Walmart to Offer Logistics Outside Its Own Marketplace Sales

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. 

Manish Joneja, the company’s senior vice president of U.S. marketplace and Walmart Fulfillment Services, said the efforts are meant to help sellers handle the complicated and expensive logistics of importing and transporting goods as well as fulfilling online orders for delivery to customers.

“If I’m a seller, I want to focus on my product. I want to focus on my customer. I need help with logistics, supply chain, different elements,” Joneja said. 

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%.

Adding logistics services for vendors gives Walmart a way to better control the home-delivery experience for customers ordering products off the retailer’s website. 

The efforts echo the strategy undertaken by Amazon, which has said more than 60% of sales on its website are for goods sold by outside sellers. Amazon, which is threatening to overtake Walmart as the country’s largest retailer overall, operates its Fulfillment by Amazon warehousing and shipping service for third-party merchants alongside its own retail listings. 

The e-commerce giant in September 2023 added an end-to-end logistics service, called Supply Chain by Amazon, that is designed to give businesses a single place to manage all their logistics and leverage Amazon’s delivery structure to fulfill orders through any online platform. 

Taking over outside vendors’ logistics requires additional warehouse capacity, which Walmart’s Joneja said the company has after building out its logistics network in recent years to add more automation. “We have ample space available,” he said.

Lisa Ellram, a supply-chain professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, said offering logistics services gives retailers a way to earn revenue on extra space they have available. 

“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.

Write to Liz Young at liz.young@wsj.com