Amazon and Walmart Face a New Gatekeeper for Loyalty

This summer, Amazon moved Prime Day to June 23-26, leaving July without its usual commercial centerpiece for the first time outside the pandemic-disrupted 2021 event.

The shift created an apparent hole in merchants’ calendars. What emerged instead was a clearer view of how large-scale shopping events are changing. Prime Day still generated extraordinary demand, but the combination of Amazon’s earlier timing, its direct overlap with Walmart Deals and a subsequent July slowdown suggests retailers are no longer competing simply to produce the biggest sales day. They are competing to control a longer, more fragmented cycle of consumer attention.

An estimated 244 million U.S. consumers, or 93% of adults, shopped at least one of the events, up from 135 million the previous year. The share participating in neither promotion collapsed from 48% to 7%, according to a PYMNTS Intelligence survey of 2,160 consumers conducted in June.

But the larger crowd came with a catch: Shoppers spent less. The survey found average spending at Amazon fell from $360 in 2025 to $308, while Walmart’s average dropped from $484 to $326. The overlap expanded the top of the funnel while compressing the value of each customer moving through it.

That trade-off offers a preview of the next phase of promotional retail. The biggest shopping events may attract more people than ever, but they are also becoming less capable of concentrating consumer spending in one place.

See also: Amazon and Walmart’s Summer Sale Wars Deliver a Win (With An Asterisk)

Retail Loyalty Gives Way to Comparison Shopping

Running competing events simultaneously also made it easier for consumers to treat Amazon and Walmart as interchangeable deal inventories. Nearly three-quarters of dual-event participants compared prices across Amazon and Walmart, the survey found, and 46% said price alone determined where they completed a purchase. Loyalty was the deciding factor for just 15%.

The overlap therefore produced not only a bigger market but a more efficient one, at least from the consumer’s perspective. Shoppers could check the same television, appliance or household item on multiple platforms in real time, reducing retailers’ ability to use the event’s scale and urgency to soften price sensitivity.

Artificial intelligence (AI) added another comparison layer. Twenty-one percent of event participants used an AI assistant to research products, locate deals or compare prices. Nearly three-quarters of those users bought at least one product primarily because an AI tool recommended it.

Also from PYMNTS: PYMNTS covered Thursday (July 23) how Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos reportedly sees Prime Video as the place to tout the company’s AI efforts and has urged Prime Video boss Mike Hopkins to revamp the streaming service to give AI a starring role.

Without another July promotional sprint, consumer retail brands have shifted their attention toward back-to-school campaigns, fourth-quarter inventory forecasts, advertising allocations and final holiday shipments.

The result is a retail calendar that looks less like a series of isolated events and more like a continuous demand-management system. Winning within it requires merchants to distinguish between reach and profitability, participation and loyalty, promotional velocity and durable growth.

Read the report: The Overlap Effect: How Amazon and Walmart Expanded the Crowd and Shrank the Basket

AI Moves Upstream of the Retailer

The more disruptive competitive pressure may come from outside both companies. More than one in five event shoppers used an AI chatbot or assistant to compare products, locate deals or research purchases, a rate that climbed to 35% among Generation Z.

That behavior moves an important part of product discovery upstream from the retailer. Instead of beginning a search inside Amazon or Walmart, shoppers can ask an independent interface to evaluate prices, features and reviews across multiple merchants before directing them toward a checkout page.

At the same time, the survey found that consumers expect major retailers to coordinate their discounting around the same shopping windows, just as they expect competitive shipping, accessible reviews and transparent pricing. What once distinguished a retailer can quickly become a market-wide condition.

That raises the strategic stakes. Attracting more shoppers is no longer sufficient when those shoppers are spending less, comparing more and arriving with recommendations generated outside the retailer’s ecosystem.