Target Joins Leaders in Mobile Payments, eCommerce Operations

March 6, 2020         By: Steven Anderson

Did you skip the crowds back on Black Friday to stay home and shop instead? Bypass the Christmas rush at the mall? Do a little shopping from your smartphone? If that’s the case, then you’ve seen the power of mobile payments firsthand, a point far from lost on businesses as well. In fact, for one business—Target—the lessons of ecommerce have meant significatn gains. According to a study sent our way from eMarketer, Target’s learned well enough to breach the top 10 of ecommerce firms in the United States.

It didn’t take much for Target to break into such rarified circles, the eMarketer study noted. In fact, just last year, Target was number 11 on the list. Thanks to a major push, however, the store jumped up three places to hit number eight on the list.

Considering that number 10—Macy’s—is actually separated from number five on the list, The Home Depot, by just 0.6 percent of the market, these figures can swing wildly at any time. Target now holds 1.2 percent of US ecommerce market share in the United States, tied interestingly enough with Costco. Once you get into the top five, though, there’s a massive jump in levels. Number four, Apple, holds 3.7 percent of the market, and number three, eBay, has 4.7 percent. Retail titan Walmart has 5.2 percent.

If you’ve noticed those numbers seem oddly small, it won’t surprise you to find that Amazon currently holds the largest share of US ecommerce…with 38.7 percent of the market.

Naturally, that’s not a 100 percent distribution. The top 10 firms combined represent only a little under two thirds of the total ecommerce market at 60.4 percent. The rest goes to a panoply of smaller operations out there, from app stores to individual websites.

Target has been ramping up its ecommerce act for some time now, taking advantage of its massive array of physical stores to serve, effectively, as delivery points for its ecommerce operations. Such a program gives it a real advantage against Amazon, who struggles to get two-day delivery to its customers. With Target’s plan, customers can just pick up their own items and shrink down the time even further, with no waiting.

It may be that brick-and-mortar shops have finally found a way to compete with Amazon, and that’s good news for the overall economy. The value of ecommerce—and by extension mobile payments—makes itself abundantly clear with these figures and their ultimate implications.