Walmart has begun testing whether shelves in the back rooms of its stores can be used to stage same-day delivery of third-party merchandise, a move aimed at expanding how customers receive marketplace items. The test was reported Sunday, April 19, and is already under way at several stores in Dallas.
Manish Joneja said the company will start “in a few markets” with “a select assortment of marketplace items through the pickup and delivery experience customers already know and love,” adding that it is “an intentional test that will help us learn and scale over time.” The shift matters because most of Walmart’s online sales still come from first-party merchandise, even as the company pushes harder into marketplace growth.
That push has been building for years. Walmart launched its online marketplace in 2009, and the company now says that marketplace revenues are rising by around 20% each year, with home, hardlines and fashion growing at more than 30%. John David Rainey has said those are “areas that we’ve been a little weaker in on a relative basis,” and has described the assortment expansion as “a great opportunity” to improve the general merchandise mix.
The numbers also show why the effort is getting attention now. eMarketer data cited in the report put U.S. sales on Walmart’s marketplace platform at less than $14 billion last year, while Walmart’s total net sales were $483 billion. Amazon’s U.S. marketplace sales were $333 billion last year, underscoring the gap Walmart is trying to close as it leans more heavily on delivery speed and assortment.
The Dallas pilot fits a familiar pattern for the company. The city has served as a test space for new Walmart technology in the past, and the current experiment appears designed to challenge Amazon’s same-day delivery for third-party sellers without forcing Walmart to remake its stores all at once. Supercenters typically carry roughly 120,000 individual products on the sales floor, so the back-room staging test gives the company a way to broaden what it can offer without crowding the aisles.
There is also a customer story behind the corporate one. PYMNTS Intelligence research found that 56% of online grocery shoppers under high financial stress made their most recent purchase at Walmart, compared with 50% of low-stress shoppers. In stores, the split was 37% for high-stress shoppers and 26% for low-stress shoppers, a sign that Walmart’s scale and price position already give it a deep hold on routine purchases. The new delivery test suggests the company wants that same habit to extend further into marketplace goods, not just groceries and first-party items. For Wmt stock investors, the question is whether Walmart can turn that reach into a broader and more profitable online engine without losing the speed advantage that made the test worth trying in the first place.
