A decade ago, Walmart’s WMT -3.09%decrease; red down pointing triangle thousands of stores across the country made it look like a dinosaur in the online-shopping era. Now the retail giant is mounting one of the few serious challenges to Amazon.com’s AMZN -0.72%decrease; red down pointing triangle dominance in e-commerce, and those very stores are central to its strategy.
A Walmart worker picks items for an online order. CREDIT: Josephine Chu and Kaitlyn Wang/WSJ
Walmart delivered five billion items on the same day they were ordered last year, double the number delivered in 2023. It can now deliver most of the 120,000 products in its sprawling supercenters, including meat, eggs and milk, to 93% of U.S. households the same day, sometimes in hours.
Amazon doesn’t release figures that allow an exact comparison of its same-day delivery reach. But Walmart’s sprawling delivery network, which in some areas is faster than Amazon’s, represents a leap that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
“I am very, very grateful that we have 4,700, roughly, stores,” which now double as fast-delivery hubs, John Furner, chief executive of Walmart U.S., said in an interview. “It’s something that perhaps a few years ago people would not have expected we would have been able to deliver at scale.”
To make most of those speedy deliveries, the retailer relies on thousands of freelance drivers using a system called Spark, created by Walmart, which uses an app to coordinate online orders from its fleet of superstores.
About 41% of all U.S. e-commerce sales go through Amazon, a much bigger share than Walmart’s 9%. Amazon could overtake Walmart this year as the country’s largest company by revenue if sales trends persist. Walmart reported $681 billion revenue in 2024; Amazon’s was $638 billion.
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