Walmart announced today a new shipping policy whereby all orders $35 or more get free 2-day shipping.
Walmart also discontinued their Shipping Pass pilot program which offered free 2-day shipping with no minimum. Those who paid for a Shipping Pass membership will get their fees reimbursed within 30 days.
The retailer also promises many more upcoming changes to enhance the customer experience and accelerate growth.
Orders under $35 will have a flat shipping cost of $5.99. The fee includes 2-day shipping.
The new policy might also be part of streamlining their Walmart sales with their sales on Jet.com, a Walmart company, which offers free shipping on $35+ and offers free 2-day shipping on many items. The move puts pressure on Amazon who raised their free shipping minimum to $49 orders as they push more people onto Prime, their free shipping subscription service.
It should be noted that in the past, people have complained that Walmart’s “two-day shipping” doesn’t actually come in two days since it takes time for them to process the order and only then gets two-day shipping. The language doesn’t sound like it’s supposed to work that way; we’ll see how they do now under the new program.
No surprise here. From what I’ve read, Walmart bought Jet.com to compete more with Amazon. Jet.com is supposed to have a pretty amazing infrastructure and that’s what Walmart wanted to get their hands on.
Jet has a poor infrastructure. Sorry, but Walmart is a world leader in supply chain logistics. They just don’t have the online business to justify holding warehouse stock like Amazon does.
What Jet has is great software engineers (something Walmart is sorely lacking, largely because they are based in Arkansas and they pay very uncompetitive wages for SDEs).
If true, I have yet to be impressed. Jet has a very limited selection and their discounts are often not all that. Walmart’s infrastructure and warehouses are far more extensive than Jet.com, but I realize their fulfillment was designed for stores not end consumers.
It isn’t the same. If you bought a Shipping Pass, shipping was free for all orders, regardless of size. This was convenient if you wanted a few grocery items and didn’t want to create a large order just to avoid a shipping charge.
I suspect what happened is that the costs of the program far outweighed the subscription price, because Walmart has been very inefficient shipping items. I’ve gotten $25 orders broken up into 4-5 different FedEx shipments that probably cost close to the order total to ship. I’ve also gotten insanely bad packaging. An order of 5 gallons of fruit punch was fulfilled by throwing the jugs in a huge box with no packaging material. Of course, the bouncing around in transit opened the box and I got one item instead of five. Glass jar items were handwrapped in bubble wrap and secured with even more packing material that probably took 10-20 minutes to put together. Labor costs alone would have made this impractical.
The lesson learned here is only offer free shipping if you are certain your warehouse network can efficiently fulfill orders like Amazon.
What Walmart needs to differentiate itself is curbside pickup of online orders, including grocery items like perishables. That would allow Walmart to outpace Amazon in most cities. I know I would use it in a second to avoid Walmart’s tedious checkouts.
Good point. Let me edit the post, thanks.
Grocery pickup already exists for Walmart. I’m fortunate to have an Aldi right across from Walmart, though. Cheaper, and in and out in less than 15. And I feel good about shopping at a place that pays their employees liveable wages.
For small stuff, I tend to stick to target.com (redcard) and ebay. I refuse to pay for a Prime membership, so every time Amazon increases their minimum, I just use them less.
Our Walmarts do not offer this service. It’s get it yourself or buy it online for ship to home.