Walmart taking on Amazon with same-day delivery pilot

Walmart is teaming up with a few third-party partners — including two names very familiar to consumers — to take on its biggest rival in the competitive in the area of online delivery.



As part of its growing efforts to compete with Amazon, the discount titan will launch pilots of grocery deliveries using the Uber and Lyft ride-hailing services from Walmart stores in Denver and one other unidentified market by mid-June. Walmart also revealed it has been running a pilot of “last mile” grocery and general merchandise deliveries with Deliv in Miami-area Sam’s Club stores since March.



Walmart has been piloting its own same-day grocery and general merchandise delivery service in the Denver and San Jose markets, and also offers curbside grocery pickup in many areas. However, these pilots show a renewed emphasis on effectively offering the type of same-day delivery convenience for which Amazon is famous.



Unlike the Amazon same-day delivery model, which relies upon Prime Now membership, the Walmart and Sam’s Club pilots do not require any additional membership fee. Instead, customers pay a $7-$10 delivery fee at time of purchase when they select “same-day delivery” at checkout.



In all the pilots, customers are notified of the third-party service being used to deliver their items, and no fee will be charged by the driver. Personal Walmart shoppers prepare the orders, which are then fulfilled by the delivery service.



In an interview with Chain Store Age, Daphne Carmeli, founder and CEO of Deliv, offered her company’s perspective on the Sam’s Club pilot.

“We got a call from Walmart and are pretty excited to be working with the biggest retailer in the world,” said Carmeli. “It’s amazing the effect the ‘A-word,’ Amazon, is having on the e-commerce landscape. They have created a customer expectation of same-day delivery. It’s the new standard. If you’re selling physical goods to customers you’ve got to figure out a way to get them to customers as quickly as possible.”



Sam’s Club customers select same-day delivery and a time window, and then make payment, through the Sam’s Club site or app. They never directly interact with Deliv online, although they do get access to a visual map that will show them where their driver is and estimated time of delivery.



Carmeli outlined what she sees as the differences between delivery specialists like her company and transportation providers such as Uber and Lyft.



“We lay down the pipes for pickup and delivery,” said Carmeli. “Moving people and packages is very different. We might send one driver for 20 deliveries. An on-demand service like Uber or Lyft will send 20 drivers for 20 deliveries. It’s a different logistical problem than scheduled delivery.”



Walmart has offered its own versions of everything from Amazon Prime Day to Amazon Prime to free cloud hosting to shipping drones. This latest effort is another sign Walmart is not going to simply accept Amazon’s dominance of the e-commerce space.



While Walmart may never match Amazon’s assortment, it has the decided advantage of thousands of stores that can serve as highly localized fulfillment centers. If the discounter can make the economics and logistics of same-day delivery from stores work with a little outside help, it will be one battle in the Amazon war it can win.