The investments look unrelated. One removes friction at the cash register; the other involves chips, data centers and capital markets. Together, however, they reveal where retail\u2019s technology competition is moving.\u00a0The transaction is becoming easier to outsource. The intelligence and customer relationship surrounding it are becoming harder to surrender.<\/p>\n
For merchants, that changes where competitive advantage is created. Checkout still has to work. But the higher-value question is now what happens before a shopper decides to buy and what the retailer can do with the relationship afterward.<\/p>\n
Read more: \u00a0Amazon Turns 360,000 Customer Checks Into Fraud Intelligence\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n Walmart Gives Up Control at Checkout to Compete Everywhere Else<\/p>\n Walmart\u2019s expansion of contactless payments represents more than a convenience upgrade. The retailer announced<\/a> in August that it would bring tap-to-pay to Walmart and Sam\u2019s Club locations across the United States by the end of 2026, allowing shoppers to use major digital wallets alongside contactless cards and wearables.<\/p>\n Walmart no longer needs every payment interaction to begin inside Walmart Pay to maintain a valuable customer relationship. It needs the broader Walmart ecosystem to give shoppers enough reasons to identify themselves, return to the app, use membership benefits and engage with services before and after payment.<\/p>\n That means Walmart is becoming more permissive at one of the few places where it historically maintained unusually tight control: the payment interface. The value of forcing a consumer through a proprietary checkout experience diminishes if doing so adds friction to the purchase. At the same time, Walmart has built an increasingly broad ecosystem around Walmart+, Walmart Pay, Scan & Go, financial products and digital commerce.<\/p>\n Opening checkout can therefore strengthen rather than weaken the broader strategy. The distinction is between\u00a0owning the payment interface and owning the customer relationship. Those were once closely connected. Digital wallets are pulling them apart.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Hidden Cost of Checkout Gaps<\/a>,\u201d a\u00a0PYMNTS Intelligence\u00a0report produced in collaboration with\u00a0PayPal<\/a>, found that 43% of consumers say they\u2019d likely link a digital wallet to an AI agent for purchases within two years.<\/p>\n Read more:\u00a0Amazon and Walmart Test Whether Drones Can Make Rural Delivery Pay<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n Amazon Is Competing Before the Shopper Arrives<\/p>\n Retail competition is moving upstream from checkout toward discovery, recommendation, personalization, advertising and increasingly agent-mediated commerce. The more effectively AI can interpret intent and collapse the distance between \u201cI need something\u201d and a completed purchase, the more strategically valuable the computational layer becomes.<\/p>\n ![\"Preferred](\"https:\/\/www.pymnts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Google-PYMNTS-blackbox.svg\")
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