Today, most major eCommerce marketplaces offer some form of free or fast shipping, and often a combination of the two. This is largely a result of growing consumer demand, where fast shipping, including next-day shipping is phasing out the need to visit physical stores. Large retailers are increasingly jumping onboard, as others like Target and Jet now offer free 2-day shipping.
Walmart’s Free 2-Day Shipping rivals Amazon Prime, and although there are more than 100 million Amazon Prime members, Walmart is gaining more of the eCommerce spend. In this article, we’ll go over the basics of Amazon Prime and Walmart Free 2-Day Shipping, and the big differences between the two programs.
Amazon Prime
Launched in 2005, Amazon Prime was the first of its kind. Amazon invested heavily in marketing it around 2011 to 2012, when they introduced bonuses such as unlimited streaming of selected films and TV programs. Today, Amazon has a vast marketplace with tons of shoppers, international reach, and plenty of demand.
Walmart Free 2-Day Shipping
Walmart started their free shipping program internally in 2017, and opened it up to marketplace sellers in October 2018. Although it’s fairly new, it’s already showing promising conversions and an added boost to sales. Whereas Amazon has a wide reach, Walmart has less seller competition and a lower cost per customer acquisition.
Who wins? Amazon Prime vs Walmart 2-Day Shipping
When it comes down to the two fast shipping programs, each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Ultimately, we recommend being on both for the best conversions, but here’s some benefits for each.
Audience reach: Amazon
Amazon is one of the largest marketplaces in the world. SimilarWeb estimates 2.4 billion visits every month, meaning there’s huge potential in sales and revenue if you do well on Amazon. In comparison, Walmart only gets approximately 300 million monthly visits, which is also a respectable number, but Amazon is the clear winner for reach.
Competition: Walmart
Since there’s less traffic on Walmart.com and they only started investing seriously in eCommerce after Amazon was strongly established, there are fewer sellers and listings on Walmart.com. Although that means less reach, on the flip side of the coin, it translates to less competition for you and your items.
Advertising options: Amazon
When it comes to marketplace seller support, it all depends on what you’re willing to pay. Amazon comes with more advertising options, but both marketplaces offer some form of marketing assistance. Amazon is the winner here because they offer multiple advertising options, including sponsored, display, and video ads.
Cost of customer acquisition: Walmart
On the other hand, Walmart ads are considerably more affordable than Amazon ads. How do we know this? We work with multi-channel eCommerce sellers directly and enable them on Walmart Performance Ads. One seller told us he’s getting keyword bids on Walmart at about ⅓ the cost of similar keyword bids they’re running on Amazon Sponsored Ads.
Rules and regulations: Walmart
Although both marketplaces have strict quality guidelines in place, Amazon has become known for sudden seller suspensions. And since the marketplace is all-powerful, if you’re kicked out, you’re out of luck. Just check out horror stories like these, these, these, and countless others online.
Ease of on-boarding: It’s a Tie
This is a tie between Amazon and Walmart for existing sellers, because both have the options of outsourcing your fulfillment to a partner. For Amazon Prime, it’s Amazon FBA, and for Walmart, it’s Deliverr. Fulfillment by Amazon and Deliverr are both transparent in their pricing, charging an all inclusive fulfillment fee and a storage fee. They are simple to use and integrate directly into fast shipping programs.
Both Amazon Prime and 2-Day Free Shipping have a lot of advantages for sellers. You’ll benefit from higher conversions, more promotion, and a higher chance for features across the site in category placement and in the Buy Box. We’ve seen Walmart.com sellers boost their sales by more than 500% after enabling fast shipping, which is certainly worth investing in.
About the Author
This is a guest post from Michael Krakaris. Michael is one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 and the co-founder of Deliverr. Deliverr provides fast and affordable fulfillment for your eBay, Walmart and Shopify stores, helping to boost sales through programs like Walmart Free 2-Day Shipping and eBay Guaranteed Delivery.
Deliverr’s FBA-like multi-channel fulfillment comes with clear pricing, easy on-boarding and a hassle free experience so you can focus on growing your eCommerce business.
