US giant Walmart has launched GoLocal, a third-party delivery service allowing other retailers to tap into its delivery infrastructure.

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Walmart said the new service would help target more local communities, particularly businesses in rural areas that have struggled to implement their own delivery operations.

Third-party retailers will be able to use GoLocal for a variety of delivery types – including scheduled, unscheduled and same-day deliveries – and will be able to expand capacity and coverage as customer demand requires.

The new service is powered by the delivery infrastructure Walmart has built up over the past three years, and represents a direct challenge to firms like Uber Eats, DoorDash and Instacart in the US. 

Walmart has also been scaling up its Express Delivery on-demand service, which promises delivery within two or three hours. The service allows customers to order from more than 160,000 products from 3,000 stores, tapping into 70% of the US population.

Walmart senior vice-president of customer products Tom Ward said: “We’ve worked hard to develop a reliable last-mile delivery programme for our customers. Now, we’re pleased to be able to use these capabilities to serve another set of customers, local merchants.”

Speaking to analysts in the US on Monday, Ward said GoLocal fees will be negotiated on a case-by-case basis and that delivery times could range from two hours to two days. 

The announcement of GoLocal comes a month after Walmart began selling its cloud-based services to third-party retailers to “offer customers seamless pick-up and delivery to customers”.

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