Amazon Prime has been a very successful online purchasing platform with free next day delivery and boasts over 80 million subscribers.
To battle the mammoth Amazon at its bread and butter service, Google is teaming up with Walmart. The idea is that Walmart, as the world’s largest company (in terms of revenue), will pair well with the technological infrastructure that Google provides. So Google will take in the customers’ orders on the computer, and take care of the logistics of payment (using Google Express), and Walmart, as a massive retailer, will deliver the product.
This partnership is meant to be a battle in the voice shopping field. Right now, you can use Amazon’s voice activated Echo speaker to do your groceries. You simply say near the speaker that you’d like to order more cat food, and soon, it will be delivered by Amazon. Now, with Google Home, the competing product, you’ll be able to do the same. They even say that Google Home will know what brands you usually get, and buy those for you.
This is a new market, but this will likely be a huge way that we will order our groceries and other retail items in the future. Walmart is smart for teaming up with Google, as this gives them a leg up on the e-commerce aspect of their business, which until now was limited to their own website. Amazon is hoping that they can poach the low-income customers of Walmart with their Amazon Prime service.
People may be skeptical at first. Who is really going to buy groceries with just their voice? But Walmart’s e-commerce CEO raises a good point, “You can imagine you’re driving home from work and ordering from groceries via voice and picking them up at your local Walmart on the way home.”
Now, that sounds like a good deal to me.