Serving More Customers, Delivering Greater Convenience: Walmart's Data-Driven Approach Expands Delivery To 12 Million More Households

Key Insights

• By leveraging advanced geospatial technology, Walmart can divide geographic areas into precise hexagonal grids, optimizing delivery zones.
• The use of geospatial technology allows for more accurate mapping of delivery areas, enabling multiple Walmart stores to fulfill a customer’s order in one seamless delivery.

Convenience is a key driver of our growth, and technology is what enables us to meet customers where they are. That’s why we continue to invest in innovation to enhance our delivery capabilities — integrating automation into our fulfillment centers to boost speed and efficiency, leveraging AI to predict demand and optimize inventory, and ensuring customers get the items they need, when and where they need them.

Now, we’re taking delivery innovation even further with geospatial technology, a powerful data science model that divides geographic areas into precise hexagonal grids, optimizing delivery zones for greater efficiency. By redefining how we map delivery areas, we’ve expanded our reach, bringing the convenience of Walmart’s delivery to 12 million more households across the U.S., making same-day deliveries more accessible than ever. What was once just out of reach is now within range, ensuring even more households have access to the essentials they rely on — delivered fast and reliably right to their doorstep.

A data science approach to delivery boundaries
Our geospatial platform is built on open-source software and customized to meet Walmart’s unique needs.  Using advanced geospatial intelligence and a variety of internal and external data sources, we've created a dynamic system that optimizes our delivery coverage.

Rather than relying on traditional boundaries like zip codes, we divide large areas into smaller, more precise hexagonal grids. Think of it like pixels in a digital image — each hexagon is a "tile" packed with real-time data such as slot availability, drive time, store capacity, customer demand and more. This allows us to adjust delivery zones with greater accuracy, ultimately serving more customers across the country.

Precision mapping: No neighbor left behind
Hexagons have a unique geometric form that fits together perfectly, covering an entire area without leaving gaps. Unlike square or circular grids, which can create inefficiencies and leave out small areas at the edges, this system ensures that every point within a delivery zone is included.

For example, a household that might have previously been just beyond the delivery boundary, now can enjoy the same convenient service as their neighbors across the street. By shifting from rigid mapping methods to a more data-driven model, we ensure more customers have access to our delivery offerings.

Expanding access, enhancing convenience
With our new approach, customers can now have their delivery orders fulfilled by multiple Walmart stores within their service area. Previously, a customer’s order might have been fulfilled by a single Walmart store based on their location, which sometimes meant that if a product wasn’t available at that store, the customer would receive their order in multiple deliveries at different times. Now, with geospatial technology refining and expanding our delivery zones, a customer may be covered by multiple stores. If one store doesn’t have a particular item but another nearby location does, Walmart delivery drivers can pick up products from both, ensuring customers receive everything they need in one seamless delivery.

Innovating with purpose
Adapting to customer needs through innovation has never been more important. We’re excited about how technology is helping us simplify our customers’ lives, and geospatial technology is one of the many ways making Walmart delivery more accessible and convenient for more households than ever.

A note about data privacy
Trust is essential at Walmart and a cornerstone of how we’re thinking about this technology. All data is anonymized and used pursuant to Walmart's privacy policies.