Walmart+ is Walmart's paid loyalty membership at $98/year (or $12.95/month), bundling free unlimited delivery, fuel discounts at Walmart, Murphy USA, and Sam's Club stations, member pricing on some items, Paramount+ streaming (select tiers), and Scan & Go checkout. The program is Walmart's answer to Amazon Prime and drives incremental basket frequency among its subscribers, reaching 18+ million US members.
What Is Walmart Doing?
Walmart launched Walmart+ in 2020, directly in response to Amazon Prime's growing dominance in grocery and mass retail. The strategic logic was clear: Amazon Prime members spent more at Amazon and ordered more frequently than non-members. Walmart needed a comparable retention and frequency driver.
The Walmart+ structure is explicitly a bundle, not a points program. Members do not earn anything incrementally -- they pay upfront and receive a set of benefits immediately. The benefits are stacked deliberately to cover multiple high-frequency touchpoints:
Free delivery covers the grocery and household goods use case. Fuel discounts cover the commuter and road-trip use case. Scan & Go in-store checkout removes the friction of the physical shopping visit. Paramount+ streaming fills leisure time and adds aspirational value to the bundle.
No single benefit in the bundle is unique to Walmart. Amazon Prime offers faster delivery. Credit cards offer fuel rewards. Streaming services are commoditised. What Walmart+ does is consolidate benefits that members previously accessed through multiple separate services into a single annual payment.
The Scan & Go feature deserves specific mention. It allows Walmart+ members to scan items as they put them in the cart and pay via the app without waiting at a checkout. In a retail environment where checkout queues are a primary friction point, removing them entirely is a meaningful loyalty benefit -- and one that costs Walmart very little to provide.
Why Does It Work?
The primary psychological mechanism is bundle anchoring. When a member considers $98 for Walmart+, they mentally add up the individual benefits: "delivery would cost me $X per month, fuel savings would be $Y, Paramount+ is $Z." The sum of parts exceeds the bundle price at almost any level of regular use. The perceived value is higher than the actual cost.
The secondary mechanism is sunk-cost commitment. Once a member has paid $98, they are motivated to use the program enough to justify that payment. Behavioural economics calls this the sunk-cost effect: once you have made an investment, you make subsequent choices to validate it. A Walmart+ member who might have ordered online once per month will order more frequently just to get value from the membership they have already paid for.
The tertiary mechanism is the fuel discount as a daily-frequency touchpoint. Most Americans refuel weekly or twice weekly. A fuel discount that activates at every fill-up is one of the highest-frequency loyalty interactions in any program. It creates a weekly reminder that Walmart+ membership is delivering value, reinforcing the commitment to the annual renewal.
The Three Options on the Table
Understanding the delivery mechanism is as important as understanding the mechanics.
The worst option for an SMB is a branded app. Walmart can build and maintain a sophisticated app with Walmart engineers and a technology budget that runs into nine figures. A 1-location retailer in Ohio cannot. Around 83% of branded loyalty apps are uninstalled within 30 days of download, according to available industry data. An SMB's loyalty program dies before it builds a meaningful member base.
The middle option is a paper punch card. It is cheap, physical, and familiar. But it has no recovery mechanism when a customer loses their card, no push notification capability, no data on member behavior, and no ability to run the kind of personalised offers that justify the word "membership." Paper is inert.
The best option is a digital wallet pass on Apple Wallet and Google Wallet. It delivers like an app (push notifications, member data, automated re-engagement) without the download barrier. Customers add it once and it lives on their phone with zero maintenance required on their side. A small retailer can set up a wallet-pass membership program, configure the benefits, and go live in a day.
Walmart runs a full-stack app because it has the scale and engineering capacity to maintain one. An independent retailer runs the same membership logic on a wallet pass.
What Can a 1-Location SMB Copy on Monday?
Walmart+'s core innovation is not technology. It is the decision to bundle benefits rather than list them separately and to charge a flat annual fee rather than earning points incrementally. Three direct applications for a small retailer:
Stack your benefits rather than offering them individually. If you can offer free delivery, a small fuel discount via a partner, early access to sales, and a birthday bonus, do not present these as four separate perks. Bundle them into a named membership (e.g., "The [Your Brand] Annual Pass") and price it so the delivery benefit alone almost pays for the year. The other benefits convert "I might" into "obviously yes."
Lead with your highest-frequency benefit. The Walmart+ fuel discount is the benefit members use most often -- weekly or more. For a coffee shop, that benefit is free drip coffee. For a wine shop, it is member pricing on reorders. For a dry cleaner, it might be free same-day delivery for members. Lead with whatever a loyal customer would use every visit, not the flashiest benefit.
Price for commitment, not margin. The Walmart+ fee is not primarily a revenue stream; it is a retention mechanism. Price your membership at the point where a regular customer sees it as a no-brainer -- below that threshold, you lose the sunk-cost effect; above it, you lose the casual convert who would become a regular once enrolled.
The loyalty program cost guide walks through pricing structures for SMB memberships. For comparison with a program that uses points rather than a flat membership, Target Circle's approach is a useful counterpoint.
Walmart Plus vs. Competing Programs
| Feature | Walmart+ | Amazon Prime | Target Circle | Paper Punch Card |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Structure | Paid annual/monthly | Paid annual/monthly | Free points | Free stamps |
| Delivery included | Yes | Yes | No (fee per order) | No |
| Fuel discount | Yes | No | No | No |
| Streaming | Yes (Paramount+) | Yes (Prime Video) | No | No |
| Member pricing | Yes (select items) | Yes (Whole Foods) | Yes (Circle deals) | No |
| Push notifications | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| SMB replication | Wallet pass membership | Not practical | Wallet pass points | Avoid |
The comparison illustrates what makes Walmart+ distinctive: the fuel discount, which is the highest-frequency benefit in the bundle and the one most members encounter most often.
The Broader US Grocery Loyalty Context
Walmart+ entered a US grocery loyalty market already structured by Kroger's fuel points system, Target Circle's discount-on-everything free tier, and a hundred regional programs. Its decision to go paid and benefits-based rather than points-based was a deliberate differentiation.
The paid membership model works at Walmart's scale because the brand already has sufficient traffic. Enough Americans shop at Walmart that even a small percentage of shoppers converting to Walmart+ produces millions of members. An SMB cannot rely on that volume.
What an SMB can rely on is relationship depth. A 1-location retailer who knows 200 loyal customers by name can design a membership that feels genuinely personal: "The Tuesday Morning Pass" for regulars who come in before 9am, "The Monthly Box" for customers who want curation, "The Founding Member" tier for the first 50 who sign up. Walmart's membership is one-size-fits-all by necessity. Yours can be custom by design.
For the broader US grocery loyalty context, the customer retention ideas guide covers the tactics that translate most directly from national chains to single-location operators.
Starting Your Own Membership Program
Walmart+ proves that a paid membership works when the benefit bundle is strong enough and the price is low enough to feel like a no-brainer. The program's success is not a function of Walmart's size; it is a function of benefit design.
An SMB with three genuine benefits to offer -- even simple ones like free delivery, 10% off, and birthday recognition -- can run a membership program on a wallet pass starting this week. The key is to name the bundle, charge for it, and lead with the one benefit your best customers would use every visit.
You do not need Walmart's engineering team to run this model. You need a clear benefit stack, a reasonable price, and a consistent delivery system.
Explore how to set it up at LoyaltyPass, where you can build a wallet-pass membership program without writing a line of code.
