Suppliers Funded Walmart Deals. A Quarter of Non-Shoppers Didn’t Know It Was Happening.

For the first time, Amazon Prime Day and Walmart Deals ran on overlapping dates. Prime Day covered four days from June 23 to June 26. Walmart announced its own event on June 9 and ran it for seven days, June 22 through June 28, with eligible Walmart+ members getting early access to an online-only curated assortment of hot Deal drop items during the first 24 hours. PYMNTS Intelligence’s Amazon Prime Day and Walmart Deals Report, published July 23, found the collision pulled 93% of U.S. adults, roughly 244 million people, into at least one of the two events, up from 135 million a year earlier. The share of adults who shopped neither fell from 48% to 7%.

Adobe Analytics, which measures transactions across more than a trillion visits to U.S. retail sites and 100 million SKUs, put total U.S. online spend across all retailers at $26.4 billion during Prime Day’s four days, up 9.3% year over year and ahead of its own forecast. That window does not cover Walmart’s full seven days. For scale, Adobe recorded $32.4 billion across Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2025, three days rather than the full five-day Cyber Week window, which totaled $44.2 billion. Mobile carried 54.2% of the four-day total, $14.2 billion, which Adobe called an all-time high.

Per-shopper spending went the other way. PYMNTS reported average spend of $326 at Walmart against $484 in its prior wave, and $308 at Amazon against $360. That comparison carries a caveat worth stating plainly: PYMNTS’ 2025 wave covered Walmart+ Week, held April 28 to May 4, 2025, and the two waves survey separate samples of different sizes, so they capture shifts in the population and not the same shoppers over time. The direction holds up independently. Numerator’s observed purchase data, drawn from more than 178,000 Prime Day orders and not from survey recall, found the average order fell to $47.66 from $53.34, average household spend on the Amazon event fell to $143.45 from $156.37, and average spend per item fell to $23.23 from $24.59.

Walmart has not published results from the event. Its corporate newsroom carries the June 9 announcement and nothing since on how the week performed. Everything that follows is third-party measurement. A 1P supplier can pull its own item movement for the week in Scintilla, but that shows what happened to one line, not what happened to the event, and the event is what the funding bought.

More shoppers, smaller baskets, and discounts that did not move

The variable suppliers should sit with is the third one. Adobe found promotional depth essentially flat against 2025: electronics peaked at 24% off versus 23%, apparel held at 24%, toys moved from 19% to 20%, televisions from 18% to 19%, appliances held at 16%, furniture from 15% to 16%, computers from 13% to 15%, and sporting goods from 9% to 10%.

Suppliers did not buy the participation surge with deeper markdowns, and they did not get smaller baskets because they discounted harder. The event grew the crowd, held the discount, and still returned less per shopper. Any post-event analysis that attributes basket compression to promotional strategy is reading a variable that barely moved.

Walmart tripled its exclusive audience and still lost the awareness contest

Start with what worked, because it went unmentioned in the coverage that followed the report. PYMNTS found the share of adults who shopped Walmart Deals and not Prime Day nearly tripled, from 6% to 16%. Walmart pulled a meaningful population into its event who ignored Amazon’s entirely, which is the hardest thing to do in a week when a competitor owns the calendar.

Now the number that should concern anyone who funded it. Among shoppers who did not participate in Walmart Deals, 26% said they simply did not know the event was happening. The comparable figure for Amazon Prime Day non-buyers was 7%.

Read that gap carefully, because the two groups are not the same size. PYMNTS’ participation splits show 48% of adults shopped Prime Day only, 16% shopped Walmart Deals only, 29% shopped both and 7% shopped neither, which puts Walmart Deals participation at roughly 45% of adults against roughly 77% for Prime Day. Walmart’s pool of non-participants is more than twice the size of Amazon’s, and a larger pool naturally holds more consumers disengaged from both events and less likely to be aware of anything. Part of that gap is an artifact of pool size and not a pure measure of reach.

The remainder is still substantial, and Numerator supports the reach reading from the other direction. Its verified-buyer survey, fielded to 5,002 Prime Day shoppers alongside the observed order data, found nearly all of them knew it was Prime Day before they bought, and about a third named the event itself as their primary reason for shopping.

Lead time does not carry the explanation, and it does not run Walmart’s way either. Amazon confirmed its dates on June 2, a week before Walmart announced, and Bloomberg had reported the June move back in March. Walmart went to market with thirteen days of runway against Amazon’s twenty-one, then ran its event three days longer. A one-week difference in announcement timing does not produce a twenty-six against seven awareness gap. Prime Day has run since 2015, and the franchise awareness Amazon accumulated over a decade is not something a thirteen-day announcement window closes. The diagnosis points back to reach.

The precise reading matters, because it changes what a supplier should ask for. Walmart was not invisible to shoppers already in market. Numerator found that more than half of Prime Day shoppers compared prices across retailers before completing their purchases, and put the share who shopped or planned to shop Walmart Deals at 49%. Walmart reached the people Amazon had already activated. It did not reach the people Amazon had not, and PYMNTS found the same pattern in membership, with Walmart+ penetration among surveyed consumers rising from 34% to 42% on gains the firm attributes to households that already carry Amazon Prime.

One thing none of this settles is what Walmart spent to promote the week. No public figure exists for Deals week media investment, so the reach reading describes an outcome and not a budget decision. A supplier who raises it in a planning conversation will hear that distinction come back across the table.

That pattern sits oddly against what Walmart spent the four weeks before the event building. Walmart Connect activated first-party shopper data inside Google Display and Video 360 for YouTube campaigns on June 11, having opened offsite access on May 28 through Yahoo DSP, with Magnite’s supply-side technology carrying VIZIO connected TV inventory, and on June 22 used the opening of Cannes Lions to lay out a global commerce media strategy under Seth Dallaire, chief growth officer of Walmart Inc., rebranding Sam’s Club MAP as Sam’s Club Connect. Walmart said in that release that its global advertising revenue grew 37% in the most recent quarter, that Walmart Connect U.S. grew 44% excluding VIZIO, and that Walmart Connect U.S. reaches more than 150 million weekly customers. Those capabilities are built to carry advertisers’ messages, not to promote Walmart’s own promotional calendar. The two do not travel together automatically, and a supplier negotiating event support needs to say so out loud.

Amazon won the comparison on selection and speed, not on price

Among consumers who shopped both events, PYMNTS found 74% compared prices between the two retailers and 46% said price alone decided where they bought. Loyalty decided it for 15%. When those shoppers compared, 38% usually or almost always finished at Amazon against 25% at Walmart, and 43% judged Amazon’s deals better against 21% for Walmart.

Amazon led all six attributes PYMNTS measured. The widest margins were product selection, 43% to 17%, and shipping time, 42% to 24%. Walmart came closest on regular, non-sale pricing, at 32% against 27%, the one dimension where it did not trail.

That distribution is diagnostic. Walmart’s everyday price position is registering with shoppers, which is the thing it has spent years and considerable margin building. Assortment breadth and delivery speed perception are where the distance remains, and a week of event pricing did not close a two-to-one deal-perception gap that PYMNTS describes as unchanged from 2025. For suppliers, that points away from deeper discounting and toward the assortment depth and fulfillment terms that determine how an item competes when a shopper has both sites open at once.

Walmart’s strongest category was one of the two shoppers were trading down in

Across all U.S. retailers, Adobe found online shoppers used the flat discounts to buy up rather than down. The share of the most expensive goods rose 19% against year-to-date averages. Electronics led at 51%, followed by toys at 37%, appliances at 30%, personal care at 27%, furniture at 24%, sporting goods at 24% and apparel at 11%. Two categories moved the opposite way: home and garden, down 5%, and grocery, down 4%.

Now place Walmart’s event inside that market, with one qualification. Adobe measures online transactions, and Walmart’s grocery volume runs heavily through stores, so the comparison is directional, not exact. PYMNTS found groceries were Walmart’s top event category at 49% of Walmart event shoppers, and the category that declined least from its prior wave. The essentials tilt showed up on the Amazon side too, where Numerator’s three top-selling Prime Day items were Premier Protein shakes, Liquid I.V. packets and Temptations cat treats, 69% of items sold for under $20, and only 3% cleared $100.

Walmart’s deal week concentrated in a category where online buyers were reaching for cheaper units, while the trade-up dollars moved through discretionary categories. That is a composition outcome rather than a merchandising failure, and the composition data explains it. PYMNTS found participation among baby boomers and seniors rose 263% at Walmart and 120% at Amazon, while millennials, the heaviest spenders in the prior wave, cut spending 35% at Walmart even as their participation grew. Numerator’s observed purchase data is directionally consistent, identifying the typical Prime Day shopper as a high-income suburban woman between 45 and 64.

For suppliers, the practical consequence is that there was no single deal week result. A grocery supplier and a toy supplier participated in materially different events under one banner, and benchmarking either against a blended figure will misread both.

The AI number reversed in twelve months

Adobe reported that AI traffic to U.S. retail sites rose 235% year over year from January through May and 89% during the event window. The finding that matters is what happened after those visitors landed: Adobe measured them converting 40% better than paid search, email and social, a reversal from last year’s Prime event, when AI traffic converted 23% worse. Adobe sells analytics and AI products, so that figure reads as Adobe’s measurement rather than a neutral fact, though its Prime Day dataset is the benchmark Reuters cites.

Two independent surveys point the same way on adoption. PYMNTS found 21% of event participants used an AI chatbot or assistant, rising to 35% among Generation Z, with ChatGPT cited by 51% of AI users and Google Gemini by 44%. Numerator separately found 20% used AI shopping tools, rising to 30% among Gen Z and millennials, with 41% using them to find deals and 36% to research products.

Those are the two platforms Walmart already occupies. Walmart and Google announced a Gemini shopping integration at NRF in January, presented on stage by then incoming chief executive John Furner and Google’s Sundar Pichai, and in March Walmart moved its own Sparky assistant into ChatGPT rather than continue with OpenAI’s Instant Checkout, a decision Daniel Danker, executive vice president of AI acceleration, product and design, framed around keeping the transaction inside Walmart’s environment. This publication covered that shift in March. The June data says the timing was right. The question it leaves is how a supplier’s own items surface inside Sparky, not only inside Walmart search.

The newest material is about who AI persuades. PYMNTS found 74% of AI users bought at least one product mainly on an AI recommendation and 30% bought more than one. Among AI users living paycheck to paycheck with difficulty, 45% bought more than one AI-recommended product, against 21% of those not struggling to pay bills. To the extent a supplier’s Walmart buyer base overlaps that financially strained group, AI recommendation surfaces are already shaping the trip before the shopper reaches a shelf or a search bar.

1P and 3P are reading two different numbers

For 1P suppliers, the awareness gap is a negotiating input. Event participation is committed inside joint business planning months ahead, with funding attached. A supplier who can document a gap of that size against Amazon has grounds to ask what Walmart will commit to on demand generation in return, instead of treating event inclusion as a fixed cost of the relationship. The near-tripling of Walmart’s exclusive audience is the other half of that conversation, because it establishes that the event pulls its own crowd when people know it is running.

For 3P Marketplace sellers, awareness matters less because bids are placed against traffic that already arrived. The relevant figure is the comparison split. When 74% of dual-event shoppers price-check and 38% of them finish at Amazon against 25% at Walmart, sellers bidding into Walmart event traffic are paying for impressions served to shoppers with a competing tab open. That argues for category selectivity and tighter dayparting during overlapping windows in place of flat event budgets.

Adobe described the June window as evidence that the summer shopping season is beginning to rival the holiday period. Walmart has built the commerce media infrastructure to compete in it and is growing advertising revenue at 37% globally. Walmart reports second quarter results on August 20, with materials at 6 a.m. Central and a call to follow at 7 a.m. That will give suppliers a quarter containing the event rather than a number for the event.

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