Home Depot and Online Growth
Over the last few years, Home Depot has expanded its retail stores aggressively, adding more than 200 outlets annually. However, the firm has recently embarked on a $1.1 billion program aimed at improving its Web presence while planning to dramatically reduce the number of new store openings to around 10 in 2011. Home Depot is the world’s largest retailer in the home improvement products space with over to 2,240 stores in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and China, and it hopes that by beefing up its online sales, it can distance itself from competitors like Lowe’s and Sears as well as fend off competition from pure play online retailers like Amazon.