Walmart’s delivery service GoLocal kicks off with Home Depot partnership

The news: Walmart is kicking off its new same- and next-day delivery service GoLocal with a partnership with The Home Depot, per a company announcement.

What this means: For now, the partnership is a win-win.

• The Home Depot can offer same-day delivery before competitors like Lowe’s, and Walmart gets a big-name client to help launch the service.
• The two have little overlap in product offerings, so there’s no worry of competition there.

How we got here: As the demand for home delivery skyrocketed during lockdowns, retailers needed to rapidly expand their delivery offerings to stay ahead of competitors—even Walmart had to lean on intermediaries like Instacart.

• But now that Walmart has had a year and a half to build out its own delivery logistics system, it’s opening it up to other businesses in the form of GoLocal.
• In the process, Walmart is becoming a competitor to Instacart.

What’s next: In the longer term, however, GoLocal’s usefulness for The Home Depot will likely wane—just as Instacart’s did for Walmart.

• After all, the biggest benefit for The Home Depot is the speed at which it can debut the offering versus those of competitors.
• But given a year or so, it’s hard to imagine that a massive retailer like The Home Depot—which will be the fifth-largest business in terms of retail ecommerce sales this year, per our estimates—wouldn’t also opt to build its own in-house delivery service.
• For Walmart, picking up retail giants as clientele will soon become unsustainable. It will likely start to focus on a base of smaller businesses to grow GoLocal in the future.