Walmart updates Amazon price-match policy: No longer matches Amazon Marketplace sellers

After Walmart announced that they would match prices at Amazon.com, unscrupulous sellers began exploiting the price-match policy in a rather nefarious way — they created Amazon Marketplace profiles for the items they wished to buy, then listed items like a PlayStation 4 for $49.00 (it sells for about $499.00) or bottles of Tide for $2.00. Then, they went to Walmart stores, price-matched the lowball Amazon items, and took the products home for next to nothing — especially if coupons were used on top of these low prices. Consumerist and other media outlets covered this practice earlier this week, while Instagram blew up with couponers showing off their enormous hauls of ill-gotten price-matched items.

Today, Walmart announced that they would no longer price-match Amazon Marketplace items:

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We launched online price matching because it’s the right thing for our customers. It’s making a meaningful difference for people who want to feel confident they’re getting the best price, and we’re committed to matching online prices going forward.

At the same time, we can’t tolerate fraud or attempts to trick our cashiers. This kind of activity is unfair to the millions of customers who count on us every day for honest value. With this in mind, we’ve updated our policy to clarify that we will match prices from Walmart.com and 30 major online retailers, but we won’t honor prices from marketplace vendors, third-party sellers, auction sites or sites requiring memberships.

We will continue to listen to feedback from our customers and our cashiers to make sure our online price match policy is working.

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