One day, Amazon will be bigger than Wal-Mart

Thursday November 29, 2012 6:41 PM By MICHAEL COMEAU

Photo credit: (Getty Images) | amazon.com

Wal-Mart is the biggest retailer on the planet.

But you know what? Judging by revenues, one day Amazon's going to be even bigger.

Right now, the gap's pretty large. As it stands now, Wal-Mart is about nine times the size of Amazon.

However, look at what happened on the all-important post-Thanksgiving shopping extravaganza that includes Black Friday.

According to ShopperTrak, U.S. retail sales rose 2.7% from last Thursday through Sunday.

That's not exactly disastrous, but store visits were actually up 8.2%, indicating that while people were out, they weren't necessarily doing more buying.

It's very likely that some of those folks headed online to fork over their hard-earned bucks. The IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark reported that online sales grew by a whopping 30% on Cyber Monday, following a 21% increase on Black Friday.

Online retail sales are growing rapidly for a few simple reasons.

They're easy, they're fast, and there's total price transparency. Plus, there are deals everywhere you look.

And Amazon's on top of the heap due to its first-mover advantage, phenomenal service, and grow-at-all-costs business strategy.

So even though it will cross $60 billion in revenues this year, Amazon is actually expanding faster than the competition.

So when will Amazon actually generate more revenues than Wal-Mart?

Based on a fairly linear slowdown in growth for both companies, I would expect the crossover to happen sometime around 2027, with Amazon approaching $1 trillion in sales.

That may seem crazy now, but following the bursting of the Internet bubble, who really thought Amazon would have made it this far?

Michael Comeau is a columnist and buzz editor at Minyanville.com.

Tags: BIZ , MICHAEL