Walmart’s 30-Minute Delivery Now Covers 38 Markets. All Of It Comes Off A Store Shelf.

Walmart’s 30-minutes-or-less delivery service now operates in 38 U.S. markets, President and CEO John Furner told analysts on the company’s second quarter fiscal 2027 earnings call on August 20. The service began in May at 33 markets, including Dallas, Chicago, Houston, Denver and Atlanta, though Walmart’s chief eCommerce officer said at the time that the company had been delivering orders in 30 minutes or less for more than a year. A Walmart spokesperson told Supply Chain Dive that the five additions are Nashville, Omaha, San Antonio, Winter Haven, Florida, and Wichita, Kansas. No Arkansas market is among them. Walmart named only nine of the original 33 and has never published the rest, so whether the service reaches Northwest Arkansas is not something the company has disclosed.

Walmart’s earnings presentation puts expedited deliveries completed in under three hours at approximately 37% of store-fulfilled orders in the quarter. Supply Chain Dive reported EVP and CFO John David Rainey characterizing those as orders where the customer paid a fee for faster arrival, and describing the share as an all-time high. A Walmart spokesperson told Supply Chain Dive that gross merchandise value tied to deliveries completed in three hours or less grew 48% year over year. Walmart’s earnings materials put Walmart U.S. e-commerce growth at 24% for the quarter, with store-fulfilled delivery up approximately 43%.

Every fast delivery Walmart completes is picked from a store

Stores handle last-mile fulfillment for 80% of Walmart’s e-commerce orders, Rainey said on the call, and that figure reaches 100% for fast deliveries. Walmart described the 30-minute service in May as powered by its store footprint, its proximity to customers, and an algorithm weighing basket size, driver availability and distance from the store.

For 1P suppliers, that arithmetic moves store-level in-stock out of the service-metric column. An item unavailable at a given store on a given afternoon is unreachable for fast delivery, a tier whose gross merchandise value grew 48% year over year. In the 38 markets running the 30-minute service, it is also out of reach for a Walmart+ member who has already paid $10 on top of the basket to get it now. Replenishment teams should consider whether their in-stock reporting is segmented to isolate those 38 markets, since a national average will not surface a gap concentrated in a fraction of the store base.

Walmart has already built tooling for that kind of visibility. Walmart Data Ventures launched Scintilla In-Store in February, describing it as a platform that puts real-time store-level data, performance metrics and assigned tasks in front of supplier field representatives, with reducing out-of-stocks named as a primary objective.

The 30-minute menu draws from a defined item set

Customers shopping the service can choose from more than 100,000 eligible items, Walmart said in its May announcement, spanning fresh groceries, pantry staples, baby essentials, cold and flu medicine, household supplies, pet food, electronics and prescription delivery. Walmart did not publish how that eligible set is determined or which items fall outside it. Eligibility functions as a gate, and a supplier whose items sit outside it is absent from the occasion no matter how well the store is stocked.

The closest available answer sits inside Scintilla. Walmart Data Ventures describes its Market Fulfillment Center Assortment API as giving direct store delivery suppliers visibility into which of their items are eligible for fulfillment at Market Fulfillment Centers, the automated pick areas built inside stores to serve online pickup and delivery. MFC eligibility and 30-minute-delivery eligibility are separate determinations, and Walmart has published neither list. For a DSD supplier trying to understand where their items stand in store-based fulfillment, the API remains the most direct visibility Walmart currently offers.

Walmart’s own description of the service offers a read on which occasions are pulling volume. The company said customers are using fast delivery for immediate needs and last-minute purchases, naming batteries and party supplies in general merchandise, dog food and cold and flu medication in consumables, and coffee pods, canned goods and forgotten items in grocery. Walmart also said shopping behavior shifts toward immediate everyday needs once customers see sub-30-minute availability. The implication for brand teams is that the routing inputs Walmart described, particularly basket size and distance from store, favor smaller and lighter configurations, and that a category winning on club-size value may be structurally underweight in this occasion.

Marketplace sellers cannot reach the 30-minute window through standard fulfillment

Marketplace is the fastest-growing line in Walmart U.S. e-commerce, with sales up 52% in the quarter according to Walmart’s earnings presentation, and Marketplace inventory does not sit on a store shelf. Walmart Marketplace offers sellers five shipping methods, according to Walmart’s Marketplace Learn documentation: Value, Standard, TwoDay, OneDay and Freight. The expedited delivery program, open to sellers meeting Walmart’s thresholds for on-time delivery, valid tracking and cancellation rate, tops out at OneDay. Under Walmart Fulfillment Services, seller inventory sits in a Walmart fulfillment center. Under seller-managed fulfillment it sits in the seller’s own warehouse or with a third-party provider. Neither location feeds the 30-minute window.

The one path connecting a seller to Walmart’s last-mile network is Walmart LocalFinds, which offers pickup and delivery from sellers’ own physical stores. The program is live on Walmart.com and currently displays same-day delivery windows, and it is open only to sellers operating retail locations. For most Marketplace sellers, speed competition on Walmart.com is being fought at the OneDay tier. Walmart’s Marketplace documentation states that expedited offers generate average gross merchandise value more than 20% higher than non-expedited offers, which is the lever available to sellers who have no route to the store shelf.

Walmart has been narrowing the broader speed gap for sellers, though neither move reaches the 30-minute window. At last year’s seller summit the company announced expanded WFS next-day delivery across Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Houston and Atlanta, and began testing an extended Marketplace aisle inside its Cypress, Texas store where customers scan QR codes to reach online assortment. The 2026 edition of Let’s Grow! runs September 1 through 3 in San Diego, which is where any further movement on seller fulfillment speed would surface.

The $10 fee is the point

Walmart’s May announcement put the 30-minute service at a $10 fee for Walmart+ members. Furner told analysts that customers who use fast delivery shop more frequently, deepen engagement, and are more likely to become Walmart+ members, and that Walmart’s physical footprint, fulfillment infrastructure and local delivery capabilities allow it to move closer to customers while maintaining an attractive cost structure. Suppliers planning fiscal 2027 assortment and replenishment should treat store-level availability in fast-delivery markets as a commercial variable rather than an operations metric, because the customer paying for the window has already cleared the price objection.

Walmart U.S. comp sales, excluding fuel, grew 2.6% in the quarter. That figure and the approximately 43% growth in store-fulfilled delivery describe the same store base doing different kinds of work. Rainey said roughly 3,100 U.S. stores now receive some level of automated freight, meaning freight handled and palletized by automated systems before it arrives, and Furner said that as Walmart improves density and utilization across the network, speed and profitability reinforce one another.

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