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Amazon Prime members prefer Walmart for online grocery shopping, research shows
Dive Brief:
A greater share of surveyed Amazon Prime members bought groceries online from Walmart than from the e-commerce giant itself during a yearlong stretch that ended earlier in 2025, according to data released this month by Coresight under 60% of surveyed online grocery shoppers who subscribe to Prime purchased groceries online from Walmart during the 12 months ahead of a poll Coresight conducted in April. Meanwhile, only about 52% of surveyed Prime members who bought groceries online over that period purchased from contrast, almost 79% of online grocery shoppers in the survey who subscribe to Walmart's membership program, Walmart+, made online grocery purchases from the mass retailer, Coresight found.
Dive Insight:
Coresight's research underscores Walmart's powerful position in the U.S. grocery e-commerce sector, where the mass retailer has made deep investments in recent years. Walmart topped the list of retailers where survey participants bought groceries online, followed by Amazon, Target and Costco - and was well ahead of conventional supermarket operators.
Almost 58% of survey participants who bought groceries via e-commerce during the 12-month period covered by the research purchased groceries online from Walmart. The comparable figure for Amazon was about 45%. Kroger banners attracted digital purchases from about 18% of online grocery shoppers in the survey.
Overall, 53.6% of respondents bought groceries online during the yearlong period covered by the survey, down from 56.3% during the prior year. However, Coresight found that the proportion of online shoppers who depend primarily on e-commerce to buy groceries rose sharply last year, continuing a steady trend that stems back to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nearly 31% of participants in the survey who bought groceries online said they do "all or almost all" of their grocery shopping online, a figure that was up by about 10 percentage points compared with data Coresight collected a year earlier. By contrast, just 4.3% of shoppers Coresight surveyed in 2020 who used online grocery services said they depended mostly on those channels.
Walmart and Amazon have both been directing resources to beef up their online grocery capabilities. For example, Walmart said last July that it would add five automated distribution centers to handle perishable foods. And last fall, Amazon added the ability for shoppers to buy items from Whole Foods, and its Amazon Fresh service in one order.
The findings are based on a survey of 2,004 U.S. consumers Coresight fielded in April as well as polls of similarly sized groups the firm conducted annually over the previous seven years.
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