Home Depot‘s new Home Depot 3-hour delivery service, launched nationwide last week, outperformed Walmart and Target on delivery speed, order-minimum thresholds and service-fee costs when all three were tested simultaneously with identical orders placed at exactly 12:11 p.m.
How the test worked
The methodology was straightforward: order the same item from all three retailers at precisely the same moment, from an address approximately 3.5 miles from each store, using brand-new shopper profiles. The item of choice was a 12-pack of Bounty paper towels, though basket-size minimums forced some adjustments along the way.
Target’s same-day services require a minimum basket of at least $35, with no exceptions. To clear that threshold, a pack of disinfecting wipes was added, bringing the subtotal to $37.48. Walmart’s equivalent paper towels were $0.30 cheaper, but baskets under $35 incur a $6.99 delivery fee there, so a similar pack of disinfecting wipes at $2.98 was added to eliminate it. Home Depot, by contrast, carries no basket minimum for same-day delivery beyond $25 to waive its $2.99 standard same-day fee, and the paper towels alone cleared that bar without any additions.
Amazon was considered as a benchmark but set aside: the earliest available same-day delivery to the test address was more than five hours away.
Home Depot 3-hour delivery arrives in under 30 minutes
Sixteen minutes after all three orders were placed simultaneously, Home Depot sent a notification that a driver was already en route. The order arrived 27 minutes after checkout, which, as the tester noted, is less time than it would have taken to make the trip to the store in person.
Target’s same-day fulfilment runs through Shipt, its third-party shopping service. A Shipt shopper collected the Target order at 1:43 p.m. and delivered it less than 20 minutes later, putting it on the doorstep roughly an hour and a half after the order was placed.
Walmart’s order took the longest. A text arrived roughly half an hour after Target’s delivery landed, advising that the order was being picked and would arrive at 3:14 p.m. The driver had two other drop-offs to complete beforehand. The Walmart order arrived at 3:20 p.m., three hours and nine minutes after checkout, just outside the promised three-hour window but within a few minutes of the originally stated time, a consistency the tester found genuinely impressive, particularly for orders containing perishables that cannot sit out in warm weather.
Walmart does offer a one-hour option for an additional $5, and an express option the website indicated could arrive in as little as 18 minutes for $5 more. Because neither Target nor Home Depot offers a one-hour tier, the standard three-hour service was used for all three retailers in this comparison.
Fee structures and membership perks
On cost, the gap between the three services is wide. Home Depot charges $7 for the three-hour tier, compared with $9.99 at Target and $14.95 at Walmart. Both Target and Walmart offer membership programmes that reduce or eliminate same-day delivery fees, but for a new shopper paying the standard rate, Home Depot’s fee is the lowest of the three by a clear margin.
One area where Home Depot trails its rivals is tipping functionality. Walmart allows shoppers to add a tip at checkout, and Target lets customers rate and tip after delivery is complete. Home Depot currently offers no in-app or online tipping mechanism, meaning customers who want to show appreciation to their driver may need to have cash to hand.
Across all three dimensions tested (speed, simplicity for a first-time user, and out-of-pocket cost) Home Depot’s new service came out ahead in its first week of nationwide availability. Whether it can maintain that performance at scale, across a wider range of order types and distances, is the real test yet to come.