Amazon and Walmart Make Same-Day Grocery Delivery Retail’s New Battleground

Amazon and Walmart occupy overlapping territory in retail but dominate in very different ways, largely because they’ve built their empires around different strategic identities.

Amazon is viewed as a technology powerhouse that happens to sell products; Walmart is seen as an efficient and omnipresent retailer. One is rooted in code, cloud servers and literal satellite moon shots. The other in aisles, pallets and physical proximity.

And yet, their battle for market share is increasingly bringing them onto the same playing field to meet the modern shopper’s needs, which speed, supply diversification and smart automation help to serve.

eCommerce Price Wars Turn Strategic

Gone are the days when brand loyalty alone was enough to ensure consistent customer engagement. Summer 2025 has seen retailers recalibrate, with both Amazon and Walmart leaning into a new playbook centered on savings velocity over loyalty.

PYMNTS Intelligence data revealed that shoppers are increasingly becoming “dual-event shoppers,” flocking to both Amazon Prime Day (July 8-11) and Walmart+ Week (April 28-May 4). These savvy consumers chase deals instead of sticking to one ecosystem, and are orchestrating purchases across platforms for optimal timing and saving.

Prime Day buyers spent an average of $360, up just over 10% from 2024. Walmart+ Week shoppers spent even more: $484, an 11% lift year over year. Notably, 53% of repeat Walmart+ Week shoppers said 2025’s deals were better than the prior year’s.

If consumers are optimizing purchases across ecosystems, the strategic implications are stark. Retailers can no longer assume that membership equals exclusivity. Loyalty programs might still matter, but as a foundation for dynamic, personalized engagement rather than a self-contained universe. Speed, transparency and competitive pricing may be the new winning strategies.

Read more: How 31 Years of eCommerce Changed What, How and When Shoppers Buy

The Convenience Arms Race

Nowhere is the velocity factor clearer than in grocery delivery. On Wednesday (Aug. 13), Amazon announced a significant expansion of its same-day grocery service to over 1,000 U.S. cities and towns, with a goal of reaching 2,300 cities by year’s end. This move directly matches Walmart’s push into perishable same-day delivery, intensifying what might be called the convenience arms race.

The service relies on temperature-controlled fulfillment, quality checks and insulated packaging, a logistics sophistication that has become as central to Amazon’s competitive identity as its marketplace breadth.

Walmart, for its part, has leveraged its physical store footprint to reduce delivery times, while experimenting with ultra-fast local fulfillment hubs.

The subtext here is that “legacy” no longer means market share. It means speed to doorstep. In the convenience economy, the company that delivers first often wins the sale, regardless of prior brand loyalty.

Infrastructure as a Strategic Moat

Retail’s competitive frontier is increasingly about building infrastructure that others cannot easily replicate. For Walmart, one recent defining move was launching its first major sourcing expansion beyond China: direct ocean freight lanes from Vietnam to U.S.-based Walmart Fulfillment Services hubs.

The move serves multiple purposes: diversifying supply chains in the face of rising tariffs, reducing geopolitical risk and creating new value propositions for marketplace sellers.

Amazon is building its own infrastructure moat, though with a technological twist. Inside its Devices & Services manufacturing facilities, the company is piloting “zero-touch manufacturing” powered by Nvidia AI and digital twins. Robotic arms, trained entirely in simulated environments, autonomously audit products and adapt to new device introductions without physical reconfiguration.

Amazon is also going to space. After four launch scrubs due to technical and weather issues, SpaceX successfully deployed 24 of the company’s Project Kuiper satellites on Aug. 11 from Cape Canaveral.

If there’s one takeaway for executives from the strategies of the two retail and tech giants, it’s that the forces reshaping retail and adjacent industries are interconnected. The same consumer behaviors that erode loyalty may also fuel the demand for rapid fulfillment. The same infrastructure investments that enable speed can also serve as buffers against geopolitical and market shocks.

Retail leaders can think less about separate strategies for loyalty, logistics and resilience, and more about how those levers might be able to work in concert.