Liz Young of The Wall Street Journal reports that Walmart’s new services for third-party sellers take a page from Amazon’s fulfillment operation. Young writes:
Walmart is extending its competition with Amazon.com deeper into the logistics arena by opening its fulfillment services to merchants who want to fill orders from customers on platforms outside the retailer’s own marketplace.
Walmart said third-party sellers will soon be able to use Walmart’s warehousing, delivery and returns services to fill orders placed on platforms beyond Walmart’s website, including Target, Etsy and even Amazon.
The country’s largest retailer by revenue said it would also start offering to handle imports on behalf of merchants from ports of origin in Asia to Walmart’s U.S. distribution centers, and will offer sellers access to less-than-truckload and full-truckload shipments at discounted rates. […]
The new services, part of its Walmart Fulfillment Services division, will launch Sept. 10. Walmart said it would fulfill online orders placed through other platforms using plain brown boxes rather than Walmart-branded packaging.
The services mark a step beyond the marketplace model that Walmart has started operating in competition with Amazon’s online sales channel. The marketplace strategy expands the goods available on the retailer’s website to items outside Walmart’s own inventories.
The company’s U.S. marketplace sales jumped 32% in the quarter ended July 26 compared with the previous year, the fourth consecutive quarter where marketplace sales grew by more than 30%. […]
“The unutilized capacity that they have is a waste,” Ellram said. “Anything that they can cover of capacity that they’re not using is a benefit.”
Walmart said it also plans to launch a service called Walmart LocalFinds this fall in Atlanta and Dallas that will offer pickup and delivery through third-party sellers’ physical stores. For example, a customer will be able to search for fresh flowers through the Walmart website and see search results that include local florists offering same-day pickup and delivery through Walmart’s Spark last-mile delivery driver network.
Read more here.
