Batched delivery at Walmart
More orders per trip, and about $3 more in tips per batch for drivers.
At a glance
- My role
- Principal Product Manager, Last Mile Delivery via Gig Delivery
- Team
- Walmart’s Spark delivery product and engineering teams
- When
- January 2022 to September 2024
- What changed
- The share of batched orders rose from 50% to 75%.
Before Hertz, I was a Principal Product Manager at Walmart for last-mile delivery by gig drivers on the Spark platform: Spark Shop & Deliver, order batching and a drone delivery pilot.
The problem
Delivering one order per trip cost too much, and drivers’ time on each trip was underused. Batching several orders into one trip helps both sides, but only if drivers accept the batched offers.
Context
Spark is Walmart’s gig-delivery platform. Drivers see single and batched offers in the Spark Driver app.
What I worked on
I worked on machine-learning batching of shop-and-deliver orders across stores, which combines several customers’ orders into one trip for one driver.
Results
These results are as I reported them at the time.
- The share of batched orders rose from 50% to 75% (+25 points).
- Drivers earned about $3 more in tips per batch.
- Batched shopping and delivery rolled out nationwide, across 4,500 stores.
- Driver utilization rose 40%.
- Cost per order fell by $7, for annual savings of $300M.
- Across my Walmart work, the programs delivered about $750M in combined savings and revenue.