Walmart announced last week that it plans to build a 1.8 million square foot e-commerce fulfillment center in Shippensburg, PA to help process online orders. The facility, which is expected to open this spring, will be used to store millions of items ordered via Walmart.com to be picked, packed and shipped to customers as soon as the next day.
In Pennsylvania, Walmart currently operates seven distribution centers (which differ from fulfillment centers in that they focus on distributing product to Walmart stores) and 160 retail stores, and has more than 60,000 employees.
The company said fulfillment centers have become a pillar of its plan to boost supply chain capacity to help power omnichannel growth. In the last year Walmart’s e-commerce sales climbed 11% and were up 90% over two years.