Walmart

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.

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.

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.

Walmart has been a non-player in toys this year, according to Eric Johnson, director of the Center for Digital Strategies at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. He was quoted in a Bloomberg article this week about how Walmart increased toy prices after Thanksgiving weekend. Johnson is regarded as something of a toy expert, so he pops up in holiday stories and he has been critical of Walmart this year.

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.

Walmart removed all doubt about how it intends to enter Russia this week when it announced the closure of its office in Moscow. The office was opened two years ago to investigate opportunities in the country, but international division president and CEO Doug McMillon said it no longer made business sense to maintain the facility.