Dive Brief:
- Walmart will offer its store fulfillment technology and local delivery services to other retailers on Salesforce Commerce Cloud, the companies announced Thursday.
- Both Walmart GoLocal, the retailer’s same-day delivery offering, and Walmart Commerce Technologies Store Assist, which helps optimize in-store fulfillment, will be available through Salesforce AppExchange in the spring, Walmart executive Anshu Bhardwaj said during a conference call.
- "With the help of Salesforce, we are packaging everything a retailer could need to manage local fulfillment and delivery," said Bhardwaj, senior vice president of technology strategy and commercialization at Walmart Global Technology. She declined to provide specifics on customer pricing.
Dive Insight:
The partnership will help retailers better serve customers in the omnichannel era, Walmart and Salesforce executives said on the call. It also provides greater access to more cost-effective local fulfillment and delivery solutions they couldn’t develop themselves.
“Most retailers, if you're not Walmart, are not standing up your own organic fulfillment or local delivery system," said Rob Garf, Salesforce vice president and general manager of retail.
When supply chain congestion and tight delivery capacity ran rampant during the pandemic, large companies like Walmart flexed their financial muscle, technological capabilities and robust logistics infrastructure to combat the issues. They also leveraged these advantages to create new lines of business — GoLocal began in 2021, while Commerce Technologies launched about a year ago.
Although both Walmart GoLocal and Commerce Technologies’ Store Assist are already offered independently, the ease of access provided by the Salesforce partnership is positioned to drive increased activity for both, as thousands of different websites are powered by Commerce Cloud.
GoLocal is pining for volume growth in the competitive same-day delivery sector. The white-label service surpassed 1 million deliveries prior to its one-year anniversary last August and has targeted a mix of retail chains like The Home Depot and local businesses.
"End consumers will be able to get the same delivery experience from Walmart GoLocal as today," said Harsit Patel, vice president and general manager of Walmart GoLocal, of the Salesforce partnership. "The difference is how the retailer would access that experience and enable it."
Store Assist should also see a jump in usage. The same technology powering Store Assist has allowed Walmart to fulfill more than 830 million orders since July 2019 across 4,700-plus stores, according to Bhardwaj. It "essentially turns any store into a fulfillment center," leveraging a location's footprint to service more customers in different ways, she added.
