Walmart and Amazon Turn to Fast Food to Sweeten Memberships

In recent months, retail giants Walmart and Amazon have been seizing on consumers’ demand for digital restaurant ordering to drive engagement with their paid memberships, offering dining benefits to incentivize subscriptions.

Walmart recently announced a deal with Burger King, its first Walmart+ dining partnership, offering members of its paid retail subscription 25% off their digital order from the quick-service restaurant (QSR) every day. Plus, once a quarter beginning in September, Walmart+ members are offered one free Whopper with any purchase from the retailer.

“The inclusion of a Burger King benefit in our Walmart+ membership portfolio is exciting,” Venessa Yates, senior vice president and general manager of Walmart+, said in a statement. “We consistently strive to offer benefits that focus on our members, aligning with our commitment to deliver undeniable value and convenience.”

Meanwhile, Amazon announced months earlier that it was expanding its partnership with Grubhub to provide Prime members with free Grubhub+ subscriptions on an ongoing basis, where previously the partnership had only offered Prime customers limited-time subscriptions to the aggregator. The online retail giant also added the ability to access Grubhub on Amazon.com and the Amazon Shopping app.

“We’re just trying to make it really simple for our members to not only find out about what value they have in their Prime membership, but also to actually benefit from it on monthly, weekly, daily basis — however it fits into their busy lives,” Jamil Ghani, vice president of Amazon Prime, told PYMNTS in an interview at the time.

These moves come as the companies look to drive adoption of their paid memberships. PYMNTS Intelligence research finds that, as of July, more than two-thirds of United States consumers held Amazon Prime memberships, while as of June, only 30% were subscribed to Walmart+. Yet this latter figure marks a sharp increase from 23% a year earlier, suggesting that Walmart’s efforts to drive subscription growth are paying off.

Overall, Amazon captures a larger portion of consumer spending than Walmart, per the latest edition of PYMNTS Intelligence’s “Whole Paycheck” study, which estimates the two companies’ market shares in various categories based on years of earnings reports as well as data from the U.S. Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). The findings revealed that in Q2 Amazon seized a 3.5% of share consumers’ spending to Walmart’s 2.9%.

Looking to online ordering to drive engagement could help both companies drive up those shares, considering consumers’ strong demand for digital restaurant options. The latest installment of PYMNTS Intelligence’s annual “How the World Does Digital” report reveals that consumers order from restaurant aggregators an average of 6.1 days per month. Plus, they order from restaurants’ sites or apps an average of 6.4 days. Additionally, one-quarter of consumers orders from aggregators weekly, and a similar share does so from restaurants’ sites or apps.

Plus, Amazon and Walmart stand to gain from the link between online shopping and digital ordering in consumers’ daily routines. PYMNTS Intelligence findings reveal that, among the three-quarters of consumers who use connected devices to multitask while they shop, 30% do so to order from restaurants.

As both Amazon and Walmart tap into the intersection of online shopping and digital dining, the addition of new membership perks could enhance consumer engagement, reflecting the growing integration of technology in shoppers’ everyday habits.