Walmart Adding 'Pop-Up' Centers for Online Holiday Sales
November 12 2020 - 4:58PM
Dow Jones News
By Jennifer Smith
Walmart Inc. is placing "pop-up" e-commerce fulfillment centers
inside dozens of its regional distribution facilities as the retail
giant braces for an expected crush of online sales during the
holiday season.
The 42 sites will hold fast-moving items in sections of
warehouses that are traditionally used to ship pallets of goods to
Walmart stores. The network of pop-up sites will ship up to 30% of
Walmart's online holiday volume, the company said in announcing the
plan Thursday, adding to the fulfillment capacity at its stores and
dedicated e-commerce campuses that typically contain two or more
fulfillment centers.
"It is a seamless merge of stores and e-commerce, so our
buildings can do either one," said Srini Venkatesan, an executive
vice president at Walmart Global Technology who oversees
supply-chain technology.
Putting both activities in one site also can reduce
transportation costs, Mr. Venkatesan said. Walmart can use its
trucks to move online orders from the pop-up sites to stores before
handing them off for last-mile delivery, instead of shipping
parcels from its big fulfillment centers through carriers such as
United Parcel Service Inc. and FedEx Corp. "We are getting a much
more distributed footprint," he said.
Soaring online orders during the coronavirus pandemic are making
it even harder for retailers and third-party logistics providers to
accommodate big anticipated swings in volume over the holidays.
Walmart is hiring more than 20,000 seasonal workers at
e-commerce facilities. Those numbers include workers at the pop-up
sites, which will also use existing regional distribution center
staff, Walmart spokesman Ravi Jariwala said.
Amazon.com Inc. is bringing on 100,000 seasonal workers this
year, part of a broader hiring surge in warehousing and
transportation sectors tied to e-commerce. Walmart rival Target
Corp., which also has tested using one site to replenish stores and
fulfill online orders, is keeping its overall seasonal hiring
steady with last year, but increasing the number of workers who
will go to distribution centers and to bolster curbside and
in-store pickup of online orders.
Walmart developed software to synchronize logistics systems for
the stores with e-commerce systems and to integrate with the
third-party carriers picking up loads from the sites. It also
pushed out a warehouse management app that employees can use on
their smartphones to pick orders.
"It's faster and more cost-effective to build code than it is to
build and permit a building," Mr. Jariwala said.
Write to Jennifer Smith at jennifer.smith@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 12, 2020 16:43 ET (21:43 GMT)
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