Walmart and Postmates Team Up for Grocery Delivery

Retailer can now reach 40% of U.S. food shoppers with delivery service.

April 27, 2018

BENTONVILLE, Ark. – Walmart and home delivery service Postmates have partnered up to join the explosion of online grocery shopping. Walmart already has partnerships with Uber and Deliv in a few markets like Dallas, Denver, Phoenix and Orlando but the new initiative gives the retailer the capability to reach nearly 40% of U.S. food shoppers through personal shopping and at-home delivery offerings.

The service will kick off in Charlotte, North Carolina and expand to 100 metro areas this year. Consumers must purchase a minimum of $30 and will be charged a $9.95 delivery fee. Postmates already has 160,000 trained couriers, but Walmart is putting its personal shopping employees through a three-week training program.

“With this partnership and its continued rollout of its ‘personal shoppers,’ Walmart is attempting to address one of the specific pain points of grocery delivery; the inability to pick your own produce and meats,” says Matt Sargent, Senior Vice President of Retail at research firm Magid. Considering 68% of Walmart customers say that the ability to touch and feel food items is important to them, it’s an important focal point when training personal shoppers.

The new partnership offers delivery services in 800 Walmart locations around the country. But a Retail Pulse study by Magid found that only 10% of Walmart customers are frequent buyers of online groceries. That compares to 31% of Whole Foods consumers and 19% of Target consumers, so time will tell if they can climb the delivery charts with a bigger reach.

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