Walmart+ has long been the retailer’s answer to Amazon’s Prime program. But Walmart+ has been limited to the United States — until now.

The retailer officially launched Walmart+ in Canada, marking the first expansion of the membership program outside of the U.S. Walmart officials lauded the north-of-the-border loyalty program expansion.

“Walmart+ is a game-changer for Canadians, especially the busy families who rely on our everyday low prices,” said Catherine Theberge-Conner, head of membership at Walmart Canada, in a press release. “With Walmart+, Canadians can access a unique membership offering that combines unlimited grocery and general merchandise delivery with benefits beyond retail.”

Walmart is No. 2 in the Top 2000. The database is Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of North America’s online retailers by their annual ecommerce sales.

Walmart is also No. 8 in the Global Online Marketplaces. That database ranks the top such marketplaces by third-party gross merchandise value (GMV).

How Walmart+ in Canada will work

The program’s cost is $8.97 monthly or $89 annually. It bundles unlimited same-day delivery from store on orders over $35, free shipping with no order minimum on thousands of items from Walmart.ca, and a Crave Standard with Ads streaming subscription — making it the only membership in Canada to include Crave as an embedded benefit. Crave is a Canadian streaming service owned by Bell Media.

Rachid Wehbi, ecommerce expert and founder and CEO of Sell The Trend, an AI-integrated ecommerce platform for merchants, said Walmart+ has followed in the footsteps of Amazon, especially by bundling a streaming service into the program.

“This strategy is comparable to the success of Amazon Prime and the integration of retail and electronic services,” Wehbi assessed.

Meanwhile, the move is a direct challenge to Amazon, which also operates in Canada.

“Without question, Walmart+ will impact Amazon the most,” Wehbi said. “Walmart+ will be directly targeting the advantages that make Amazon’s Prime membership so successful.”

The move has further implications for grocers.

“However, Walmart+ will also greatly affect Canadian grocers, specifically Loblaw and Empire (Sobeys),” Wehbi noted.

He added that grocery has a frequent shopping cycle. Thus, through utilizing delivery and subscriptions, Walmart will most likely become customers’ first choice for grocery shopping.

What comes next for Walmart+

Looking ahead, Wehbi anticipates Walmart Canada will benefit from the Walmart+ expansion.

“Membership programs form a stable source of income, promote more frequent purchases and give Walmart deeper insights into customer behavior,” he said.

Wehbi calculated that the short-term loss from delivery and subscriptions is traded off with long-term gain from loyal customers, larger purchase volumes and more spending per household.

“In the current state of the retail industry, the customer relationship is more valuable than profit from individual sales,” Wehbi said.

Moreover, he expects that Walmart+’s expansion into Canada will serve as a template for other countries.

“I believe if Walmart figures out how to quickly sell and keep customers in Canada, it will take everything it learned during this phase and adapt it to international locations where it already has a majority ownership stake in retail,” Wehbi said

He added that this will be an opportunity for Walmart to see how its business model works outside the U.S.

“Canada has a lot of stores, and a lot of people who buy online and are used to subscription models, so it will be easy to adapt this service to other countries if it works there first,” he said.

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