Flipkart owner Walmart planning to offer Amazon Prime-like one-day delivery but FREE

Within hours after Amazon announced its plan to provide one-day delivery benefits to its existing Prime customers in the US, Flipkart-owner Walmart is expected to make a similar announcement, a move that's likely to undercut Amazon's benefits by a huge margin. Although Walmart did not share any specifics, the company dropped some exciting hints such as free shipping and not charging any Amazon Prime-like membership fee, which is enough to grab eyeballs.

Here's what Walmart had to say on Twitter:

"One-day free shipping...without a membership fee. Now THAT would be groundbreaking. Stay tuned."

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In the event that Walmart's tweet is anything to go by, we can expect the e-commerce company to extend its one-day delivery service to all its users, without charging them any membership fee. Walmart says that would be GROUNDBREAKING. However, Walmart hasn't shared any specific timeline as to when it will make the announcement. But we can expect Walmart to make the announcement pretty soon.

Amazon, on the other hand, didn’t say when the change to its U.S. Prime membership will happen, but it said Thursday that it in the past month it has been increasing its selection of items eligible for one-day deliveries. In countries like India and the UK, Amazon has already been offering one-day delivery benefits to its Amazon Prime customers.

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Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said the company is equipped to offer one-day shipping since it has spent more than 20 years adding warehouses around the country where orders are packed and shipped. Amazon also said that it expects to spend $800 million in this year’s second quarter to speed up deliveries.

Walmart is experimenting with digitising its physical stores. Last week, Walmart officially opened its Intelligent Retail Lab inside a 50,000-square-foot neighbourhood market grocery store on Long Island. Thousands of cameras will monitor the store in real time so workers can quickly replenish products or fix other problems.

(With AP inputs)