The flipside of this is that Walmart does not charge extra for small, individual items, and I suspect they're losing a lot of money by doing so. I'm a heavy Amazon user, but as an experiment (and because I needed some individual toiletries) I ordered ~15 items from Walmart.com. Walmart's answer to this shipment request was to send 5 separate packages from different places and taking anywhere from 1 day to 10 days. Shipping transit estimations were all off. One shipment was just a single loofah. Just a very annoying process altogether.
Even with these add-on products Amazon is basically forcing you to adopt a Costco / buy-in-bulk model, and I think it's the only profitable and sensible direction.
>>> Walmart's answer to this shipment request was to send 5 separate packages from different places and taking anywhere from 1 day to 10 days
Logically speaking, I would think this would actually be the fastest way to fulfill orders. Find the closest distribution center that has your stuff in stock and ship it.
The ten day delivery is a bit disconcerting for sure though.
Even with these add-on products Amazon is basically forcing you to adopt a Costco / buy-in-bulk model, and I think it's the only profitable and sensible direction.