蘑菇AV

Walmart bets on AR: The retailer experiments with several use cases for the technology that it hopes can make shopping online as immersive, interactive, and social as in-person experience.

This win combats Affirm鈥檚 recent loss of Walmart to Klarna. Affirm also benefited from recent tie-ups with Adyen, which helped the company burrow into the UK market. Our take: Affirm is attempting to break away from its competition by mimicking traditional lenders: Affirm started reporting loans to TransUnion this month and is chipping into in-person retail sales with the Affirm Card.

The news: Walmart-owned Sam鈥檚 Club will integrate its Scan & Go checkout technology into all 600 of its stores, the company announced at its 2025 Investment Community Meeting. Scan & Go will gradually replace traditional checkout. Here鈥檚 how it works: Scan & Go lets customers scan their purchases with the retailer鈥檚 mobile app.

Like Walmart, Amazon has technological savvy and deep payments expertise鈥攑lus deep pockets to finance the endeavor. It also already offers an ACH-based pay by bank option, making a real-time solution the next logical step. Walmart will pilot a pay by bank cash-back and discount rewards program for customers.

Larger retailers like Walmart and Target have more power to wring price concessions out of suppliers. But even that has its limits: Walmart鈥檚 efforts to get its Chinese partners to eat the cost of tariffs have been met with uncharacteristic resistance, Bloomberg reported.

Walmart could also be a candidate for adding surcharges: It鈥檚 trying to push its pay by bank offering to cut back on swipe fee expenses.

Amazon will pull in over 80% of US retail media search dollars this year, per our forecast. But Walmart will continue growing its share of non-Amazon retail media search ad spending over the next two years.

The opportunity: The deal will let DoorDash provide a more personalized experience and give Ibotta, which partners with grocers like Kroger, Walmart, and Publix, access to a broader consumer base.

Walmart. Worldpay.

Walmart, Costco, Target, and Home Depot are among the retailers pressing their Chinese suppliers to lower prices. But those efforts are running into resistance from both manufacturers and Beijing, which summoned Walmart for a widely publicized dressing down. Amazon is paying higher prices to some vendors to help them cushion the blow of tariffs.

Pepsi is accused of offering an unnamed big-box retailer鈥攚hich sources identified to CNBC as Walmart鈥攁n unfair price advantage over competitors ranging from big grocery chains to local convenience stores. The FTC鈥檚 suit argues that Pepsi violated the RPA by giving Walmart advantages, such as 鈥減romotional payments鈥� and advertising, which it did not offer to rival retailers.

Toy sales will gain steam as value-focused consumers find deals throughout the holiday season, which began in early October when retail giants including Amazon, Target, and Walmart launched major sales. Click here to view our full forecast for US holiday retail ecommerce sales growth, by product category.

Walmart customers kept spending, driving comparable sales up 4.2%. Walmart hasn鈥檛 seen any signs of weaker consumer spending, though its shoppers have grown more 鈥渃hoiceful, discerning, value-seeking,鈥� and focused on essentials over discretionary items, CFO John David Rainey told CNBC. Total revenues: $167.77 billion (4.8% YoY). Walmart US net sales: $115.35 billion (4.1% YoY).

This article was contributed by Walmart Connect.

Unified ID 2.0鈥檚 rising popularity: Warner Bros. Discovery and Walmart Connect have adopted UID2, heralding a shift in advertising toward privacy-conscious personalization.

Since most brands lack the resources of an Amazon or Walmart to enhance their search capabilities, Shopify鈥檚 new tools could encourage merchant sign-ups or upsells as retailers look for cost-effective ways to stay competitive. Go further: Read up on key use cases for generative AI search in retail.

Retailers like Best Buy and Walmart are harnessing their in-house creative capabilities to help advertisers create more engaging retail media content. Last year, Walmart Connect expanded its creative ad formats to include more on-site and in-store placements, seasonal programs, and single-supplier-led store events.

Amazon and Walmart reinforce the value of their membership programs: Amazon now offers free Grubhub+ membership as a permanent Prime perk and Walmart+ announces its member-exclusive sale.

Amazon and Walmart combined will gobble up more than 84% of all retail media ad spending in 2025, representing a pervasive and unyielding dominance within the channel. The share of ad spending allocated to all other RMNs increased by less than 1 percentage point between 2019 and 2024.

Net charge-off trends differ, although Capital One鈥檚 charge-off rate jumped mainly from the Walmart card鈥檚 loss sharing agreement ending, the company said. Capital One鈥檚 net charge-offs (NCOs) were 6.02%, up on both the quarter (5.60%) and the year (5.33%). Without the Walmart effect, NCOs for the quarter would have been 5.66% in Q4 2024.

Amazon leads the retail media market with $39.81 billion in 2024 US ad revenues, while Walmart brings in $3.87 billion. Other players like Instacart, Target, and Etsy trail with less than $1 billion each. Global Meta ad revenues are projected to grow from $160.63 billion in 2024 to $227.90 billion in 2027, but growth rates will slow from 21.7% to 11.4% over that period, according to our forecast.

On today's podcast episode, we discuss the media companies with the highest TV usage, how ESPN is being maneuvered, how multiple new streaming bundles will change the game, and a tie up between Walmart and Disney for enhanced targeting and measurement across streaming. Tune in to the discussion with our vice president of content Paul Verna.

Amazon Prime Day conditioned shoppers to expect bargains in July: That鈥檚 driven Google, Target, Walmart, and others to seize on the opportunity to drive consumers to spend.