Mark your calendars: Wednesday, July 15, the two largest online retailers are going to slug it out. Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) said last week that Wednesday is “Prime Day” and the company plans to offer sales prices to its Prime customers who pay $99 a year for a membership that includes free two-day shipping and access to Prime Instant Video among other benefits. Amazon promises “more deals than Black Friday.”

And in the other corner, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) announced Monday morning, well, nothing new really. In a blog post, Fernando Madeira, president and CEO of Walmart.com, said that the website will be “kicking off some awesome deals this week” and that consumers don’t have to pay “hidden costs or admission fees” to get Walmart’s low prices. Madeira wrote:

Our customers will see thousands of great deals on Rollback beginning this week along with some special atomic deals (more on that in the days to come). In addition, we’re rolling back our free shipping minimum order to $35 from $50, making it even easier for customers to save on shipping all summer long.

When Amazon announced its Prime Day last week, we wondered if Amazon might be trying to boost its efforts to encourage consumers to use Amazon more often for more things.

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The larger story, of course, is the continuing threat that Amazon poses for Wal-Mart. As of May, Amazon sites were the fourth-most visited in the United States, with 182.62 million unique visitors for the month. Wal-Mart ranked 22nd, with 86 million unique visitors. That is not very close, obviously, but Wal-Mart is the only traditional retailer among the top 50 Web properties. Wal-Mart intends to spend between $1.2 billion and $1.5 billion to grow their online business this year.

Wal-Mart cannot afford to let Amazon get away unchecked and to continue to add benefits to its Prime membership. Wal-Mart even felt it had to lower its free shipping minimum to the same that Amazon’s $35 minimum for non-Prime members to get free (slow) shipping. The big question about Wal-Mart’s plans is whether $1.5 billion is going to get the job done.

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