The Canadian subsidiary of Walmart is expanding upon a partnership with a well-known online delivery platform.
Walmart Canada is piloting Walmart Now, the first virtual convenience store available in Canada, in the Greater Toronto area. Walmart Now offers an assortment of close to 4,000 items, including apparel basics, toys, personal care, and house cleaning essentials, picked and delivered from 10 existing Walmart Canada locations in as fast as 30 minutes by Instacart.
Instacart uses the Carrot Storefront, its end-to-end white-label e-commerce solution, in addition to the Instacart app, to support Walmart Now. The Walmart Now virtual storefront is available on the Instacart website and app.
Walmart Canada began working with Instacart in 2018, and has already been offering customers delivery in as fast as an hour from more than 250 locations across Canada via the Instacart app and its e-commerce site.
Walmart Now is not Walmart Canada’s first effort to leverage its physical store infrastructure to support a virtual business. In March 2021, the retailer partnered with scalable “ghost kitchen” (the popular term for a digital kitchen that only fulfils digital food orders) platform Ghost Kitchen Brands to offer one-stop meal pickup and delivery.
