Amazon vs Walmart Weekly: The Battle Over Payments, Pricing, Perks

Finding customers, tantalizing them with targeted ads and merchandise, and then presenting products in a compelling way are all retail art forms in and of themselves. Even so, they can also be quickly rendered useless if the final step — the payment — does not go smoothly at that most important moment of the decision-making process.

Most times this fight to eradicate checkout friction is aimed directly at consumers. Other times, however, it is aimed toward sellers, the entrepreneurial merchants and manufacturers who are playing a growing role in the marketplace-driven digital economy. It is also where Amazon and Walmart increasingly find themselves at odds in their ongoing efforts to secure new products and inventory via signing up and serving the logistical needs of sellers.

This week, Amazon found itself in a spat, not with Walmart, but with Shopify, after it told its commercial merchant customers that they would be unable to protect them against fraud if they used Amazon’s Buy with Prime feature in their store fronts, which has been being tested since June.

While Shopify told merchants it would be not responsible for any problems if they continued to use the “unsupported external checkout script,” Amazon was having none of it and strongly defended the integrity of its new merchant payments tool.

“We developed Buy with Prime to serve Prime members wherever they shop and empower merchants of all sizes wherever they choose to sell,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed response to PYMNTS in the wake of Shopify’s accusations. “We hope that all ecommerce providers will put customer experience and merchants’ success first by allowing them to take advantage of more tools.”

While there’s no telling how this emerging payments spat will play out, it is certainly noteworthy for its merchant-focused battleground, which of course speaks to the growing importance that sellers play in the current economic environment. Stay tuned.

Priced to Sell

To be sure, Walmart is watching this payments spat develop as it is involved in its own high-stakes effort to bring new sellers and products (SKUs) onto its platform, as evidenced by this week’s invite to Canadian eCommerce sellers.

While having the goods to sell and the ability to rapidly fulfill orders is tantamount, the retailer’s underlying price, inventory and payments challenges are visible everywhere you look, such as with this week’s earlier than usual Top Holiday Toys announcement.

“We know our customers are shopping early and finding the lowest prices on toy gifts is a priority for many families this year,” Walmart U.S. Senior Vice President of Electronics, Toys and Seasonal Laura Rush said in a press release that acknowledged both tight budgets and customers’ plans to start their holiday shopping early.

Perk Up

As PYMNTS has reported, while price is a factor in customer buying decisions, it is not the only factor that drives sales.  As a result, the emphasis that it, and other rival retailers and brands such as Disney, are placing on the variety of perks they can pile on to entice customers to buy and also come back again is clearly on the rise.

This process of “perking up” is most notable lately in the efforts being made by Walmart+ to close the gap against category dominator Amazon Prime, where the former has added benefits such as free Paramount media content for subscribers, and the latter has invested enormous sums in NFL football and “Lord of the Rings” films.

Although PYMNTS research has shown free delivery to be the most commonly cited reason that customers say they subscribe to Prime or Walmart+, it remains to be seen if the perkier platforms can also get customers to change their historical behaviors and shopping habits.

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