Walmart Free Shipping Service to Start this Summer — at $50/Year How Does it Compare?
A couple of you guys have asked me to weigh in on the new Walmart $50/year Free shipping service. (Side note: It’s weird to call it a “Free shipping service” if it costs $50/year, but let’s let that slide. 😉 )
The premise is much the same as Amazon started out. $50/year membership gets you free unlimited 3 day shipping on Walmart’s products. Walmart won’t deliver on Sunday like Amazon does, there are no subscribe & save deals or specials where you can get free products like Amazon. (Didn’t we all love those free baby registry boxes? 🙂 )
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That is not so say that Walmart will never offer those things. Amazon started out very basic in 2004 offering only free two-day shipping within the contiguous United States on all eligible purchases for a flat annual fee of $79 (equivalent to $95 in 2015 dollars so it hasn’t gone up much at all).
Amazon, the Amazon logo, AmazonSupply, and the AmazonSupply logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.
Walmart won’t offer a streaming service, music, data back-up, a program for Moms, home services, or many of the services that Amazon provides in addition to shipping but by the price Amazon Prime launched at, Walmart’s new service is pretty darn competitive.
Since I live in Silicon Valley and can weigh in on the tech side of things I can tell you that Walmart are aggressively hiring engineers for Walmart Labs which will likely make the company function with more efficiency, but they are still years behind Amazon – 11 years if you consider the 2004 Amazon Prime release date. They very likely don’t have their own warehouse robots, offer their own engineered version of essential tech items or have many discount programs for those with this new service.
In the end though, this is good for us Amazon-ers! More competition puts the pressure on Amazon to give us more value for our $99/year prime purchase. I expect that Target will soon not be too far behind with a shipping offering of their own.
Do you think that this new shipping service from Walmart is worth it? I want to hear your thoughts in the comments.
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