The day before Amazon’s “Prime Day,” Wal-Mart countered the e-commerce giant with its own new promotion: free shipping with no minimum purchase on all online orders.
Amazon said it will have more than 100,000 deals as part of today’s sales event — but only for customers in its $99-a-year membership program.
Wal-Mart looks to be trying to steal a slice of those dollars while encouraging shoppers to try its own membership program. Wal-Mart “offers more ways for every customer to save at a time when others are screaming about one-day sales reserved for their most elite customers,” the company said in a statement.
Wal-Mart also has discounts this week and recently began offering free 30-day trials of ShippingPass, its $49-a-year unlimited two-day shipping program. Daily sign-ups for ShippingPass have quadrupled since last week, Wal-Mart said.
Other retailers, including Macy’s, Kohl’s, Sears, Toys R Us and J.C. Penney are touting deals this week even if they don’t mention Amazon or Prime Day by name.
Retailers’ impulse to jump on the bandwagon with competing sales events might surprise customers who were underwhelmed by the products and discounts included in Amazon’s Prime Day sales last year.
While the best Prime Day deals did rival those on Black Friday in 2015, many of Amazon’s most popular products weren’t included in Prime Day deals, according to Market Track. Across a range of 380 products, Amazon’s Black Friday prices were on average 9 percent lower than its Prime Day prices, Market Track reported.
Even so, Amazon said customers bought 34.4 million items, and orders topped the previous Black Friday by about 18 percent. Some sold out in seconds.
“While it did have a kind of underwhelming response, people still showed up and bought a lot of stuff on a random Tuesday in July,” Steve Osburn, a retail strategist at Kurt Salmon, said.
