Wal-Mart is the world’s largest retailer with 10,792 stores, 2.1 million employees and total annual sales of $466.1 billion worldwide, but it is far behind Amazon when it comes to online sales. Last year, Amazon had sales of $61 billion compared to Wal-Mart’s $9 billion anticipated sales for this year. As good as Wal-Mart is in the retail sector, Amazons is just as good online, and that would explain why Wal-Mart is adopting some of Amazon’s methods in providing services to their customers. The new battleground these giants are fighting for is locker space for the delivery of products.

Amazon started the locker experiment in 2011 and since that time it has slowly been acquiring locations around the country in popular chains like RadioShack, 7-Eleven, Staples (News - Alert) and local stores. Although this approach might seem counter intuitive because most people have a residence where they can have their product delivered, it has been successful. Besides Wal-Mart, Google (News - Alert) has also jumped in this market by purchasing BufferBox, a start-up that provides e-commerce lockers.

 Wal-Mart has a clear advantage when it comes to this platform because it has more than 10,000 retail stores ready to use some of that space for lockers and 4,637 of them are in the U.S. The company will start a pilot program for a dozen stores around the country starting this summer and make future decisions based on the results.

This program will go hand in hand with the test it has been conducting for providing better shipping services for products that have been ordered online. The impetus for this program once again is Amazon and its Prime Subscription Service, which provides free two-day shipping in the U.S. for only $79 per year. In order to compete, Wal-Mart has been shipping items from local physical stores that are closest to the customer. Initially the program started with 25 stores two years ago and this year they plan on expanding to around 50 stores.

Wal-Mart is making every effort to ensure it is a strong player in this market by acquiring and creating propriety technology:

• They implemented their own internally-built search engine called Polaris to power Walmart.com resulting in 10-15 percent boost in sale conversions
• A new homepage that gives the customer access to the hottest items in different categories
• A Walmart.com mobile app that will let the consumer start a shopping list by speaking the item or scanning barcodes on products while still at home
• A back end system for all that is Wal-Mart called Pangaea to improve overall operation and provide better customer service

While brick and mortar stores will perhaps be around forever, it is very clear online is where the battle between retailers will be fought now and for the foreseeable future.