Walmart Expands Delivery Unlimited, Solidifies Online Grocery

Walmart Inc. (NYSE:WMT) focuses on strengthening its grocery delivery game. This is evident from its latest plan to extend Delivery Unlimited to 1,400 stores by this fall. Delivery Unlimited, which is a Grocery Delivery membership plan, was introduced in Houston, Salt Lake City, Tampa and Miami earlier this year.

With Delivery Unlimited, customers can avail unlimited Grocery Delivery orders from Walmart by paying membership fees of $98 annually or $12.95 monthly. Further, it offers customers a free fifteen-day trial. However, customers without memberships can continue to avail Grocery Delivery by paying per-delivery charges.

Delivery Unlimited is likely to add a feather to Walmart’s cap by prioritizing consumers’ convenience and helping them save costs. With the expansion of Grocery Delivery, Delivery Unlimited is also anticipated to expand. The service is currently available in about 3,000 Walmart stores. The company had earlier stated that it expects to have roughly 3,100 grocery pickup locations and about 1,600 grocery delivery locations by the end of fiscal 2020.

Grocery Delivery on Track

We believe that the expansion of Delivery Unlimited will serve as yet another move by Walmart to keep pace with the evolving retail landscape. The company has long been making bold e-commerce efforts to counter Amazon’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) growing dominance and stay firm amid other retailers like Target (NYSE:TGT) and Kroger (NYSE:KR) .

Talking of e-commerce, the company is making aggressive efforts to expand in the booming online grocery space, which has long been a major contributor to its e-commerce sales. To this end, the big-box retailer is committed to enriching consumer experience by providing easy shopping methods and seamless grocery deliveries. In line with this, Walmart recently joined hands with Point Pickup, Skipcart, AxleHire and Roadie. These are anticipated to strengthen its online grocery delivery service in four states, with plans of further expansion in the days ahead.

Earlier, Walmart had inked a deal with Postmates to extend its online grocery delivery service to cover more than 40% of the families in the United States. Other than this, the company’s contract with DoorDash and acquisition of Parcel highlight its focus on enhancing grocery sales. Further, the Walmart Pickup program enables customers to place orders online and pick them up at a store for free. The company also partnered with ride-hailing services Uber (NYSE:UBER) and Lyft (NASDAQ:LYFT) for speedy online grocery deliveries, while it tested same-day delivery with Deliv.

We believe these actions will help Walmart offer multiple choices to online grocery shoppers amid increasing competition from Amazon. Also, such efforts along with its other omnichannel strategies have helped this Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) company rally 23.4% in a year compared with the industry’s growth of nearly 19%. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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