Wal-Mart escalates grocery pickup battle with Amazon

The service allows shoppers collect the orders they have placed on Wal-Mart on the same day, in-case the transaction is finished by 10 a.m. The company also has been analysing grocery delivery to homes, but for the time being it is only extending the pickup option. Walmart said it charges the same price for items purchased online as in stores and there is no extra fees for online service.

The move puts Wal-Mart, No. 3 in the Internet Retailer 2015 Top 500 Guide, in closer competition with companies tackling the online grocery market, an area seen as an elusive prize ever since the original dot-com boom in the 1990s.

Walmart is offering this service now in five more markets, as a pilot program that began in 2011.

At each location, there will be designated parking spaces for pickup customers.

The retailer will roll out the free service from this month in certain US cities after trial runs proved popular, Michael Bender, chief operating officer of Wal-Mart’s global ecommerce, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. Target Corporation (NYSE:TGT) has reported it is looking forward to aggressively focus grocery delivery and disclosed this month that it would start testing a same-day products delivery service in collaboration with Instacart in Minneapolis.

“With 70% of the USA population living within 5 miles of an existing Walmart store, this is an idea that simply makes sense for us”, the company said. Now the company Insiders own 44.8% of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. For example, a Trader Joe’s customer in Los Angeles can pay an additional $15 to have groceries delivered in less than an hour.

The pick-up service will be available at select stores in new markets, including Atlanta, Georgia; Charlotte and Fayetteville, North Carolina; Salt Lake City and Ogden, Utah; Nashville, Tennessee; Tucson, Arizona; and Colorado Springs, Colorado. The company has a market cap of $204,475 million and the number of outstanding shares have been calculated to be 3,205,942,000 shares. Wal-Mart’s customers have also complained about the quality and freshness of its food.