Walmart Delivers 20% of Same-Day Orders Within 3 Hours

Glenn Taylor
4 min read
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Walmart keeps pushing the limit on same-day delivery.

Over the past 12 months, Walmart’s U.S. division delivered 4.4 billion items either same-day or next-day, with about 20 percent of those delivered in under three hours, said Walmart CEO Doug McMillon during the retail giant’s earnings call Thursday morning.

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“Delivery times are getting faster, and the cost of delivery is coming down at the same time,” McMillon said, an observation that mirrors the recent success of Amazon since regionalizing its fulfillment network. Walmart now offers same-day delivery out of more than 6,500 stores worldwide.

In the first quarter, Walmart saw an almost 900 basis point improvement in one of its internal customer service metrics partly because of the delivery execution, called a “perfect order” score.

“We grade ourselves by a perfect order,” said John David Rainey, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Walmart. “And what a perfect order is for us is when you come to our virtual store online, do you find the things that you want? Do we have to replace those? Is it delivered when we say it will be delivered?”

Across the board, Walmart has been kicking delivery into overdrive. In March, the company introduced on-demand early morning delivery to customer doorsteps as early as 7 a.m. and as quickly as 30 minutes.

The company has also managed to expand its drone delivery capabilities, revealing in January that it expanded the program to cover up to 75 percent of the Dallas-Fort Worth population. The move firmly establishes Walmart as having the largest drone delivery footprint of any U.S. retailer, including stores across more than 30 towns and municipalities in the DFW metroplex. On-demand drone delivery providers Wing and Zipline are the two companies powering the expansion.

Over the past two years trialing drone delivery, Walmart says it has completed over 20,000 safe deliveries.

“Our delivery business has now exceeded our pick-up business in size and the run rate remains strong,” said John Furner, president and CEO, Walmart U.S., in the call.

The evolving delivery capabilities come as Walmart continues to see high growth in its U.S. e-commerce business, which grew at a 22 percent clip in the first quarter. The strong quarter was highlighted by 6 percent revenue growth to $161.5 billion and net income of $5.1 billion.

Delivery milestones aren’t just occurring in the U.S. Same-day delivery orders in India grew at Flipkart by over 150 percent in the quarter and is now available across 20 major cities. Walmart also highlighted that 55 million orders in China were delivered in one hour, while 60 percent of e-commerce orders are delivered in the same day in Chile.

Walmart’s logistics network continues to see strides in automation, with McMillon saying in the call that the implementation of automated storage and retrieval systems within Walmart’s distribution centers and fulfillment centers “is on track.”

After a 16-month proof of concept, Walmart rolled out 19 autonomous forklifts from Fox Robotics across four of its high-tech DCs. According to Maurice Gray, the general manager of Walmart’s distribution center in Brooksville, Fla., the retailer will expand the pilot pending an evaluation of their benefits.

Gray said the FoxBot autonomous forklifts complement the automated storage and retrieval system—which catalogues and stores the goods—and are designed to fully automate the warehouse loading dock.

FoxBot’s proprietary AI and machine learning system can enable the forklifts to make decisions on detecting pallet locations, stabilizing picked loads and loading and unloading pallets—all of which can help avoid product damages commonly caused by manual forklifts.

The retail giant is continuing to bolster its warehousing network across the board, with the company opening its long-awaited fourth high-tech fulfillment center, a 1.5 million square-foot1.5 million square-foot facility in Greencastle, Pa.

The warehouse is built to double the storage capacity of a traditional Walmart fulfillment center, and also double the number of customer orders able to be fulfilled in a day.

The fulfillment center will serve customers and Walmart+ members in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey, giving them access to next- or two-day shipping. It is expected to require 1,000 employees.

With the new fulfillment center opening, Walmart is closing another facility in Pedrickstown, N.J. in June. While the locations are approximately 170 miles apart, Walmart is offering a $7,500 bonus, plus relocation, to those associates willing to make the move.

America’s largest retailer has already opened three next-generation fulfillment centers in Joliet, Ill.; Lancaster, Texas; and McCordsville, Ind.; and expects to open a fifth iteration in Stockton, Calif. in 2026.

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