Walmart tests store back rooms for same-day marketplace deliveries

Walmart has started using shelves in the back rooms of several Dallas stores to stage select third-party marketplace items for same-day delivery, putting new pressure on the same spaces associates already use for receiving, sorting and pickup prep. The test raises a basic store-operations question: can faster fulfillment move through crowded back rooms without creating new bottlenecks on the floor?

Manish Joneja, senior vice president of Walmart U.S. Marketplace and Walmart Fulfillment Services, said the company was starting in a few markets and would scale only after learning from the pilot. For store teams, that makes the Dallas test less about a flashy new system than about tighter slotting, cleaner handoffs and more disciplined inventory control as marketplace orders move through pickup-and-delivery work already built into stores.

The bet is being driven by growth. Walmart said Marketplace sales rose more than 30% in each of the prior four quarters in 2024, and the number of sellers listing items on Walmart.com grew 20% in the previous fiscal year. John David Rainey has also said marketplace categories including home, hardlines and fashion were growing faster than 30%, while overall marketplace revenue was growing around 20% a year. With Supercenters carrying about 120,000 individual items, Walmart has reason to keep expanding assortment without turning the sales floor into a storage problem.

The back-room pilot also fits a longer push to make stores function as local fulfillment infrastructure. Walmart said in 2022 that its 4,700 U.S. stores were within 10 miles of 90% of the U.S. population and that it had increased pickup-and-delivery capacity by 20% in 2021, with another 35% increase planned for 2022. By 2023, the company said more than 4,000 stores were operating as delivery hubs, and in April 2025 it said geospatial technology had expanded delivery to 12 million more U.S. households by using hexagonal delivery grids and data on slot availability, drive time, store capacity and customer demand.

Walmart renamed its market fulfillment centers Accelerated Pickup and Delivery, or APD, on January 9, 2025, underscoring how quickly the company has been reworking store space for speed. The Dallas back-room test looks less capital-intensive than building another dedicated facility, but it could still reshape daily routines for hourly associates, department managers and assistant managers if more marketplace inventory has to be slotted, staged and handed off without slowing the rest of the store.