Walmart is preparing for a surge of holiday orders by adding ecommerce fulfillment centers to its distribution warehouses
- Walmart plans to add 42 "pop-up eCommerce Distribution Centers" to help handle the surge of orders with the upcoming holiday season.
- These pop-ups will be added to regional distribution centers, and are expected to handle about 30% of the retailer's holiday shipments.
- This is another measure to keep ecommerce orders processing smoothly this holiday season. Walmart is hiring 20,000 employees to help as well.
As Walmart prepares for holiday shopping, the company will add 42 ecommerce fulfillment centers to already existing regional distribution centers in order to help process orders, the company announced.
By adding these ecommerce centers, "facilities that have traditionally only supplied products to stores are now equipped to also fulfill online orders," according to a press release. These "pop-up eCommerce Distribution Centers" will ship up to 30% of Walmart's holiday orders, according to a different statement from the company.
"It is a seamless merge of stores and e-commerce, so our buildings can do either one," said Srini Venkatesan, executive vice president for Walmart told the Wall Street Journal. He added that by combining the two facilities, the company can cut down on transportation costs that are often associated with delivery.
In order to pull this off, Walmart's technology team implemented new technology "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," the WSJ reported.
Since the coronavirus pandemic led to stay-at-home orders in March, retailers like Walmart have been dealing with more online orders than in the past. The company has hired 500,000 new employees since March, and will hire 20,000 employees for ecommerce during the holidays.
Retailers big and small are expecting more orders than ever this holiday season, and online orders will make up $190.47 billion of the total $1.013 trillion analysts are expecting shoppers to spend this holiday, Business Insider's Avery Hartmans previously reported. Driving sales too is so-called "guilt-gifting," as people are forced to spend the season away from their families.