Wal-Mart To Relaunch Web Site in November

Wal-Mart plans to reopen its shuttered Internet operation sometime in November, according to a column published in this weekend’s Barron’s, and the e-tail world is watching with keen interest.

While other online retailers may benefit from having the trial-and-error experiences of previous holiday shopping seasons in their brief histories, writes columnist Mark Veverka, the renewed Wal-Mart.com, first launched four years ago, is a potential powerhouse.

Now directed by Jeanne Jackson, the chief executive Wal-Mart lured from Gap Inc., where she was credited with turning Banana Republic into a retailing force, Wal-Mart.com, a discrete operating unit of the Bentonville big-box behemoth, claims to have gained from the downturn in e-tail stocks like Amazon.com, EToys and Drugstore.com. Those stocks have been on a virtually uninterrupted downtrend since a run-up in the last holiday season.

Venture capitalist Jim Breyer of Accel Partners, a Wal-Mart.com stake holder, cites Wal-Mart.com’s ability to recruit high-level employees from other, struggling e-tail operations as an example.

Wal-Mart’s new offering can be expected to be stripped-down, noted Veverka, pointing out that relatively few Wal-Mart shoppers have access to high-speed Net connections. The column also states that Wal-Mart.com will be a “hybrid,” deploying its parent’s famed inventory management and distribution methods alongside its own technologies.

The column concedes that even e-tail bears expect an uptick in shares of Amazon and the like as holiday sales and hype kick in. But, as it has throughout those one-time start-ups’ existence, the Arkansas Goliath looms large.

“Expectations obviously are very high,” Breyer told Veverka, “and we are nervous about that.”