Walmart

The age old question of what to get the person who has everything has finally been answered, and a Walmart gift card appears to be the ultimate solution for the perplexed gift-giver. That’s according to the gift card exchange website www.giftcardrescue.com and survey involving 6,000 people who created gift card wish lists on its site since the beginning of the year.

As holiday promotions heated up in November and shoppers hit the Internet, there was a 44% surge in traffic to Walmart.com when compared with October, according to the online measurement firm comScore. The growth propelled Walmart to the 20th spot on comScore’ November ranking of the top 50 U.S. Web properties. The nearly 52 million unique visitors Walmart.com attracted in November 2010 was 5% more than in November 2009, according to comScore’s data.

An accurate view of whether Walmart is capturing a fair share of this holiday season’s anticipated sales growth is hard to come by given the lack of monthly results from the company, but a somewhat clearer picture emerges online based on traffic and sales estimates from third parties.

Connecting Northwest Arkansas earlier this month published the results of a survey of Walmart suppliers that revealed some interesting insights and this week spawned a few inaccurate headlines from various news organizations. The most notable was a headline on a Bloomberg story, which said Walmart suppliers lacked confidence in company CEO Mike Duke and that senior managers were explaining the company’s strategy. That’s a powerful statement and would be quite an indictment of the company’s chief executive and senior leadership team, if it were true.

Walmart, Target and Best Buy attracted record levels of customers to their websites during November, according to data released this week by the online measurement firm comScore. Retailers have come to expect a surge in traffic to their sites as the holiday approach and during November that proved to be the case and then some.

Hoffman Estates, Ill.-based Sears.com accounted for 6.21% of multichannel Web traffic for the week ended Nov. 27, which included Thanksgiving and Black Friday, according to data released from Experian Hitwise.

The data showed Sears.com received 21.1 million visits for the week, just under JCPenney at 21.5 million visits, or 6.34% of total Web traffic. Walmart topped the list at 25.88% of all Web traffic, or 88 million visits, with Target ranking second at 15.26%, or 51.8 million visits.

Competition in the toy category is intense every holiday season, but it seems to have been ratcheted up a few notches this year, and Target was one of the companies doing the ratcheting. The company’s aggressive pricing moves put it in close proximity to Walmart early in the season and more recently Target’s toys were less expensive than Walmart’s, according to a pricing survey conducted by Citigroup retail analyst Deb Weinswig.

The time to ponder that question is when everything is going right, which pretty much seems to be the case at Target these days. The company’s stable senior leadership team has articulated a clear strategy that is being well-executed and delivering expectation-exceeding results such as a 5.5% gain in November same-store sales and third quarter earnings per share that surged 28.5% to 74 cents.

Fayetteville, Ark. - A report Monday said that Wal-Mart Stores is preparing to test a small-format store it is calling “Walmart on Campus” at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

According to the report by Advertising Age, the pilot appears to be part of a series of tests of Walmart’s smaller-format stores.

Of all the competitive threats facing Walmart, none looms larger in the minds of the retailer’s suppliers than the ongoing expansion and financial success of leading operators in the dollar store segment. That’s according to Walmart suppliers who participated in a survey conducted by Connecting Northwest Arkansas and identified such chains as Dollar General and Family Dollar as the greatest competitive threat to Walmart during the next five years.