Walmart is sweetening the deal for the shoppers it wants to win over from Amazon.com by offering a free one-month trial of “ShippingPass,” its answer to its online rival’s wildly successful Prime subscription plan.
The world’s largest retailer, looking to rev up online sales growth that has sagged in recent quarters, said on Tuesday it was as of Friday offering a free 30-day trial of ShippingPass. That annual subscription service, like Prime, offers members unlimited free two-day shipping (that was three days until recently for Walmart) and no order minimums. The program’s cost is $49 a year, compared to $99 for Amazon Prime.
In its most recent quarter, Walmart reported global e-commerce sales rose 7%, their slowest rate of growth yet. Meanwhile, Amazon’s sales rose more than 20%, thanks in large part to Prime. Prosper Insights and Analytics, a retail data firm, estimated last month that one-third of American adults are Prime subscribers. Walmart’s e-commerce sales came to nearly $13 billion last year, or about one-sixth of Amazon’s total.
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