For many years, Amazon had a massive infrastructure lead over Walmart. The online company often plunged its profits back into building its shipping and warehousing network — at first to deliver two-day shipping and later to offer, in many cases, one-day delivery.
That’s something Walmart clearly opted to fix back in 2016, when it decided to spend $3.3 billion to acquire Marc Lore’s Jet.com. As part of the move, Lore, a digital pioneer who also sold Diapers.com to Amazon, took over the chain’s digital and infrastructure operations.
“The acquisition will build on and complement the significant foundation already in place to serve customers across the Walmart app, site, and stores and position the company for even faster e-commerce growth in the future by expanding customer reach and adding new capabilities,” the company shared in a press release.
Those efforts worked, and you can now argue that Walmart’s delivery ability now rivals Amazon’s.
Walmart leaned on its stores
Lore helped shift the mindset at Walmart from being a brick-and-mortar store to being an omnichannel retailer. He talked about those changes during a 2019 Walmart shareholders’ meeting.
“Today, they [customers] have so many options to save money AND time. They can shop in our stores, order online and pick it up…OR they can get free 2-day delivery to their door,” he said.
Lore also laid out future plans for the chain.
“But, we’re not stopping there. A few weeks ago we announced NextDay delivery. It allows customers to quickly receive up to two hundred thousand of our top items. The incredible thing is, it costs us less to deliver orders the next day, because items come from a single fulfillment center located near the customer, and orders arrive in one box,” he added.
Now, seven years later, Walmart’s current executives shared just how far the chain has come during its fourth-quarter earnings call.
Walmart has become a digital player
Walmart leveraged its existing store and warehouse assets to grow its digital business.
The chain’s CFO John David Rainey shared how much digital sales have grown globally during the quarter.
“E-commerce sales were strong across markets, with growth up 24%. We’re using our unique assets, stores and clubs, distribution centers and fulfillment centers, and last-mile delivery networks to get orders to customers faster and more efficiently,” he said.
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Rainey explained how the company achieved that growth.
“Remove friction from the experience, and accelerate our sales momentum,” he added.
The proof of that success is in the numbers.
“In Walmart U.S., e-commerce sales grew 27%, with 35% of store fulfilled orders delivered in under three hours. In China, e commerce grew 28% and represented more than 50% of the sales mix in that market. Flipkart is delivering orders in less than fifteen minutes across more than 30 cities in India. And Sam’s Club US doubled their growth in club fulfilled delivery sales,” he said.
Walmart can ship from its stores.
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Walmart has built on its strengths
Walmart has had this capacity for years, but has struggled to communicate the depth and breadth of its offering.
“If I could change anything about how we’re perceived today, it’d be that more people know about our breadth of assortment online and our increasing delivery speed,” former CEO Doug McMillon said on its fourth quarter 2025 earnings call regarding the company’s delivery fulfillment program.
The chain uses all of its assets to support digital sales.
“Walmart uses stores, and store delivery is practically all of their same-day deliveries; Amazon doesn’t have stores, so it is optimizing its fulfillment network,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of business intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, SupplyChainDive reported.
The retail chain’s growth has been strong and steady.
“Walmart delivered five billion items on the same day they were ordered last year, double the number delivered in 2023. It can now deliver most of the 120,000 products in its sprawling supercenters, including meat, eggs and milk, to 93% of U.S. households the same day, sometimes in hours,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
Amazon still controls 41% of all U.S. e-commerce, while Walmart has 9%, according to The Journal.
Walmart may never catch up to Amazon, but it can be competitive.
“I don’t think that Walmart will ever really get to the sheer size Amazon has online,” Blake Droesch, retail analyst for Emarketer, which tracks e-commerce told The Journal. “But Walmart is one of the only retailers that’s had the capital and strategy to marshal a true defense.”