Catenaa, Sunday, April 19, 2026- Walmart is opening a new lane in its race with Amazon for speedy e-commerce delivery, carving out back rooms of stores to hold merchandise for sellers on its digital marketplace.
The Financial Times said that the largest US retailer’s marketplace platform carries about half a billion items offered by third-party sellers.
The sellers retain ownership of the items until they are sold and pay sales commissions and shipping fees to Walmart.
Third-party sellers typically keep their items on their own premises or in Walmart-owned warehouses. Most deliveries from Walmart’s warehouses take one or two days, while direct shipments from sellers can be slower.
Walmart is now testing the use of shelves in the back rooms of stores as staging areas for delivering third-party merchandise in an effort to deliver them on the same day to customers, according to people familiar with the initiative.
The move is a challenge to Amazon, the e-commerce leader, which offers third-party sellers delivery as fast as the same day through its order fulfilment service.
Walmart’s experiments are underway at several stores in Dallas, the Texas city it has often used as a proving ground for new technologies, a person with knowledge of the tests said. “Starting in a few markets, we’ll soon be offering a select assortment of marketplace items through the pick-up and delivery experience customers already know and love. It’s an intentional test that will help us learn and scale over time,” said Manish Joneja, senior vice-president of Walmart US Marketplace and Walmart Fulfillment Services.
The majority of Walmart’s online sales consist of first-party merchandise, or items in its own inventory. The sales floors of its Supercenter stores typically carry about 120,000 individual products, including groceries, clothes, and electronics.
Walmart launched its online marketplace in 2009. Revenues are growing at about 20 per cent a year, John David Rainey, chief financial officer, said at an industry conference last week.
But US sales on Walmart’s marketplace platform were less than $14 billion last year, according to eMarketer, a fraction of Walmart US’s $483 billion in total net sales.
More than a third of ecommerce orders delivered from its stores come in less than three hours. The use of store back rooms to warehouse third-party merchandise is made possible by recent changes across Walmart’s supply chain.
The company has been automating warehouse operations so that its own merchandise arrives in stores bundled, ready to go straight to shopping aisles.
That has freed up some space in back rooms for third-party merchandise. Walmart is using AI to help identify which items to warehouse in back rooms and in stores. The assortment in each location may vary depending on local demand.
“Walmart relies heavily on stores to fulfil orders. Now, that means that it can only rapidly fulfil orders for what’s available in its stores. And those are the items that it carries, generally not the marketplace items,” Sky Canaves, an analyst at eMarketer told The Financial Times.
Bringing marketplace inventory into store back rooms could speed delivery for those items, “but that space is limited, and it needs to serve the needs of the customers who are shopping in stores as well,” she said.
