- Walmart has added automatic replenishment to its online ordering options.
- The move comes 16 years after Amazon unveiled a similar subscription offering.
- Walmart has spent years adding to its online and delivery options to compete with Amazon and other retailers.
Walmart now lets you order items through a subscription — something that Amazon has offered for years.
The retailer touted the service on Wednesday as a recent addition to its smartphone app in a blog post. It's meant to save customers the hassle of going to a store for frequently bought items, like toilet paper and dog food, every week or every month, the company said.
"From pet food and supplements to diapers and paper towels, Walmart subscriptions guarantee automatic scheduled delivery on a customer's preferred cadence, whether it's every two weeks or every two months," Walmart says in its blog post.
Items ordered through subscriptions are eligible for free shipping on orders over $35, according to the retailer's website. Walmart+ subscribers get free shipping on all orders, regardless of their value.
The replenishment model is one way retailers try to get more of a shopper's spending.
"It becomes this great flywheel of sales and profits, in which one or two subscriptions can blossom into many more (in my case, more than 40)," Kevin Coupe, author of the MorningNewsBeat newsletter, which covers developments in the retail industry, wrote on Friday.
But Walmart is also far behind one of its biggest rivals in introducing the option. Amazon started its "Subscribe & Save" program in 2007.
That first iteration of the service allowed customers to have a selection of dry grocery items delivered at a few different intervals, ranging from one to six months. It also offers customers a discount for buying at least five products together in the same auto-ship order. The offering still exists today.
Walmart has expanded multiple offerings to compete with Amazon in recent years. It launched Walmart+, a subscription service that provides free delivery and other benefits, in 2020. Amazon launched Prime, its own subscription service, in 2005.
It has also built out its own network of independent contractor delivery workers through Spark after parting ways with DoorDash last year. Some drivers told Insider in August that the platform includes many contractors who are using other identities to deliver orders for Spark.
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