Amazon and Walmart Grew the Crowd but Shrank the Basket

Overlapping summer sale events from Amazon and Walmart nearly saturated the adult U.S. market, but average spending fell sharply at both retailers, showing that a bigger audience can still produce smaller baskets and weaker economics. Deal-week competition is turning loyalty into price arbitrage. With shoppers moving fluidly between Amazon and Walmart, comparing offers in real time and choosing largely on price, promotional events increasingly reward the lowest offer rather than the strongest retail relationship. AI is beginning to control the path to purchase. As shoppers use assistants to research, compare and recommend products before entering a retailer’s ecosystem, Amazon and Walmart risk losing influence over discovery, even when they ultimately win the transaction.

This summer, Amazon moved Prime Day to June 23-26, leaving July without its usual commercial centerpiece for the first time outside the pandemic-disrupted 2021 event. The shift created an apparent hole in merchants’ calendars. What emerged instead was a clearer view of how large-scale shopping events are changing. Prime Day still generated extraordinary demand, but the combination of Amazon’s earlier timing, its direct overlap with Walmart Deals and a subsequent July slowdown suggests retailers are no longer competing simply to produce the biggest sales day. They are competing to control a longer, more fragmented cycle of consumer attention. An estimated 244 million U.S. consumers, or 93% of adults, shopped at least one of the events, up from 135 million the previous year. The share participating in neither promotion collapsed from 48% to 7%, according to a PYMNTS Intelligence survey of 2,160 consumers conducted in June. But the larger crowd came with a catch: Shoppers spent less. The survey found average spending at Amazon fell from $360 in 2025 to $308, while Walmart’s average dropped from $484 to $326. The overlap expanded the top of the funnel while compressing the value of each customer moving through it. That trade-off offers a preview of the next phase of promotional retail. The biggest shopping events may attract more people than ever, but they are also becoming less capable of concentrating consumer spending in one place.

Running competing events simultaneously also made it easier for consumers to treat Amazon and Walmart as interchangeable deal inventories. Nearly three-quarters of dual-event participants compared prices across Amazon and Walmart, the survey found, and 46% said price alone determined where they completed a purchase. Loyalty was the deciding factor for just 15%. The overlap therefore produced not only a bigger market but a more efficient one, at least from the consumer’s perspective. Shoppers could check the same television, appliance or household item on multiple platforms in real time, reducing retailers’ ability to use the event’s scale and urgency to soften price sensitivity. Artificial intelligence (AI) added another comparison layer. Twenty-one percent of event participants used an AI assistant to research products, locate deals or compare prices. Nearly three-quarters of those users bought at least one product primarily because an AI tool recommended it.