Amazon looms large as the biggest disrupter of retail in the last two decades, but that doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to catch up to Walmart.
The problem is that what is being calculated as retail sales by many analysts really isn’t, according to retail analyst Nick Egelanian, president of retail development consultants SiteWorks. “Amazon’s total worldwide sales for all businesses were $179 million in 2017,” he said in an email to Retail Dive. “When you back out international sales, web services (cloud storage), over 30 ancillary businesses, third-party fulfillment and Marketplace sales, we estimate Amazon had about 1% of U.S. retail sales as of December 2017, or about $50 billion.”
