It’s hard to overstate Amazon’s online retail dominance. With 76 percent market share of online retail, it’s as if the 1995–96 Chicago Bulls entered your local rec league. No one can challenge Amazon today, but a newly announced partnership between Google and Walmart—allowing you to order groceries from the latter with Google Assistant, or online via Google Express, starting in late September—may ultimately present a threat. Still, it's a long-term long shot.

In Walmart, Google adds a retail behemoth to its Google Express service, an online shopping bazaar in need of an anchor. In Google, Walmart gains a foothold in the voice-enabled future of commerce. Whether the alliance ultimately pays off is almost beside the point; the alternative was watching Amazon pull further and further ahead.

Raise Your Voice

Here’s a vision for the future that Walmart and Google are banking on: You realize it’s time for a grocery run. Rather than hop in the car and head to the store, or tap through items on your smartphone, you simply say, “OK Google, order my groceries.” And that’s it. Your preloaded list of frequently ordered items shows up later that day or the next, depending on where you live, or will await you curbside at a nearby Walmart.

You can already pull off a version of this, as any Amazon Echo ad will tell you. In reality, though, it remains an untapped avenue for purchases.

“Everybody’s trying to get into virtual assistants, what we call conversational commerce. They’re banking on the fact that people are trying to do this even though they really don’t presently,” says Krista Garcia, a retail analyst with eMarketer, which tracks the ecommerce space.

Voice-enabled purchases may amount to as little as $250 million per year, says Jason Goldberg, SVP of digital marketing company SapientRazorfish. That's a tiny sliver of the $390 billion ecommerce market last year, according to eMarketer. Walmart’s total revenue in its most recent fiscal year was $485.9 billion.

The biggest reason: It's a shoddy experience. “The majority of products people buy are inconvenient to buy via voice,” SapientRazorfish's Goldberg says. “There’s variance in sizes, configurations, payment operations.” Amazon Echo or Google Home can offer up its best guess if you ask for paper towels. But if it guesses wrong, you’re left with a game of 20 questions: How many rolls? Which brand? Single sheet or select-a-size? Repeat that for every item, and you see why most people would rather pull out their phones, or track down their laptop, or bang their head against the nearest countertop.

You have to get it right the first time. Otherwise, there’s little point to using voice at all.

Amazon has a decent shot at this, given how deeply it understands your purchase history. Google? Not so much, at least not before the Walmart deal. Google Express already partners with some big names—including Costco and Walgreens—but has such a negligible market share that it can’t reliably know what you want, when you want it.

Walmart helps on two fronts. First, it offers an “Easy Reorder” feature that lets customers pick up their go-to groceries with one click—or in this case, one breath. The partnership also offers an even more important benefit to Google: data. If a Walmart customer links an account with Google Express, Google will gain access to their purchase history—primarily online orders, but in some cases in-store shopping as well. And that means fewer questions about just what kind of paper towel to order.

‘White Space’

In their battle with Amazon, Google and Walmart are trying to exploit their toeholds in two unsettled arenas: digital assistants, and groceries.