Grocery drives Walmart's e-commerce increase

Bentonville, Ark.-based Walmart announced its second-quarter earnings Thursday, including an increase of $2.5 billion in revenue to $123.4 billion from the same quarter in 2016. But the most eye-popping number Walmart released was a 60 percent increase in e-commerce sales.

“The majority of this growth was organic through walmart.com, including online grocery, which is growing quickly,” Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said in a conference call. “We are delivering growth through an improved customer value proposition that includes free two-day shipping on millions of items … now with more than 67 million SKUs, an increase of more than 30 percent from the first quarter.”

Walmart’s $3 billion acquisition of Jet.com a year ago seems to be paying off. In the first quarter, Walmart’s e-commerce sales soared 63 percent.

“We’ve seen strong results from the rollout of online grocery, which is now in more than 900 U.S. locations, and we’re expanding this service in many of our markets around the world,” McMillon said. “Retail is constantly evolving, and it’s critical that we move even faster as the customer and competitive landscape continue to change.”

Walmart’s comp sales grew 1.8 percent and comp traffic was up 1.3 percent.

“Walmart’s grocery business continued to improve as food categories delivered the strongest quarterly comp sales performance in five years, led by strong customer traffic and a return of slight market inflation in food, excluding our own price investments,” McMillon said. “All formats had positive comp sales and e-commerce contributed approximately 70 basis points to the segment.”

The quarter marks the 12th consecutive quarter of positive comp sales and the 11th consecutive quarter of positive comp traffic, according to Walmart, the nation's largest grocer.