Walmart Chases Amazon For Online Sales, Little Headway So Far

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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and writer MacKenzie Bezos attend the Amazon Studios Oscar Celebration at Delilah on February 26, 2017 in West Hollywood, California. (Photo by Jerod Harris/Getty Images)

The critical holiday selling season is about to get underway and retailers are working hard to get loyal customers to their websites, and planning incentives to attract new ones.

Wal-Mart Stores is the world's biggest retailer by sales but lags in online sales. Meanwhile rival Amazon.com is still expanding in retail at a Big Bang theory rate. A new study points out key strengths and weaknesses in each of the retail giants.

San Francisco-based Semantics3 uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to parse data. The data mining firm recently did an e-commerce comparison of Walmart and Amazon in online sales of clothing. Because it's a broad category, it provides insight into who is winning in retail online.

It's no surprise that Amazon is ahead of Walmart in overall clothing sales.

"Clothing is one of the most popular categories for third party market sellers," Semantics3 CEO Varun Sivamani said in an interview. "In our sample, relative to the number of products, Amazon has almost three- to four times more sellers than Walmart. Amazon clearly dominates this category."

However, Sivamani said Walmart "has gone all out to increase their marketplace business. They are onboarding all the sellers from Amazon," by offering generous incentives.

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos in his annual letter to shareholders in April said that staying innovative and relevant, what he calls Day 1 thinking, is key to the company's success.

"Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight," Bezos said.