WALMART and Amazon are two of the world's largest retailers and compete fiercely in the retail market, including in the grocery space. Although Amazon outpaces Walmart Plus by the numbers, a retail expert shared a key way to choose the right service for you. Launched in September 2020, Walmart+ is a membership-based subscription service.
Walmart created the service during the pandemic when online sales were rampant due to shoppers' sentiments that grocery pickup was safer than in-person shopping. Walmart is the world's largest retailer and consistently surpasses Amazon as its biggest competitor each year, so the retailer was bound to create a program to compete with Amazon Prime . Prime was launched in 2005 and has over 200 million subscribers, while Walmart+ has been active for around four years and is estimated to have somewhere under 100 million members.
Walmart's chief customer officer Janey Whiteside denied claims that the service was intended to vie with Prime. “We’re not launching Walmart+ with the intent to compete with anything else,” she said on a call with reporters in 2020. “We’re launching it to meet the needs of our customers, and it really was designed to make their busy lives easier.
We think that it offers a comprehensive suite of in-store and online benefits that help people save time and money across a variety of areas.” To explore why companies create paid services, The U.S.
Sun spoke with Mitchell Olsen, a marketing professor at the University.