Walmart’s new website – marketing lessons to learn from its race against Amazon

Walmart has a new website and app. In a bid to make them more engaging and personalized, they have swanky images and catchier names for categories, deals and promos on their home page – their gardening section is called “green thumbs optional”.

There is a lovely fresh look and feel – with spring colors and a light overlay. With rich imagery, live video and a new ‘social-inspired scroll’, Walmart hopes to bring its ‘massive assortment to life’.

This move by Walmart is not just for customers – there are improvements that will benefit sellers and suppliers, giving them the opportunity to showcase more of their relevant products and tell their stories online.

All this is happening at Walmart against a backdrop of Amazon seeing a drop in Prime memberships for the first time ever! Both sellers and shoppers on Amazon are not so thrilled with its e-commerce business model in particular. There are many complaints about the website being full of untrustworthy products whose quality is questionable. Some of them feel that the search results are all rigged and that AmazonBasics label simply copies popular products.

Recently, Amazon raised its prices for what are exactly the same services – annual Prime memberships went up by $20 and Amazon Fresh deliveries under $150 are not free anymore.

Walmart teamed up with Paramount plus to bring its customers Walmart+ - that costs $98 a year for free same-day grocery delivery, free online shipping, a Paramount+ streaming service subscription, and exclusive Black Friday deals.

Sound familiar?

There is no doubt whatsoever that these are super powers in the landscape of retailers. And it leaves no doubt whatsoever that they are trying to outdo each other all the way to the top.

The two super brands have a massive line of products each. They each have a great slice of the market-share pie.

Let’s break it down though –

When it comes to products that they offer, they both have an expansive list.

Walmart has a very impressive line of brick and mortar stores. Amazon is strong on ecommerce with some physical stores as well. Now that some murmurs and rumblings emerge about Amazon, Walmart revamps its website, giving it a very youthful look and feel and, dare I say, takes it along Amazonian lines?

Could it be that Walmart is out to woo the disgruntled customers who used to shop on Amazon?

At one time, it was only Amazon’s warehouse workers who complained about the hours and the work conditions. Now customers are starting to complain about the ‘junk’ that is sold on Amazon! And when AmazonBasics simply copies best-selling products and offers them at a lower price, the sellers are not too happy either.

Despite all of this, at the end of the day, it’s all about the money, honey.

And Walmart seems to be positioning itself at the sweet spot when it comes to price.

Makes one wonder – is this the beginning of the end for Amazon?