Walmart Offers Free 30-Day Shipping Trial

Walmart is now offering free 30-day trials of its ShippingPass subscription program in an apparent effort to better compete with Amazon’s Prime program.

The mega-retailer is also offering one free month to existing ShippingPass customers, Walmart announced Wednesday.

ShippingPass costs $49 per year, which buys you unlimited two-day shipping for orders from Walmart.com — no minimum purchase necessary. Without ShippingPass, you must spend at least $50 per order to qualify for free shipping.

The best-known perk of Amazon's Prime subscription program is also unlimited two-day shipping. Without Prime, you must spend at least $49 per order to qualify for free shipping (or at least $25 of books).

But at $99 per year or $10.99 per month, Prime costs more than ShippingPass — a fact that Walmart appears to reference in its announcement today:

“ShippingPass is about half the price of similar programs out there.”

Granted, Prime offers more perks than ShippingPass. In addition to free two-shipping, a Prime subscription comes with:

• Free video streaming, including movies and TV series
• Free unlimited music streaming
• Free unlimited photo storage
• Free access to more than 800,000 e-books

So whether ShippingPass or Prime is best for you probably depends on your needs, preferences and habits. At least now you can test out both for a month for free with no commitment.

To sign up for a free ShippingPass trial, visit Walmart’s ShippingPass web page and click on the orange “Sign Up Now” button.

To test out Prime, visit Amazon's Prime web page and click on the yellow “Start your 30-day Prime free trial” button.

For more ways to save on shipping, check out “25 Retailers With Free Shipping — No Matter How Little You Spend.”

Have you tried ShippingPass? Let us know what you think of it and if you’d recommend it to others — leave a comment below or on our Facebook page.