Walmart is beating Amazon on price and delivery

A shopper complaining that Amazon has become a rip-off may sound like another internet rant. But Walmart’s numbers show a real shift in online retail.

Walmart U.S. e-commerce sales jumped 24% in its latest quarter. Store-fulfilled delivery increased 40%, while marketplace sales grew more than 50%.

Walmart is using its 4,600 U.S. stores as local fulfillment centers.

In May, Walmart expanded 30-minute-or-less delivery to 33 U.S. markets, covering more than 100,000 products. The company said millions of deliveries had already been completed in under 30 minutes across more than 19,000 ZIP codes.

The viral claim that Walmart is generally “half the price” of Amazon does not hold up. Profitero’s comparison of more than 10,000 identical products found Amazon remained the lowest-priced major online retailer, while Walmart had narrowed its price gap with Amazon to about 4%.

But price is only part of the competition.

Walmart+ costs $98 a year versus $139 for Amazon Prime, and Walmart offers free delivery on qualifying orders over $35.

Amazon is responding in the opposite direction. Reuters reported that Amazon is expanding its physical grocery presence, adding stores as it competes with Walmart’s enormous physical footprint.

That is the real reversal.

Amazon spent years making physical stores less relevant to shopping. Walmart is now using those physical stores to make online orders faster.

Amazon is moving toward stores.

Walmart is turning stores into warehouses.

And the gap that once made Amazon’s delivery model difficult to challenge is getting smaller.

Amazon’s business is still growing rapidly. Its second-quarter 2026 sales rose 20% to $200.6 billion, with North American sales up 16%.

So this isn’t an Amazon collapse story.

It is a competition story: Walmart is making same-day delivery of ordinary merchandise increasingly routine, while narrowing the price difference that once gave Amazon another advantage.

For shoppers, the practical change is simple.

Before paying Amazon’s price and waiting for Amazon’s delivery, more people now have a Walmart store nearby that can send the same kind of merchandise to their door.