mart is the third ranked online retailer in market share of visits after eBay and Amazon, they still have to play by the online rules to gain visitors.
On a side note, I did a search on Wal-Mart for a digital camera that I’m interested in buying, and found that their price was $100 more than on a site that I found through Froogle. My pocketbook will be very happy.