Walmart (NYSE:WMT) and Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) have formed an agreement to enter the voice-shopping market, which is currently dominated by online retail rival Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN).
Walmart is set to team up with Google to begin a joint-venture into the expanding voice-shopping market.
In a blogpost, Walmart’s head of e-commerce, Marc Lore, announced that Google will offer hundreds of thousands of Walmart items on its voice-controlled Google Assistant platform from late September.
Lore went on to say that it will “create customer experiences that don’t currently exist within voice shopping anywhere else”.
US company Walmart also owns the British supermarket Asda, and it could pave the way for groceries to be de delivered across UK, competing with larger Tesco (LON:TSCO) and Sainsbury’s (LON:SBRY).
Currently Amazon’s voice-activated Alexa device, which allows shoppers to also shop online on the retail site, has the majority share of the growing voice-shopping market.
Consumers have been increasingly turning to convenient online platforms to shop for goods in recent years, and this trend has only been accelerated by the introduction of the Alexa.
Amazon continues to perform strongly with regard to online sales, with Walmart attempting to push back with this latest project.
Back in January, Walmart began offering free, two-day shipping on more than two million items — in a bid to challenge Amazon Prime, whose members pay an annual fee for faster and streaming services.
Last month, despite Amazon’s dominance in the online marketplace, the company reported a fall of 75 percent in profits, as ambitious expansion efforts hit quarterly results.
The company reported a profit of $197 million in the three months to the end of June, down 77 percent from the same period a year previously.
Notably, expenses increased to $37.3 billion, up 28 percent year-on-year, relating to expansion efforts into Asia.
Shares in Walmart and Google ticked upon Wednesday morning amid the news, with Walmart shares up 0.39 percent, and Google’s Alphabet shares up 2.12 percent as of 12.27PM (GMT).