Source: http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/77643.htmlQuoteWalmart Rattles Amazon's LockerBy Erika MorphyE-Commerce Times03/27/13 12:08 PM PTWalmart wants people to stop thinking of it as just the largest chain of retail stores in the world. The company has e-commerce envy, and it's going after Amazon by setting up some lockers in its stores -- much like the ones Amazon has located in 7-Elevens and such -- for online customers to pick up their goods. The thing is, Walmart already has in-store pickup, so the lockers may be more for show than customer convenience.Walmart ratcheted up the e-competition a notch with the announcement Tuesday that it would soon begin offering a locker service similar to the one Amazon recently rolled out.There appear to be few differences between the two offerings: Both provide secure locations, available 24 hours, where consumers can pick up purchases they made online. Users will be notified when their item has arrived at a locker and given an access code to open it. Amazon already has a number of lockers available around the country; in the Washington D.C. area, for example, there are about 20 locations.Walmart will eventually leverage its formidable brick-and-mortar network of stores and superstores for the service. For the start of its test run, scheduled to begin this summer, the locker service will be available in about a dozen stores.Click HereA Persistent Push Into E-CommerceFrom one perspective, the new service is just an incremental add-on to Walmart's array of existing customer offerings."The locker service is just removing some of the friction from the in-store pick up process," noted Michael Harvey, COO of CorraTech."Now they don't have to walk into the store, find the customer service desk, wait in line and so on to get their purchase," he told the E-Commerce Times.However, from a big-picture standpoint, the locker service is very telling. It illustrates Walmart is going to keep pushing into the e-commerce space despite the huge lead Amazon has.It intends to be "tenacious" in its pursuit of e-commerce marketshare, said Neil Ashe, president and chief executive of Walmart Global eCommerce, when announcing the service.A League of Its Own"Clearly Walmart is looking at and responding to what Amazon is doing," CorraTech's Harvey said. "Walmart is among the top e-commerce sites in the world, but it is not in Amazon's league."One challenge Walmart has is expanding its image as a physical store to include its virtual real estate."For most online purchases, people automatically think of Amazon -- and not Walmart, despite the huge number of online sales it has," Harvey pointed out.That said, its physical store network is a big e-commerce advantage, he continued.The company might not have attained McDonald's supposed goal of having a location within one mile of every American, but most people are within driving distance of a Walmart, noted Harvey. "There is no way Amazon could ever offer anything comparable, short of, well, partnering with Walmart."--As all observant members of SR know, Pine has been raving about the concept of Virtual Offices for a while. They indeed have dozens of advantages, diverse propositions and even fringe benefits like coffee and mints (together, it is my new thing, delicious!). The central problem though with VOs is that they are expensive. For vendors, this is just another business expense. The whole process of anonymizers -> regional VPN or proxy, switching back and forth between various nyms and associated papers is not really a hindrance to our brave, intelligent and attractive vendors, for whom the main threat model for running circles around LE is dizziness and blurred vision from staring at monitors all day.However! Be that as it may!Virtual offices are expensive. For a humble newb to investing that much time and energy into simply obtaining a real life proxy, it is just too much for almost anybody save the most paranoid or law abiding individuals.Happily the cost of the basic service a virtual office provides is about to drop by one or two orders of magnitude soon. Swapboxes, bufferboxes, Amazon lockers, Walmart lockers and so on, we love them all. Practically every major company is saying Fuck You to UPS, USPS and Fedex, and deciding it wants to join the package delivery game. Since many of these are sprawling multinationals online or offline, such as Google, Walmart, there is huge opportunities for them to carve up the postal pie, and offer many useful services to happy SR customers.Now, initially many of these companies may adopt a "company town" model, such as Amazon locker, where only packages from Amazon or approved partners are delivered to the locker storage location. But the trend is clear, in the future practically everybody is going to have an extra address or two at the local fast food outlet or some other chain. There are simply far too many advantages to opening up a freely addressable locker to all.