The lockdown forced by the coronavirus continues to be a driving force for Amazon, which saw its profit triple from a year ago. Those profits are expected to continue even as the company spends billions of dollars dealing with COVID-19. 

Net income for the third quarter rose to $6.3 billion, or $12.37 a share, from $2.1 billion, or $4.23 a share, a year ago, despite spending around $2.5 billion dealing with the global pandemic. The online retailing giant also posted revenue that rose 37% to $96.1 billion. Excluding foreign exchange rate changes, the increase was still 36% over a year ago. 

Wall Street expected Amazon would maintain its strong momentum in the third quarter, with the e-commerce juggernaut making billions more dollars during the pandemic as customers used its site to avoid going to stores. Amazon wasn’t the only online retailer benefiting from this trend, with Etsy, Walmart, Target and Wayfair all seeing big sales increases too. While the latest quarter didn’t include Prime Day — which was delayed to the fourth quarter and ran from Oct. 13 to 14 — Amazon was still predicted to post a 32% rise in revenue thanks to a surge in demand all year.

Amazon is now poised to exit the pandemic — whenever that may be — as a bigger and more powerful entity in retail, especially as dozens of traditional merchants like Lord & Taylor and Aldo have gone into bankruptcy protection this year. This dynamic will benefit Amazon’s revenue growth, but it creates other problems. Millions of consumers, now habituated to using Amazon, may find fewer shopping options, making it easier for Amazon to raise prices if it decides to do so.

For the fourth quarter, Amazon said it expects sales to range between $112 billion and $121 billion, or growth of 28% to 38% vs. a year ago. Analysts expected the company to post $112.3 billion in revenue in the period, according to Yahoo Finance. 

Amazon shares fell 2.1% to $3,145 in after-hours trading. 

For Amazon, getting bigger may invite even more scrutiny, with elected officials and regulatory agencies in the US already investigating the potential monopoly powers of Big Tech. Last week, the Justice Department sued Google, claiming the company operates a search monopoly. More of these actions against Amazon, Apple and Facebook are widely expected.

That’s why Amazon’s been on a kick to talk about all the good it’s doing for small and medium-sized businesses, as well as its own employees. On Thursday, CEO Jeff Bezos called for other employers to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. 

“Two years ago, we increased Amazon’s minimum wage to $15 for all full-time, part-time, temporary, and seasonal employees across the U.S. and challenged other large employers to do the same,” Bezos said in the company’s release. “Best Buy and Target have stepped up, and we hope other large employers will also make the jump to $15. Now would be a great time.”

Bouncing back 

Amazon started off the pandemic with difficulty, as the company experienced regular delays in its heralded logistics network that frustrated its customers. It also struggled to implement new safety features in its warehouses, as workers repeatedly protested for better protections from the coronavirus. The company spent huge sums of money to tackle these problems, hiring hundreds of thousands of new workers to handle the spike in consumer demand and adding dozens of new safety measures including a testing regime, masks and more rigorous cleanings.

Delays are no longer the norm for Amazon orders but the company disclosed this month that nearly 20,000 US workers contracted COVID-19, a sign that Amazon’s work to contain the virus in its workforce is far from over.

Bezos warned in April that Amazon would spend $4 billion for its coronavirus response in the second quarter, potentially wiping out the company’s profits for that period. Instead, Amazon posted an all-time record profit.

The fourth quarter should show even more strength for the company, with Prime Day adding to Amazon’s typical growth from Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Amazon this month said independent sellers on its platform posted a nearly 60% increase in sales during Prime Day. 

Since those sellers account for about 60% of Amazon’s sales, the company likely saw a big increase in this latest Prime Day, putting the company in a good starting point for the holiday season. Edison Trends said Prime Day likely grew by 36% in the US. 

Amazon said it expects operating income in the period to be between $1 billion and $4.5 billion, compared with $3.9 billion a year ago. The projection includes $4 billion in costs related to coronavirus. 

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For a different kind of Prime Day, Amazon decided to offer a different measure of its success.

On Thursday, the e-commerce titan’s press release about Prime Day 2020 — unlike in the four previous years — didn’t headline with how the overall sale went. For example, Prime Day 2019 was such a smashing success that Amazon said it “surpassed the previous Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined.”

This year, instead, Amazon said the independent sellers on its platform posted nearly 60% better sales from last year. Since these small and medium-sized sellers account for about 60% of Amazon’s total sales, that indicates the company had a strong showing. However, the different statistics make it hard for folks outside the company to rate this Prime Day against others.

The world’s largest online retailer has been reporting huge revenue growth this year, as millions of customers have turned to Amazon for deliveries so they can avoid going into stores during the coronavirus pandemic. Prime Day was expected to keep that growth going, with research firm eMarketer predicting Amazon would rake in $9.9 billion during the 48-hour sale, up 43% from a year earlier.

But there were lots of challenges Amazon faced. The sale came in October, just before the holiday shopping season, with Amazon forced to delay the event due to the pandemic. Prime Day was previously held in July. The first day of the sale coincided with Apple’s iPhone 12 launch event, which may’ve stolen attention away from Prime Day. Added to that, a lack of additional stimulus from the federal government is putting a drag on the economy and likely dampening sales for retailers.

Read more: Prime Day 2020: Is that deal really the best deal?

A clear benefit for Amazon this year was that the prevailing storyline about Prime Day was the actual deals. Things haven’t always gone this smoothly. For the first two years of Prime Day, the hashtag #PrimeDayFail gained prominence as website glitches and uninspiring products disappointed customers. Prime Day 2018 faced a disastrous start, with Amazon’s website and app both crashing for more than an hour. 

Last year, a coordinated multicity protest against Amazon took place, making the sale a platform for activism against the company’s ties to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its treatment of its warehouse workers.

Some of those protests and worker strikes returned this year, but they were far more muted, likely because the coronavirus is dissuading many people from large gatherings.

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Consumers are wondering whether to buy their holiday gear during Amazon’s Prime Day tomorrow or wait until Black Friday, with the big shift in Prime Day’s placement throwing our year-end shopping routines out of whack. The answer is simple: Shop as early as possible. 

Prime Day, which is usually held in July, has become a major part of the retail calendar, with dozens of major stores joining in the sale to snag customers. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, Amazon delayed the event to Oct. 13-14 this year, making Prime Day more of an unofficial start to the holiday shopping season than its typical role as a kind of Christmas in July.

That’s going to put more pressure on retailers who traditionally save their premiere holiday sales for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Customers are expected to look for deals earlier this season and merchants will respond in kind. Walmart and Target, for instance, already announced sales to coincide with this year’s Prime Day.

“The biggest impact right now is how much pull Black Friday will have, in keeping consumers spending within the late November time frame,” said Vivek Pandya, an analyst for Adobe Digital Insights.

Retailers for years have been trying to get a jump on holiday shopping by starting their sales early, often right around Halloween, a trend that’s typically called “Christmas creep.” The results have been mixed at best, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday remaining the juggernauts of the holiday season. But customers have a lot of reasons to shop earlier this year, especially with Prime Day arriving in mid-October. That could scramble the pacing of the entire holiday season and, at least for this year, shift tons of sales earlier than usual.

See also

• Best Prime Day 2020 deals still available
• Best Walmart deals after Prime Day: $90 off Galaxy Watch and more
• See CNET’s Early-Bird Holiday Gift Guide 2020

Added to Prime Day’s arrival in October, there are a few big reasons why shoppers are motivated to buy early this year. Supply chains remain disrupted, which is slowing down new shipments of the most sought-after products. Online sales are through the roof, adding strain on delivery networks.

Shoppers are well aware of these issues and want to make sure that they can get the items they want and make sure, too, that those things arrive in time for the holidays. That dynamic is expected to cause supply shortages in high-demand items like electronics and work-from-home gear sooner in the shopping season than usual.

“If you see them, you should pick those up,” Sara Skirboll, a shopping and trends expert for deals site RetailMeNot, said about hard-to-find items like free weights. “Come November you might not find something like that.”

Retailers are anticipating this surge in early buying, so some of the deepest discounts this season are expected to come around Prime Day, in some cases better than Black Friday or Cyber Monday, Skirboll said, “because [retailers] know they need to compete and they know that shoppers are going to be looking for deals.” 

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Black Friday and Cyber Monday are sure to be massive selling days that include plenty of deals, too. But Skirboll recommends that if you see a good deal on an item you want to buy for the holidays, just grab it and don’t wait to see if it’ll drop in price.

Adobe’s Pandya agreed that retailers looking to go big on Black Friday and Cyber Monday will face more challenges than usual this year, with customers likely exhausting some of their holiday budgets before November and shipping bottlenecks likely causing delays.

Black Friday still has huge value since customers associate the term with discounts, so Pandya said people should expect to see lots of Black Friday deals. But even those might start showing up well before the actual Black Friday comes around.

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Last year’s Amazon Prime Day TV ad featured geometric cartoon townspeople — who built their trucks, parade floats and houses out of Amazon delivery boxes — at a boisterous parade, with a liveried band showing off all the great deals on fashion, home goods and electronics. In 2020, the backdrop is a suburban neighborhood where the same fictional characters are home and socially distanced, watching a movie from a backyard projector or celebrating a new shipment of pajamas. Those on the street are wearing masks.

That’s right, even Amazonville appears to have been struck by the COVID-19 lockdown, which highlights what an entirely changed Prime Day it’ll be in 2020.

“Amazon in years past — they have been promoting Prime Day as a celebration. It was more of an uplifting tone,” said Sara Skirboll, shopping and trends expert for deals site RetailMeNot. “This year it will be different, it will be more practical — more things that people need and less things they want.”

There’s no rule book for how to throw a giant, company-invented sales event during a pandemic, but Amazon is making a go at it, with Prime Day coming on Tuesday and Wednesday. The e-tailer will have to set the right tone for a US beset by grief, social unrest and a sour economy, and a world in the grips of the novel coronavirus. Consumers will get an early jump on holiday shopping and hopefully get a chance to save on stuff they need, like work-from-home equipment, home entertainment gear and maybe even toilet paper.

It’ll be an important opportunity for Amazon to show off how it can help customers save money during an economic downturn and support small businesses on its platform — while it faces a series of antitrust investigations into the power it wields over those same small businesses.

Prime Day is also expected to be a huge moneymaker for the e-commerce juggernaut. Researcher eMarketer estimates the event will bring in $9.9 billion worldwide in just 48 hours. That would be a 43% increase from last year and would mark the biggest Prime Day yet (though that record is broken every year).

But some of the biggest beneficiaries may end up being brick-and-mortar merchants, who are pushing their own sales to coincide with Prime Day in hopes of getting a financial boost during a tough year that’s been filled with retail bankruptcies.

Changing times

The biggest change to Prime Day this year is its timing. The sale is typically held in the summer to prop up an otherwise sleepy retail season. This year it was delayed to October so Amazon could respond to a surge in online orders during the pandemic and retrofit its warehouses with new safety protocols to protect its workers.

“This will result in a different focus: de-emphasizing products for summer and back-to-school, and making the event an early lead-in to the holiday season,” said eMarketer retail analyst Andrew Lipsman.

Many retailers are expected to offer some of their lowest prices during Prime Day, RetailMeNot said, so they can get a jump on holiday sales and try to steal customers from Amazon. Walmart, Target and Best Buy have already announced Black Friday-like discounts at the same time as Prime Day, making the sale the unofficial start to holiday shopping.

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Retail experts recommend customers shop early to avoid out-of-stock items, which’ll be especially likely this year due to supply chain disruptions during the pandemic, and delivery delays due to many more online shipments.

In a nod to the difficulty of 2020, Amazon is emphasizing its social awareness so it can present Prime Day as a platform to help others and not just to sell mountains of Roombas and giant tubs of Vaseline. If you spend $10 at a small business on Amazon’s site ahead of Prime Day, the e-retailer will give you a $10 credit to spend during the sales event. Amazon is also promoting Amazon Smile, its charitable-giving feature. 

“It’s not the purpose of Prime Day,” Lipsman said of these efforts to give back. “I do think the context is very different these days and they’ll have to be conscious of that.”

See also

• Best Prime Day 2020 deals still available
• Best Walmart deals after Prime Day: $90 off Galaxy Watch and more
• See CNET’s Early-Bird Holiday Gift Guide 2020

Chris McCabe, founder of Amazon seller consultancy ecommerceChris and a former Amazon employee, said Amazon will certainly benefit from Prime Day, but he said the online seller has already seen a bump up in sales all year. Considering that, he said, Amazon doesn’t really need to throw a big sale.

“In October, people are already shopping for Christmas, so you don’t need to boost sales,” he said. “Everything has been elevated all year, all week, all month.”

Stimulus potential

Prime Day coming so close to the holidays may take some of the oomph out of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, as more customers do their holiday shopping early. But expect those holiday season sales to still be huge and provide lots of discounts.

One reason customers may want to wait to buy for the holidays is that a huge federal stimulus plan is still being negotiated and could be approved before the end of the year. The previous stimulus checks, sent to Americans in April, provided a big boost to retailers and the economy, as consumers bought up clothing, appliances, electronics and plenty more. 

Though uncertain due to a fraught election and an unpredictable president, another stimulus could, if it arrives in time, have a big impact on Black Friday, which falls on Nov. 27.

After all the sales are done and the delivery boxes are opened, here’s hoping that on Prime Day 2021 the denizens of Amazonville will be able to safely come out for another rousing, confetti-filled parade along Bezos Boulevard. But for now, enjoy the pajamas.

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Just ahead of the holiday shopping season, Walmart is making a new push into a subscription service. The concept, called Walmart Plus, launched two weeks ago and so far includes only a handful of perks. But it might someday shake up the e-commerce subscription market that’s thoroughly dominated by Amazon Prime.

Walmart is one of the very few companies that could hope to challenge Amazon, which has a 15-year headstart and boasts over 150 million members worldwide. As the biggest retailer in the world, Walmart has the resources, finances and logistics infrastructure to build out a viable Prime rival.

It’s got a very long way to go. Walmart Plus, which costs $98 a year, offers shipping as fast as same-day for orders over $35. It also offers a fuel discount and a “Scan & Go” feature that lets in-store shoppers scan and pay for items using their phones, so they can avoid the checkout line. Amazon Prime, costing $119 annually, offers one-day shipping even for orders under $10, the Prime Now rapid-delivery service, Prime Video and Prime Music streaming services.

Walmart says it’s just getting started, though some of its other attempts at subscriptions — such as the now discontinued ShippingPass and Jetblack programs — haven’t lasted.

An early test for Walmart is coming up very soon, with Amazon’s Prime Day sale  expected to encourage hordes of customers to shop online to find deals. The event is sure to bring in new Prime customers, but Walmart — which will be hosting a rival sale — may be able to bring in some new Plus customers too.

CNET spoke with Janey Whiteside, Walmart’s chief customer officer, about her company’s plans for the new service and what customers can expect going forward. Here’s the interview, edited for length and clarity:

CNET: What’s the backstory for creating Walmart Plus?Whiteside: Everybody wants more convenience in their life, and we talk a lot about how much cognitive load everybody’s got going on. Very few people get excited each week about going to the store to buy groceries and everything else that you need. We started off testing unlimited delivery last year because we saw a tremendous pickup of our pickup business, no pun intended. For those people that do one or two deliveries a month, being able to kind of bulk buy that delivery and subscribe to that was important. We started to look at what was our competitive advantage, and obviously that is the supercenters in geographic proximity to so much of America.

And then we started to layer in everything else that we hear from our customers. Fuel discounts are huge, particularly for large parts of America who rely so much on their car. One thing we hear from our customers is, “When I go to the store. I enjoy it but I’d like to be able to get out, as quickly as possible and I really don’t want to have to stand in the checkout line.” The capacity to let people get in and out and just scan their goods and leave — even more so now to do it entirely contactless — was another benefit we knew was incredibly important.

A $98 subscription may seem at odds with Walmart’s traditional mission of serving many lower-income shoppers. So who is the target audience for Walmart Plus?We feel confident that it is positioned at our core and our growing customer base. Staying true to our “everyday low price” commitment to our core customer base was incredibly important. If you’re a customer that once or twice a month wants their groceries to be delivered, it makes sense for you to enroll in Walmart Plus.   

More on e-commerce

• Walmart, Target to compete with Amazon Prime Day
• What you need to know about Walmart Plus signup
• Walmart Plus takes on Amazon Prime with $98 membership
• Amazon Prime vs. Walmart Plus: Price, free trial, delivery

What makes Walmart Plus, I think, a different membership program is one of the core tenets that we have felt very passionately about when we developed it was we would never take anything away from the core Walmart shopper who may not choose to or can not afford to enroll in Walmart Plus. And so we worked to really make sure that everything that we put in Plus was additive and that never took anything away from somebody or disadvantaged somebody who wasn’t able to enroll in the program for any reason.

Are you too late to market with this? Has Amazon Prime blanketed the market, they’re already too successful, they’re already too big?I really don’t think so. I’ve said this — I know people are like, “Oh come on” when I say it — but the reality is we really didn’t develop Plus with anything in mind but how do we create the right opportunity to get more to our Walmart customers. 

And here’s what we know more than ever: right now, that customers want groceries and things that you would get from a Walmart Supercenter, light bulbs and batteries and toilet paper and sanitizer and everything else. And right now, getting those delivered to your door so you don’t have to go out, or stand potentially in the line or mask up, is incredibly important to be able to focus on — whether it’s the homeschooling the kids or the 15 other things that we’re all trying to deal with through the pandemic.

Is there anything you can hint to about what people can expect from Walmart Plus in the future?No great membership program is static, by definition. You can expect the program to evolve and grow. Sometimes that will be in small ways, and sometimes that will mean much bigger, more headline-grabbing ways.

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Amazon’s Prime Day is finally coming. The annual sale event will be held in the US on Tuesday, Oct. 13, and Wednesday, Oct. 14, according to an internal message Amazon sent employees this week.

The message, sent Thursday, said that an official announcement from Amazon is coming Sept. 28.

CNET on Tuesday reported that Prime Day would kick off on Oct. 13, citing four people with knowledge of Amazon’s plans.

In preparation for the sale, Amazon has already blacked out vacation for its full-time warehouse workers from Oct. 13-20, according to another internal message to employees that CNET reviewed. The news fits with earlier statements from Amazon that confirmed the closely followed online event would take place in the fourth quarter.

An Amazon spokesperson on Tuesday declined to comment on the starting date. “Stay tuned for more details on Prime Day,” the spokesperson said. “Customers can also say, ‘Alexa, keep me posted on Prime Day.'”

Last year, Amazon extended Prime Day to 48 hours from 36 hours the year before. Prime Day was held in India this year Aug. 6-7.

Like just about everything else in 2020, Prime Day was impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. The sale typically takes place in mid-July as a way to boost revenue during an otherwise slow summer retail season. Amazon delayed the event, however, as the retailer struggled to retrofit its sprawling logistics operations to handle both a surge in online orders and dozens of protocols designed to keep its warehouse workers safe.

The changes delayed shipments for months. After delivery times improved, Amazon had the ability to forge ahead with Prime Day.

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Amazon will have lots of new and updated gadgets and services of its own to pitch to consumers on Prime Day. This Thursday, the company hosted its annual fall product launch, revealing a redesigned set of Echo speakers, the new Echo Show 10 smart display and an in-home security drone called the Ring Always Home Cam.

More on Amazon Prime

• Prime Day 2020: The latest updates on Amazon’s big sale
• Amazon Prime Day is coming in the fourth quarter
• Walmart Plus vs. Amazon Prime: Is grocery delivery or streaming more important?

The new dates for Prime Day alter the dynamics of the event. Many Prime customers may end up buying their holiday gifts earlier than usual because the sale will be held much closer to year’s end. Still, Amazon isn’t expected to eat into its holiday season sales by holding Prime Day so late, because its sales during the pandemic have been substantially higher than usual, and that trend isn’t expected to stop anytime soon.

Brick-and-mortar retailers, though, may see a noticeable benefit from Prime Day, since dozens of them usually promote their own discounts in parallel with the sale. This year has been especially difficult for traditional retailers, as lockdowns shuttered their locations for a chunk of the year and many customers have avoided going into stores. That’s forced many retailers into bankruptcy protection, including J.Crew, Pier 1 and JCPenney. 

Likewise, the millions of smaller merchants that list their products on Amazon should also see a boost from Prime Day.

Update, Sept. 25: Adds info on new internal message to employees that confirms Oct. 13-14 as dates for this year’s Prime Day.

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The holiday shopping season is fast approaching and Apple has begun lining up its new devices, including its latest entry-level iPad and iPad Air, which the tech giant revealed at a launch event Tuesday.

The new iPad Air gets a bigger screen, at 10.9 inches from 10.5. That bump-up in display size was made possible by removing the home button on the front of the device. Now, Touch ID to unlock the screen will be available on the top button instead. The device will switch over to a USB-C connection from Apple’s own Lightning port, a move Apple has already made with its iPad Pro and laptop line. The processor will be upgraded to the new A14 Bionic chip, from the A12 Bionic, which was introduced in 2018. Apple pitched the new processor as powerful enough to handle tasks like editing 4K video and playing graphics-intensive games.

The Air will come in five colors: silver, space gray, rose gold, green and sky blue. (The older model came in silver, space gray and gold only.) It’ll be available starting at $599 (£579, AU$899) and goes on sale next month.

iPad Air 2020

$599 at Apple

The new, eighth-generation entry-level iPad — Apple’s most popular tablet — starts at $329 (£329, AU$499) and is $299 for education customers. The 10.2-inch device, which offers the same display size and hardware design as before, will be available starting Friday. It gets the A12 Bionic chip, a boost from the 4-year-old A10 Fusion in the prior model.

iPad (8th-gen) 2020

$329 at Apple

The two updated tablets were introduced after Apple already refreshed its top-tier iPad Pro in March. Also, in recognizing the 10th anniversary of the iPad’s launch, Apple revealed it’s already sold over 500 million of the devices.

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While the iPad isn’t nearly as popular or profitable as Apple’s iPhone, it’s becoming a more critical part of Apple’s lineup during the coronavirus pandemic, with millions of customers upgrading their devices for work-from-home and remote learning setups. Showing that increased demand, the tablet market posted a huge gain in the second quarter this year, after two prior quarters of declines. The PC market has experienced a similar boost, even amid a global economic slowdown.

Apple’s fall plans

• Apple One, new iPad Air and Apple Watch 6 and SE: Everything Apple just announced
• Apple Watch Series 6 is here: All about the new health sensors, Fitness Plus and Family Setup
• iPhone 12 rumors: Apple likely to launch new 5G iPhone in October

“Now more than ever, iPad has become even more important,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said during the virtual event, “keeping us close to the ones we love when we can’t be there in person, helping students learn remotely, helping people express and share their creativity, reshaping how the world communicates. And iPad is providing a critical lifeline for doctors, nurses and patients.”

Like many companies, Apple has struggled with manufacturing and delivery delays driven by the pandemic, which has upended billions of lives around the globe. In February, before the coronavirus was widely detected in the US, Apple warned that the virus was slowing manufacturing and supplies in China. The country is a primary hub for assembling most of Apple’s devices and has struggled with manufacturing delays for the wider tech industry as well.

All these manufacturing problems mean Apple went against its typical pattern by hosting a September launch event without revealing a new iPhone. Tuesday’s event focused on iPad, Apple Watch and other products like a new Apple One services bundle. But Apple’s new phone, rumored to be called the iPhone 12, will be released “a few weeks” later than normal, Apple warned in June. The phone is expected to be unveiled in October or November instead.

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Amazon’s hiring binge in 2020 apparently isn’t done yet.

The e-retailer said Monday it’s hiring 100,000 more people in the US and Canada to work in its warehouses to help it manage the surge in online orders during the coronavirus pandemic.

The announcement comes after the e-commerce juggernaut already hired 175,000 more US warehouse workers earlier this year. Amazon last week said it’ll be holding a career day for another 33,000 job openings for tech and corporate workers.

All these thousands of job openings show how — while the broader US economy has sputtered during the pandemic — Amazon has seen huge gains thanks to millions of customers ordering more stuff online. Amazon isn’t the only online retailer seeing a boost from consumer spending, with Walmart, Etsy and many others reporting big bumps in e-commerce sales.

Amazon may end up hiring even more seasonal workers to manage the busy holiday season, too, though it hasn’t said anything about those plans yet. Last year, it hired 200,000 workers for the holiday season.

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Just a few days after announcing a new drone delivery program in North Carolina, Walmart is at it again. The company on Monday said it’s working with Zipline to test deliveries of health and wellness supplies in Arkansas, near its Bentonville headquarters.

The new trial comes after Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, teamed up with another drone operator, Flytrex, to do deliveries in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Zipline started operating in 2016, helping deliver medical supplies in Rwanda.

The Zipline project is slated to start early next year and may eventually include general merchandise deliveries too. If the program is successful, Walmart will look to expand it, Tom Ward, Walmart’s senior vice president of customer product, said in a statement Monday.

These two new pilot projects, though small to start with, show that Walmart is looking to become a more significant player in drone deliveries, alongside companies including Alphabet, Amazon and UPS. There’s still a lot of regulatory work to make drone deliveries a mainstream service, and Walmart’s increased interest — though encouraging for the drone industry — isn’t likely to speed up that process.

The Arkansas program could be especially useful during the coronavirus pandemic to help people get the items they need quickly and without having to visit stores. The few drone and robot-powered services that are currently available in the US are already seeing spikes in demand during the health crisis.

Ward said the Arkansas deliveries can serve a 50-mile radius and will arrive in less than an hour. UPS in November announced a similar test run, using a Matternet drone to deliver medical prescriptions from a CVS to two locations in North Carolina.

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Walmart is getting into drone deliveries, kicking off a pilot project Wednesday in North Carolina to ship groceries and household items through the air.

The big box retailer teamed up with drone delivery company Flytrex to run the program so it can build up its experience on shipping and packing orders using drones. The announcement comes about a week after Amazon gained approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to operate its drone delivery program more broadly.

Walmart hasn’t been a big player in drones so far, but it’s shown interest in the technology, having filed dozens of patents for drones and testing out drones to move around inventory within its warehouses.

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The concept of drone or robot delivery has gained traction especially during the coronavirus pandemic, with many customers avoiding going into stores and looking for contactless shopping options. That’s already resulted in demand gains for Alphabet’s Wing pilot drone project in Virginia and the startup Starship’s sidewalk drones.

There’s still an enormous amount of regulatory work to be done to make drones mainstream, so customers shouldn’t expect to see regular drone deliveries nationwide anytime soon. If drones do start to grow in importance, Walmart will have to catch up to Amazon, Alphabet and UPS, which have all been working on drone delivery concepts already.

The Walmart pilot, which will be in Fayetteville, North Carolina, is the second test program connecting Flytrex and Walmart. In April, Flytrex set up a drone delivery hub by a Walmart in Grand Forks, North Dakota, that can deliver groceries from that store to customers’ backyards.

Walmart has also tested out automated car deliveries with the companies Nuro, Ford and Gatik.

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