Talking to Fortune magazine, Neil Ashe, Wal-Mart’s head of e-commerce, said that the boundaries between offline and online are blurring as consumers increasingly expect a seamless transition between the two. Wal-Mart has been relatively late to e-commerce, but Ashe’s remit is to make e-commerce central in the retailer’s strategy. Consumers are becoming used to choosing from a variety of purchasing and delivery/collection options, and Amazon has been at the forefront of this change, with innovations like its Prime service. Wal-Mart gets it too, but it has done little to compete with Amazon online. Ashe sees the way forward for Wal-Mart as leveraging its existing assets and making them “contemporary”, and since joining Wal-Mart in 2012 he has been acquiring tech startups, allowing the retailer to trial social gifting and subscription boxes. Wal-Mart has a long way to go for its e-commerce effort to “move the needle”, but Ashe says it is learning. 

Online grocery shopping has had limited appeal, restricted by negative consumer perceptions of selection, price and delivery options, but competition in the market is changing that. This Wall Street Journal writer organized a shopping comparison and found that some online services are performing close to offline stores in terms of selection and convenience, and also price, driven by the expansion of online retailers like Peapod and FreshDirect, as well as the launch of AmazonFresh. Walmart has been trialing its Walmart To Go service in two cities, and further impetus is coming from new services, such as Instacart. Having others choose your food still puts off many from using online services, but for others it’s an advantage. There remain a number of issues still to address, such as minimum orders, what to do with all the delivery boxes, and product substitutions, but the retailers are taking notice and competition will help ensure these problems are ironed out.

Analysis of sales in the UK for the Christmas 2013 period shows that some of multichannel retailers were seeing continued switching from offline to online purchasing. Sales at John Lewis were up 6.9% on a like-for-like basis in the five weeks to 28 December 2013, but online sales jumped 22.6%. johnlewis.com contributed nearly 32% of all John Lewis sales in this period. Its Click & Collect orders were up over 62%. House of Fraser saw like-for-like sales increase 7.3% in the three weeks to 28 December, but online sales were up nearly 58%. The IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark shows that online sales on Boxing Day 2013 were up over 40% on the same day in 2012. Mobile commerce is gaining traction. Christmas Day traffic from mobile phones and tablets represented three quarters of total online traffic, and IBM data for Boxing Day show that 58% of online traffic came from mobile devices, and particularly smartphones (nearly 30% of all online traffic), but the tablet was the device of choice for those making purchases (29.4% of online sales).