This summer, Walmart has opened a brand new warehouse for that matter. Indeed, to compete with Amazon or other pure players, you need to have the same tools. This is the reason why they opened a 110 000 square meters warehouse dedicated 100% to their Ecommerce business. Why is this warehouse more adapted to the Ecommerce competition?
- Because of its sized: it is bigger than usual Walmart's buildings, in order to stock more products, and offer a wider product range online.
- It has automated systems allowing the operations to be more efficient. "The new warehouses each will ship hundreds of thousands of orders daily, four to five times its dozens of existing smaller warehouses. Each new warehouse has several million items, five times the network of older warehouses. That will enable Wal-Mart to offer more consolidated orders arriving in fewer boxes."
- Faster delivery: The goal is to counterattack the Amazon Premium service by delivering in 2 days products for free.
Walmart plans to open 4 other warehouses by the end of 2015 to reach 95% of the US population. Furthermore, obviously, Walmart owns a large store network that can complete and offer more versatility to customers to get their goods.
This example shows you clearly that supply chain and logistics are key elements in the Ecommerce business that needs to be mastered. It is different to ship goods in full trucks than couple of packages to a home. And Walmart is working actively to fill the gap.
