Amazon currently ranks number one in the retail sector thanks in large part to Amazon Prime’s paid subscription service. But Walmart plans to launch its own paid subscription service called Walmart +, which the company has kept secret until very recently.
Walmart’s online marketplace now includes 52 million product SKUs, self-service advertising capacity and more than 33,000 vendors. When you consider the fact that 57% of Amazon Shoppers shop at Walmart.com, Walmart is selling in the market.
According to Recode, which first published the story, Walmart + is intended to be an updated version of Walmart’s Delivery Unlimited service. Delivery Unlimited charges customers $ 98 per year for unlimited same-day grocery deliveries from participating stores.
This does not necessarily mean that Walmart + will be priced the same. The final price for Walmart + has yet to be announced and may still be subject to testing at different price points.
But Walmart has once again delayed the launch of Walmart +, Recode learned. It is unclear if there is a new internal release date and if the show will launch nationally or regionally when the company finally introduces it.
Walmart originally planned to launch Walmart + in late March or April, Recode reported in February, but the retailer first reported a July date after the Kovid-19 epidemic began across the US in March. Reported. Pushed back.
Although the purchase of the Kovid-19 earlier this year helped Walmart sales reach record levels, its US e-commerce presence still ranks at only one-eighth of Amazon’s. Today, Amazon is valued at $ 1.56 billion, while Walmart is valued at $ 372 billion. And Amazon Prime is a big reason for this.
Perhaps the most important fact for Walmart is that more than half of its spending families now own the Amazon Prime Membership, previously reported. This is a trend that has been going on for years, as Amazon gained Prime to appeal to the lowest disposable income homes for shopping at Walmart.
Amazon added a monthly payment option for Prime in 2016, a 45 percent discount on the Prime rate for those receiving government assistance in 2017, and ways for Prime customers to pay for their orders in cash last year.
While Walmart’s overall grocery business is larger than Amazon’s, an intimidating, Arkansas retailer in Bentonville that Walmart’s top customers will eventually turn to Amazon for groceries, plus they get sucked into more. For the main benefit package.
When Walmart + launches, the $ 98 annual membership is expected to include unlimited same-day delivery of groceries and other Walmart Supercenters products, reserved delivery spaces and open space notifications, as well as access to the new express delivery offer. in two hours. . from Walmart. although not of unlimited use. During the pandemic, customers have struggled to secure grocery delivery spaces in some parts of the country as companies such as Walmart and Amazon struggled to handle drastic increases in demand for online grocery services.
The timing of the introduction of Walmart + could create opportunities for Walmart and present new challenges. On the one hand, as Recode recently reported, “the proportion of people who said they had a positive impression of Amazon fell from 74 percent in January before the pandemic hit the United States to 58 percent in May in two surveys. Similar separations of more than 1,000 people made by Survey Monkey with Fortune and Recode, respectively.
The epidemic has also accelerated the adoption of grocery delivery and forced millions of Americans out of work, making fuel discounts particularly attractive. But at the same time, the same record unemployment number may question the timing of the start of a program that asks customers to spend more with you, even if they do during good economic times.
Either way, the Walmart + initiative is a top priority for the company’s chief customer officer, Jenny Whiteside, who joined American Express in 2018, according to sources. Other top Walmart leaders, including CEO Doug McMillan, were also actively involved in the plan, highlighting the importance of the initiative. Walmart executives hoped the program would be pricey enough for customers to pay and there is no comparison to the benefits with Amazon Prime having different benefits. Buyers should soon be able to decide for themselves.
