Walmart Price-Matching Amazon Officially Begins

If you love to online shop, that’s probably because Amazon offers some of the lowest prices in town, but Walmart aims to get more people shopping in its stores by price-matching Amazon.

According to Reuters, Walmart president and CEO Greg Foran says that the company informed managers at all 5,000 store locations to begin price-matching online retailers. It turns out about half of all Walmarts have been doing this anyway for the past few weeks as a trial run of sorts, but it seems that it’s now happening nationwide.

Previously, Walmart only matched prices for other brick-and-mortar stores and not online retailers, and many stores are actually doing that, but online retailers were strictly exempt from this, simply because the likes of Amazon usually offered lowered prices 99% of the time.

Of course, Walmart is place where you can find pretty much everything for as cheap as you’ll find in a physical store, but buyers can now use their price-matching prowess and get something for even cheaper than what Walmart is selling it for.

Of course, most shoppers will simply just buy whatever they need right on Amazon, instead of having to go down to the nearest Walmart and semi-argue with a manager about the price of that nifty blender. However, there are some folks who simply don’t want to wait for the two-day shipping and would rather have the item as soon as possible.

Price-matching could easily wind up costing Wally World a lot of money, by taking losses on certain items for selling them less in order to price-match another store, but it’s ultimately something that should hopefully get more shoppers through the doors and increase sales of other items. Plus, it should cut down on showrooming

Showrooming is when a shopper sees something they like in a store and gets on their smartphone to find a cheaper price elsewhere. If there’s a cheaper price elsewhere, the shopper will usually leave the store without buying anything, whereas if the price was matched, they would most likely just buy it right then and there.

While this is good news for shoppers, don’t expect Walmart to price-match with Amazon over Black Friday weekend. The store could halt their new price-matching policy for those few days, and most stuff that will be on sale on Amazon for Black Friday will go by quickly anyway, not giving you enough time to get a Walmart manager and price-match an item.

Walmart posted their Black Friday deals earlier this week, with some great deals on iPads, including an iPad Air for $397 including a free $100 Walmart gift card, essentially knocking the price down to $297. You can also get an original iPad mini for $199 with a $30 Walmart gift card.

So far, both Target and Walmart will be selling the iPad Air starting at $400 with a $100 store gift card after purchase, meaning that you can technically get the year-old Apple tablet for just $300 for the 16GB WiFi-only model. While many stores have yet to reveal their Black Friday deals, this will probably be the best iPad Air deal around.

Of course, you won’t get a straight-up cash discount with these deals, but if you shop at Target or Walmart often, the $100 gift card can come in handy, and it’s essentially free cash that’s earmarked for a particular store, and if you shop at that particular store anyway, it’s honestly just free cash any way you look at it.