In This Article:
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.
More from Sourcing Journal
-
Amazon Teamsters, Labor Groups Back Legislators' New Warehouse Safety Bill
-
Walmart Refutes Calls for Change Over Equal Pay and Employee Safety
“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.