Target's new partner Shipt takes Walmart off delivery list

As delivery firm Shipt rolls out same-day delivery from its new owner, Target, there's at least one retailer it is taking off its vendor list: Walmart.

To be fair, there never was an official partnership between Shipt and Walmart. And Oklahoma City was the only market where Shipt delivered groceries from Walmart stores.

When it launched delivery in Oklahoma City last summer, there was a disclaimer at the end of Shipt's news release that noted: "Shipt sources groceries from local Walmart stores, however, the company is not endorsed by or affiliated with Walmart."

And Walmart set the record straight then, too.

"Shipt included our brand in its recent press release without our knowledge," a Walmart spokeswoman told the Oklahoman last year.

While a bit unusual, this arrangement is not unheard of. As delivery firms have proliferated in recent years, they don't always have an explicit relationship with the retailers or restaurants from which they deliver.

In any case, as Shipt launched delivery from Target stores in Oklahoma City this week, it ended its deliveries from Walmart, which of course is one of Target's biggest rivals. A Target spokeswoman confirmed the development, but didn't comment further on it.

Target executives have said they want to keep other retailers on the Shipt marketplace to make the $99-a-year service attractive to consumers and more cost effective to run. Some of the other retailers it delivers from include Kroger, Meijer and Publix.

Amazon's push into selling apparel is drawing the most customers away from Target Corp., according to a new research report.

The survey by Coresight Research (formerly Fung Global Retail) found that 30 percent of respondents who had spent more on clothing from Amazon in the last year said they had switched some of their spending from Target, making it the top retailer to lose out to Amazon in apparel. Macy's and J.C. Penney were also found to be high up on the losing end, in addition to Walmart and Kohl's.

"The biggest battles in U.S. retail are often characterized as Amazon vs. Walmart and Amazon vs. the department stores," Deborah Weinswig wrote in the report. "However, our research suggests that Amazon vs. Target may actually be the bigger battle, at least in apparel."

At the same time, Target has been working hard in the last year to refresh its own portfolio clothing brands. Last fall, it launched a new men's apparel line, Goodfellow & Co., and replaced Merona with A New Day in its women's department. Its latest new brand — Universal Thread, which is taking the place of Mossimo — hit stores and Target.com in recent days.

When asked last summer about how worried he was about Amazon's push into clothing, Mark Tritton, Target's chief merchandiser, said: "We keep an eye on them like all of our competitors," he said then.

But he added that Target already has an established customer who comes to it for style.

"There's a real relationship with Target," he said. "We're more than just an algorithm. We're an emotion to them."

Still, various studies have documented the high overlap between people who shop at Target and are also Amazon Prime members. So it's no surprise that Target is one of the most vulnerable to Amazon's expansion into apparel. The online retailer has rolled out a host of its own private labels and added more name brands.

Nike, Under Armour and Hanes are the most popular brands sold on Amazon, according to the Coresight survey.

Amazon does not release sales figures by category so it's hard to discern its overall sales in apparel, but some analysts had forecast it to overtake Macy's last year as the biggest seller of clothing in the U.S.

The Coresight study suggests that Amazon is now tied with Target as the second-most shopped apparel retailer in the U.S. after Walmart.

Kavita Kumar • 612-673-4113