Walmart employees can now deliver shoppers’ orders

Walmart.com and Jet.com shoppers across three US cities now may see deliveries of their orders effected by Walmart employees rather than one of the major shipping companies like FedEx or UPS or a delivery start-up like Instacart or Deliv.

"Unlike crowdsourced delivery, where the driver has to travel (often out of the way) to pick up the package, then drive the full distance to deliver it, our associates are starting at the same place as the packages," said Marc Lore, president and CEO of Walmart eCommerce US, in a blog post for the retailer. The payment system worked through a proprietary app which was built by the retailer for this test.

The app matched order delivery addresses with the driving routes of employees from work to home, and was built to minimise any more driving than what the employees would do anyway to get home. Delivering was completely voluntary, and the employees could choose when they wanted to deliver, how many packages they could take and their size.

"Once they're done working at the store for the day, they pick up the packages from the backroom, load them into their vehicle, enter the delivery addresses into the GPS on their phone and head towards home," Lore said.

According to Walmart executives, the idea was to cut costs on the so-called last-mile of deliveries, when packages were driven to customers' homes, often the most expensive part of the fulfillment process.

''It just makes sense: We already have trucks moving orders from fulfillment centers to stores for pickup,'' Lore said in a blog post on Thursday afternoon. ''Those same trucks could be used to bring ship-to-home orders to a store close to their final destination, where a participating associate can sign up to deliver them to the customer's house.''