Of everyone weighing Amazon Prime against a cheaper alternative, Walmart+ is the comparison I get asked about most in the Ecommerce Paradise community. Both memberships promise fast shipping and a stack of extra perks, but they’re built around genuinely different shopping habits, and picking the wrong one for your situation means leaving real value on the table.
This breakdown compares Prime and Walmart+ across price, shipping speed, streaming, and the features that actually matter if you’re also running an ecommerce business on the side.
| Category | Amazon Prime | Walmart+ |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $14.99/mo or $139/yr | $12.95/mo or $98/yr |
| Shipping | 1-2 day, broad catalog | Free shipping, no order minimum |
| Grocery delivery | Whole Foods delivery (select areas) | Free same-day grocery, $35 minimum |
| Streaming | Prime Video + Prime Gaming + Music | Choice of Paramount+ or Peacock |
| Gas savings | Not included | 10 cents/gallon at partner stations |
| Free trial | 30 days | 30 days for $1 |
Price: Walmart+ Is the Cheaper Membership
Walmart+ costs $98 a year compared to Prime’s $139, a $41 gap that holds up whether you compare annual or monthly rates. Both offer discounted tiers for students and government-assistance recipients at similar reduced prices, so the underlying price gap stays roughly consistent across every tier of either program.
If price alone were the deciding factor, Walmart+ wins outright. The real question is whether the $41 a year you’d save is worth the tradeoffs in catalog size, shipping speed, and entertainment perks covered below.
Shipping Speed and Catalog Breadth
Amazon Prime’s biggest structural advantage is the sheer size of its catalog combined with genuinely reliable 1-2 day shipping across tens of millions of items, with same-day and even same-hour options in many metro areas. Walmart+ offers free shipping with no order minimum, but its online marketplace, while growing quickly, still doesn’t match Amazon’s breadth of third-party sellers and product variety.
For anyone who orders a wide range of product categories rather than sticking mostly to groceries and household basics, Prime’s catalog advantage alone often justifies the higher price. If your shopping is concentrated in groceries, household staples, and everyday goods that Walmart carries well, that catalog gap matters a lot less.
Grocery Delivery: Walmart+’s Strongest Advantage
Walmart+ was built with grocery delivery as a core feature from day one, offering free same-day delivery on orders over $35 from your nearest Walmart supercenter, plus free pharmacy delivery with no order minimum. Amazon’s grocery delivery through Whole Foods is more limited in coverage and generally positioned as a premium grocery option rather than Walmart’s everyday low-price model.
If grocery delivery is a meaningful part of why you’re considering either membership, Walmart+ is the stronger fit for most households, both on price per grocery trip and on the breadth of stores Walmart delivery covers compared to Whole Foods.
Streaming and Entertainment Perks
Prime includes Prime Video’s full streaming library, Amazon Music, Prime Gaming with a free Twitch subscription and monthly game titles, and Prime Reading’s rotating ebook selection, all bundled at no extra cost beyond the base membership. Walmart+ offers a single streaming choice between Paramount+ Essential or Peacock Premium, both ad-supported tiers, with no equivalent to Prime Gaming or Prime Reading.
If entertainment perks are a meaningful part of the membership’s value to you, Prime’s stack is considerably broader. Walmart+’s streaming choice is a genuinely useful bonus, but it doesn’t come close to replicating the full range of what Prime bundles into its entertainment offering.
Gas Savings and In-Store Perks
Walmart+ includes a benefit Prime simply doesn’t offer: 10 cents off per gallon at Walmart, Exxon, Mobil, and Murphy USA gas stations, plus member pricing on fuel at Sam’s Club locations. For anyone who drives regularly and fills up often, this adds up to real savings over a year that Prime has no equivalent for.
Walmart+ members also get Scan & Go checkout in physical stores, letting you scan items and pay directly through the app without waiting in a checkout line, a perk aimed squarely at in-store shoppers rather than online-only Amazon customers.
Which One Makes More Sense for Ecommerce Sellers
If you’re using your membership partly for product research and niche sourcing, Prime’s broader catalog and faster general shipping make it more useful for ordering competitor products, checking reviews, and testing samples across a wide range of categories. Walmart+’s catalog works fine for household and grocery-adjacent product research but is narrower overall.
Neither membership fee is automatically deductible, but if you’re using either primarily for business purposes, ordering packaging, supplies, or products for testing, talk to your accountant about whether the cost qualifies as a deductible expense once your business formation is properly set up. The deduction logic applies the same way regardless of which membership you choose.
What Independent Comparisons Say
Kiplinger’s direct comparison of Walmart+ and Amazon Prime lands close to the same conclusion drawn here: Walmart+ wins on price and grocery-focused value, while Prime wins on catalog breadth and entertainment perks, making the right choice largely dependent on which category of spending matters more to your household.
CNBC Select’s breakdown of the two rival memberships similarly frames Walmart+ as the budget-conscious alternative rather than a like-for-like replacement, noting that Walmart simply doesn’t match Amazon’s overall marketplace size even as its delivery and membership perks have improved considerably in recent years.
AARP’s comparison of the two memberships adds a useful angle for household budgeting, pointing out that shoppers who primarily buy groceries and household staples tend to see faster payback on Walmart+’s lower annual fee than occasional shoppers evaluating either membership purely on shipping speed.
Vetting Suppliers and Doing Product Research With Either Membership
If you’re using either membership partly as a research tool while vetting suppliers for a new store, Prime’s broader catalog and faster shipping across more product categories make it the more useful option for ordering competitor products, checking sample quality, and reading real customer reviews quickly. Walmart+’s catalog works reasonably well for household and grocery-adjacent categories but is narrower once you move into niche or specialty product research.
Neither membership is a substitute for proper supplier due diligence, sample orders through your actual supplier, and reference checks still matter, but having fast, reliable shipping available makes the early-stage research phase considerably faster regardless of which membership you’re using for it.
Family and Household Sharing
Amazon Household lets two adults share nearly all Prime benefits from a single membership, effectively cutting the annual cost roughly in half for a two-adult household. Walmart+ doesn’t currently offer an equivalent household-sharing structure, so each adult in a household typically needs their own separate Walmart+ membership to access the full benefit set individually.
This is a meaningful factor for couples or roommates weighing the two memberships purely on cost, since Prime’s effective per-person price drops considerably when split across two people in the same household, while Walmart+’s $98 annual fee stays fixed per account regardless of household size.
Free Trial and Cancellation Comparison
Amazon Prime offers a standard 30-day free trial at no cost, while Walmart+ runs a 30-day trial for $1, a small but real difference if you’re testing multiple memberships back to back. Both memberships are straightforward to cancel through account settings, with no cancellation fees or retention hurdles on either platform.
If you’re planning to trial both before committing, staggering the trials rather than running them simultaneously gives you a clearer sense of which one you’d actually miss once the free period ends and the perks stop being novel.
Return Policies and Customer Support
Amazon’s standard 30-day return window applies broadly across Prime-eligible purchases with free return shipping in most cases. Walmart’s return policy varies more by product category but generally offers a comparable window for most items purchased through Walmart+ eligible listings.
Both companies offer solid customer support, though Amazon’s 24/7 chat and phone availability currently gives it a slight edge over Walmart’s business-hours-focused support model for anyone who needs help outside standard daytime hours.
Mobile App Experience
Amazon’s shopping app is generally considered the more feature-rich of the two, with AI-assisted deal finding, extensive price history tracking going back up to a year on most products, and tight integration across Prime Video, Music, and Grubhub+ within a single login. Walmart’s app has improved considerably in recent years, particularly around in-store navigation, Scan & Go checkout, and grocery list building, but it still offers a narrower overall feature set than Amazon’s app.
For anyone who does most of their shopping through a phone rather than a desktop browser, this gap is worth factoring in, since a smoother app experience genuinely affects how much value you get out of either membership day to day.
Can You Just Get Both?
A reasonable number of households end up keeping both memberships rather than picking one exclusively, since the combined annual cost of $237 isn’t dramatically higher than many people already spend on separate streaming and grocery delivery subscriptions individually. Prime covers broad shipping and entertainment, while Walmart+ covers grocery delivery and gas savings that Prime doesn’t touch at all.
If you’re not ready to commit to both, trialing each one for a month before deciding is a low-risk way to see which perks you actually use versus which ones sound good in theory but sit unused after the free trial ends. Tracking your actual orders and grocery runs for a few weeks before signing up for either membership is a simple, honest way to estimate real usage rather than guessing based on how you think you shop.
Prime Day vs Walmart Deals: Comparing the Big Sale Events
Prime Day, along with the newer Prime Big Deal Days event later in the year, remains the more heavily promoted and broadly covered shopping event of the two, spanning more than 35 product categories and drawing significant media coverage each year. Walmart runs its own competing deal event timed intentionally to overlap with Prime Day, aiming to capture shoppers comparing prices between the two retailers during the same shopping window.
Neither event consistently beats the other across every category. Electronics and general merchandise deals tend to be deeper during Prime Day given Amazon’s scale advantage, while Walmart’s overlapping event has increasingly competitive pricing on household goods, groceries, and seasonal items where Walmart’s supply chain gives it a natural pricing edge.
Payment Methods and Billing Flexibility
Both memberships accept standard credit and debit cards, and both allow switching between monthly and annual billing at any point through account settings. Amazon additionally accepts its own gift card balances toward Prime membership costs, while Walmart+ billing runs exclusively through standard payment methods without a gift-card equivalent option.
Neither membership prorates a mid-cycle switch from monthly to annual billing, so if you’re planning to switch billing frequency on either platform, timing the change to align with your next renewal date avoids paying for overlapping periods unnecessarily.
How Each Membership Handles International Shopping
Amazon Prime benefits generally don’t transfer between country-specific Amazon sites, meaning a US Prime membership won’t unlock free shipping if you’re ordering through Amazon UK or Amazon Germany while traveling. Walmart+’s footprint is more US-centric overall, with the membership built primarily around domestic delivery from US Walmart locations rather than any meaningful international shopping infrastructure.
For digital nomads and location-independent entrepreneurs, this makes Prime the more flexible option if you occasionally need to interact with Amazon’s other regional marketplaces, even though the core membership benefits still don’t carry over automatically between countries.
Membership Stability and Company Track Record
Amazon Prime has existed since 2005 and has grown its benefit stack consistently over two decades, with price increases that have generally come bundled with meaningfully expanded perks. Walmart+ launched in 2020 as a more direct response to Prime’s dominance, and while it’s grown its feature set quickly, it has a shorter track record to judge long-term pricing and benefit stability against.
Neither company has given any indication of discontinuing its membership program, and both have strong enough retail footprints that either membership is a reasonably safe long-term bet, but Prime’s longer history gives slightly more confidence in predicting how the program might evolve over the next several years.
Environmental and Packaging Considerations
Amazon has invested heavily in reducing packaging waste through its Frustration-Free Packaging initiative and expanded use of recyclable materials across its fulfillment network, though the sheer volume of individual package shipments remains a legitimate environmental concern critics regularly raise. Walmart+ orders shipped from a nearby supercenter can, in some cases, involve a shorter delivery distance than an Amazon warehouse shipment, potentially reducing the carbon footprint of a given order depending on your specific location relative to each company’s nearest facility.
Neither company publishes fully comparable, independently audited environmental impact data specific to membership-driven shipping volume, so this remains more of a directional consideration than something you can precisely quantify when choosing between the two.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is cheaper, Amazon Prime or Walmart+?
Walmart+ is cheaper at $98 a year versus Prime’s $139, a $41 annual difference that holds across both the monthly and annual billing options.
Does Walmart+ have anything like Prime Video?
Walmart+ offers a choice between Paramount+ Essential or Peacock Premium, both ad-supported, but it doesn’t match Prime’s combined Video, Gaming, and Reading stack.
Is Walmart+ shipping as fast as Amazon Prime?
Not consistently. Amazon’s 1-2 day shipping network covers a broader catalog and more locations reliably than Walmart+’s free shipping, which works well but doesn’t match Prime’s speed and coverage across as many product categories.
Does Amazon Prime offer gas savings like Walmart+?
No, gas savings at partner stations are a Walmart+ exclusive benefit that Amazon Prime doesn’t currently offer.
Is it worth having both Amazon Prime and Walmart+?
For households that shop heavily online across a wide range of categories and also do regular grocery runs, yes, since the two memberships cover different needs rather than fully overlapping.
Can I split the cost of either membership with someone else?
Amazon Prime supports this directly through Amazon Household, letting two adults share most benefits from one membership. Walmart+ doesn’t currently offer an equivalent sharing structure, so each person typically needs a separate membership.
Does either membership offer a better deal for students?
Both do. Prime Student and Walmart+’s student rate are priced similarly at roughly half the standard cost, so the better deal usually comes down to which core benefit set, shipping breadth or grocery delivery, matters more to your specific shopping habits as a student.
Which membership is better for a small online business?
Amazon Prime generally wins for ecommerce operators specifically, thanks to its broader catalog for competitor research and faster general shipping, though Walmart+’s lower price makes it a reasonable secondary membership if grocery or household supply delivery also factors into your workflow.
Want the full Amazon Prime breakdown first? Read the complete Amazon Prime review →
Disclaimer
This article is for informational purposes only. Pricing and benefits for Amazon Prime and Walmart+ change periodically. Always verify current pricing directly on each provider’s website before subscribing. Ecommerce Paradise uses affiliate links for some providers mentioned in this article, which does not affect the recommendations made here.
Trevor Fenner is an ecommerce entrepreneur and the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, a platform focused on helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable high-ticket ecommerce and dropshipping businesses. With over a decade of hands-on experience, Trevor specializes in high-ticket dropshipping strategy, niche and product selection, supplier recruiting and onboarding, Google & Bing Shopping ads, ecommerce SEO, and systems-driven automation and scaling. Through Ecommerce Paradise, he provides free education via in-depth guides like How to Start High-Ticket Dropshipping, advanced training through the High-Ticket Dropshipping Masterclass, and fully done-for-you turnkey ecommerce services for entrepreneurs who want a faster, more hands-off path to growth. Trevor is known for emphasizing sustainable, real-world ecommerce models over hype-driven tactics, helping store owners build scalable, sellable, and location-independent brands.
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