In 1999, three years before reaching the top of the Fortune 500, Walmart operated nearly 4,000 stores globally and generated $137.6 billion in net sales. But for all its size and might, its online presence was just getting its sea legs. Despite efforts by certain executives to prioritize digital—detailed in Jason Del Rey’s 2023 book Winner Sells All: Amazon, Walmart, and the Battle for Our Wallets—Walmart mainly focused on its brick-and-mortar business throughout the 1990s.

The January 1996 edition of the company’s in-house newsletter provides a window into its thinking at the time: “The internet—it’s one of the hottest computer buzzwords to come along in years…It could be the next VCR or the next pet rock.”

That same newsletter explained that Walmart had a homepage where customers could see job openings and “what’s hot in the latest Walmart circular,” but it wasn’t until 2000 that the company made the leap into online shopping with the launch of Walmart.com.

• Del Rey told Retail Brew that marking 2000 as the starting date of Walmart’s e-commerce journey is “a bit revisionist” given the nascent efforts to get it off the ground in the mid- to late 1990s, but acknowledged that the really consequential moves didn’t come until the 2010s.

How then did Walmart become the e-commerce giant it is today, with online sales growing more than four times as fast as sales from physical stores? The answer is a winding 25-year journey involving spin-offs, acquisitions, and some very public strategic pivots from top brass that together nudged the retail giant into the future.

Keep reading here.—AV

In 2005, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told the New York Times that its newly released Prime membership program was among the company’s consumer-focused innovations “that wonʼt pay off for years.”

In many ways, Bezos was right. Amazon Prime, introduced in February 2005, was a $79 annual membership program (which now costs $139 per year) that offered shoppers unlimited, express two-day shipping. Amazon took its time to get the service off the ground. As Amazon expanded beyond shipping to include services like Prime Video, the Prime membership program gained significant momentum with consumers. And, 20 years later, Amazon Prime is a household name and generates at least $40 billion in revenue.

Amazon identified a white space within logistics at a time when shipping costs were a significant barrier to early e-commerce adoption. And despite rivals underestimating Amazonʼs impact, competitors have struggled to adapt to the new world order set by Amazon in e-commerce. The last publicly disclosed number for total Prime members stands at more than 200 million.

Keep reading here.—VC

In the late ’90s, US consumers seeking prestige beauty products headed to department store counters to, say, spritz Clinique Happy perfume or swatch Bobbi Brown lipsticks. That was until a French retailer called Sephora shook up the beauty industry, first with its open-sell concept retail stores in 1998, and then, with something even more groundbreaking—its own e-commerce website—at the turn of the century.

As the LVMH-owned beauty retailer worked to grow its US presence after opening its first store stateside in New York City, Sephora.com debuted its e-commerce transaction abilities in the US on October 14, 1999. At the time, e-commerce was “a new frontier,” Howard Meitiner, Sephora USA’s then-president and CEO, told Retail Brew. “Nobody really knew what the future was going to be.”

Sources told WWD at the time that the site was anticipated to garner $20 million in sales in year one. Flash forward a quarter-century, and Sephora.com has become Sephora’s largest North American store, it says, offering 340 brands and 45,000 products, and generating $3.3 billion in revenue in 2023, per ECDB, while the US online beauty industry has surpassed $30 billion in sales.

“What [Sephora.com] did is it validated that this new thing called e-commerce was a perfect vehicle for beauty products,” Meitiner said. We’re looking back at the site’s early days—and where it’s going next.

Keep reading here.—EC