How Walmart is building its last-mile delivery service GoLocal to compete with Amazon
Walmart is ramping up GoLocal, the white-label home delivery service it launched three and a half years ago, as it looks to compete with the likes of Amazon.
GoLocal’s services are now available to even more customers, thanks to a new partnership with IBM that integrates GoLocal into IBM’s order management system. Meanwhile, GoLocal now caters to 10 different retail verticals, from beauty to home goods to sporting goods, Rina Hurst, vp of Walmart GoLocal, told Modern Retail. GoLocal declined to divulge how many retailers it works with today, but it’s made 30 million deliveries since its debut in 2021 — a 150% increase from the 12 million it cited in November 2023. “We continue to see growth,” Hurst said.
Walmart launched GoLocal in August 2021 as a “delivery-as-a-service business.” At the time, Walmart said that deliveries would be handled by Walmart associates, gig workers and, occasionally, other delivery companies. Its first partner was Home Depot, which uses GoLocal for same-day and next-day delivery and delivery for big and bulky items. GoLocal’s list of partners now includes 1-800 Flowers, Books-A-Million, Hibbett, Sur La Table, UrbanStem and Sally Beauty.
“We’re seeing all industries grow,” Hurst said. “There hasn’t been one industry that hasn’t come and asked us about [our delivery services]. It’s across the board. It could be ship-from-store. It could be same-day delivery. There’s all kinds of use cases.”
Walmart is looking to grow its B-to-B delivery service at the same time that it’s trying to catch up to one of its biggest last-mile rivals, Amazon. In 2022, Amazon overtook UPS and FedEx as the top delivery company in the U.S., per the Wall Street Journal. In 2023, Amazon Logistics processed 5.9 billion U.S. delivery orders, the equivalent of 16.16 million delivery orders per day, according to Capital One Shopping.
Still, while Amazon is a leader in last-mile delivery, Walmart is going after a different market with GoLocal. Amazon mostly services its own merchants from its e-commerce platform. Walmart, however, is offering last-mile delivery to retailers that either don’t have the resources to build out last-mile networks or don’t want to rely on traditional carriers.
It’s a chaotic time for the last-mile delivery sector at large. Last week, UPS announced that it plans to cut its Amazon shipping volumes by more than half by late 2026. The U.S. Postal Service stopped completing final delivery for UPS shipments under SurePost, UPS’ low-cost shipping service. UPS Mail Innovations, which provides high-volume mailing services, hiked its rates by 25% as of Jan. 1.
Further complicating matters, new U.S. tariffs on China — home to Temu and Shein — could have “widespread impacts on certain carrier networks,” said Matthew Hertz, founder and CEO of Third Person, an AI-powered platform helping brands discover and connect with fulfillment partners.
Compared to a few years ago, last-mile delivery is “changing very quickly,” Hertz told Modern Retail. At the same time that companies like Walmart have upped their focus on last-mile, new players have entered the space. These include UniUni, Veho, OSM, Roadie and ACI.
In some reassurance to industry giants, these companies represent a “small share” of total U.S. parcel volume, Hertz said. “USPS, FedEx, UPS and Amazon control the market, and I suspect their total market share will remain relatively consistent,” he said. The rest that is up for grabs “will trade hands amongst these smaller players,” Hertz predicted.
Walmart GoLocal is hoping that its large physical footprint and network of 16,000 pickup points will help it stand out from a growing batch of competitors. Walmart has 4,700 stores, and many are within short range of a GoLocal retail partner — meaning that if a retailer has an order it wants to send out, there’s a good chance Walmart will have a delivery route nearby.
“We’re already servicing Walmart stores, and then we can just go next door, pick up the order and go deliver that, as well,” GoLocal’s Hurst said. Some of Hibbett’s stores, for instance, are located in the same parking lot as a Walmart. That allowed GoLocal to “win the business [Hibbett] from an incumbent,” Hurst shared.
Walmart GoLocal is also using new technology like artificial intelligence to optimize routes for its Spark drivers, independent contractors who deliver orders for Walmart and other businesses by using the Spark Driver app. The new routes have allowed GoLocal to triple Sally Beauty’s volume, “and we’re seeing those operational metrics stay consistent,” Hurst said.
Meanwhile, a consumer electronics company, which Walmart declined to name, achieved nearly 100% on-time delivery with GoLocal, which helped the business decrease its order cancellations and returns. GoLocal’s on-time delivery rate for same-day delivery stands at 98.5%.
Last-mile delivery has come a long way from 2020 when the logistics industry was under stress from an influx of e-commerce orders during the pandemic. DoorDash and Uber, for instance, now offer their own white-label delivery services to retailers. Drones are being deployed for last-mile because they can avoid traffic and navigate tight spaces. And, consumers today expect a variety of delivery choices, including two-to-three-day delivery, one-to-two-day delivery and same-day delivery.
“I think retailers have really started to be strategic about the value prop they offer,” GoLocal’s Hurst said. “[They know,] ‘Hey, if [customers] want this urgently, like in the next hour, we can charge a premium for that. But if they want it by end-of-day or tomorrow, we can think about how we build lifetime value with those customers.'”