Walmart Increasing NYC Sales Despite No Physical Stores

Walmart is reportedly gaining a growing amount of online business in New York City.

The retailer is making these gains even as it has been blocked from building physical stores in the city due to opposition from labor unions and activists, the Financial Times reported Thursday (Dec. 25).

Over the past five years, Walmart’s eCommerce sales have increased in each of the city’s five boroughs, doubling in Manhattan; rising between 90% and 120% in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens; and increasing by 44% in Staten Island, the report said, citing data from Advan Research.

The report also said that SimilarWeb found that visits to Walmart.com by New York City users have seen double-digit year-over-year growth each month, and that Apptopia found that the number of times the Walmart app has been opened by customers in downstate New York, including New York City, is 7.1% higher than during the same period last year.

Walmart provides same-day delivery of fresh produce and shelf-stable food staples to at least parts of three boroughs from stores outside the city, and it offers other forms of delivery to the rest of those boroughs and the other two boroughs, according to the report.

Asked by the FT if Walmart would try again to open a store within New York City, a company spokeswomansaid, per the report: “We’re always looking for opportunities to expand and better serve customers and communities. We have no information to share at this time.”

PYMNTS reported Dec. 4 that Walmart and other retail giants are racing to compress the distance between click and doorstep, with cost becoming both the accelerant and the constraint shaping their strategies. The more a retailer can lower the cost of fulfillment, the more volume it attracts, and the more volume it attracts, the lower its marginal cost to operate its logistics network and the greater the benefit to its customers.

The retailer is also becoming an artificial intelligence-laced eCommerce platform rather than purely a grocer, PYMNTS reported Dec. 11. This shift was highlighted by Walmart’s decision to trade on Nasdaq and not the NYSE, with Nasdaq having a technology focus.