Cyber Monday shoppers take note! Walmart may be gaining ground in its quest to take on Amazon, as a new study shows the retail giant’s online operation is approaching price parity with its e-commerce nemesis.
Data analytics firm Market Track performed the study for Reuters, discovering that over the last year Walmart.com’s prices were on average only 0.3% higher than those on Amazon. Rewind a year, and the difference was 3%.
In some product categories, Walmart.com is indeed cheaper than Amazon. The prices it charges for wearable technology such as fitness trackers and smartwatches are 6.4% lower than Amazon’s as opposed to 12.6% higher a year before.
Walmart is 1.3% also cheaper now when it comes to sports and outdoor products—in 2016, it was 3.5% pricier.
Walmart spokesman Dan Toporek told Reuters that the firm is “committed to having online prices that meet or beat prices at other top sites,” while Amazon spokeswoman Kate Scarpa said her firm’s prices were “as low or lower than any other retailer and we work hard for customers to ensure that’s true every day.”
As Walmart’s U.S. E-commerce chief, Marc Lore, recently told Coins2Day, the company’s strategy for taking on Amazon isn’t just about cutting prices—it’s also trying to fight Jeff Bezos’s outfit on the voice-activated shopping front, by working with Google Home.
So it’s probably worth noting that one of Walmart’s Cyber Monday deals is a discounted Google Home Mini ($29 rather than $49), plus $25 off an order if customers link the device to their Walmart accounts.