Amazon’s (AMZN) Prime Day, scheduled for this Wednesday, will see a massive foe enter the online retail ring to offer its own mega-discounts to shoppers.
Amazon is turning 20 this week, and to celebrate this landmark the online retailer is offering a huge sale under the name of Prime Day.
However, Walmart (WMT) looks set to spoil the web retailer’s party by launching a rival sale on July 15, offering more than 2,000 Web-only “rollbacks,” which is Walmart-speak for discounts, according to USA Today.
This puts the world’s largest company and Fortune 500 leader in direct competition with Amazon’s much-hyped sale day. Amazon is promising “more deals than Black Friday” starting midnight on the same day.
Walmart has heated up the Web retail wars even further by publicly hitting out at Amazon’s Prime membership-requirement to get in on the sale action, boldly stating in a blog post today that “we’re standing up for our customers and everyone else who sees no rhyme or reason for paying a premium to save.”
“We’ve heard some retailers are charging $100 to get access to a sale,” said Fernando Madeira, CEO and president of Walmart.com, in the blog post, which is in direct reference to the $99 Prime membership fee. “But the idea of asking customers to pay extra in order to save money just doesn’t add up for us.”
It’s part of a larger push by the company to become a global e-commerce giant to rival their bricks-and-mortar operation. In an earnings call with analysts in February, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said that while global e-commerce sales grew approximately 22% in the last year, it was “solid, but not quite as strong as we wanted,” he said on the call. He added Walmart would invest between $1.2 billion to $1.5 billion to grow their e-commerce business over the current year.