Pymnts has done a survey and concluded that Walmart+, in just seven months, has grown a subscription base of more than 60 million US consumers .
The story goes on: "Although the total gap between Walmart+ and rival Amazon Prime is still a formidable 100 million members wide, the upstart entry from Arkansas has been trending higher in the first quarter of 2021, at a time when the dominant digital leader has experienced a few months of slippage in its overall share of the category … By the end of the first quarter, approximately two-thirds of respondents said they had access to Prime versus 24 percent who said they had access to Walmart+. However, from a December peak of 75 percent of consumers having Prime access, the total tally slid 10 percentage points over the past few months to the current 65 percent."
Pymnts writes that "one of the key drivers of new subscriptions to Walmart+ is its leadership in groceries, and the convenience that comes with running over 5,000 U.S. stores. In short, the new data shows that when it comes to just grocery purchases, Walmart’s pricing advantage - combined with its in-store and curbside pickup options - are clearly attracting people to its membership program and getting them to shift their behavior. Twenty-eight percent of Walmart+ customers said they made the shift in their grocery-buying during the pandemic compared to about 19 percent of Amazon customers who did."
The story continues: "Walmart+ had a slight 5:3 bias toward male subscribers — 30 percent of men and 18 percent of women said they subscribed to the new service, whereas Amazon’s member base was evenly split, with about two-thirds of men and women having a Prime account. In both cases, Baby Boomers and seniors were the least likely to subscribe, the survey showed — but while Amazon’s demographic range was more consistently clustered with a 55 to 75 percent share of all age groups, Walmart’s bracket-leading millennial subscriber base was about twice as large as its Gen X and Gen Z customers."
- KC's View:
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The interesting thing about this story is that we just had one the other day, from Bloomberg, saying that "Walmart+ customers, who are paying $98 a year to belong to a program positioned to compete with Amazon Prime, are largely not using a number of the benefits that Walmart built into the program, instead seeing the appeal largely as being free shipping."
Whatever … it appears that Walmart is making progress and that they must be generally satisfied - maybe even thrilled - by how well this program is doing.
