The news
Costco put its warehouses on DoorDash for the first time this week, a day after Uber Eats expanded its Costco delivery from 17 states to 47. Since Instacart has delivered from Costco for close to 10 years, members can now order the same items through any of the three apps.
None of those deliveries run on Costco’s own trucks, though. The fleet Costco does own is Costco Logistics, which it bought in 2020 for about $1 billion and which carries appliances, furniture, TVs and anything else that takes two people or an install. Both halves are growing at the same time.
A gig driver can pick up a case of water and a rotisserie chicken and have them at the door in under an hour, but that driver can’t bring a refrigerator. So Costco rents the first job and owns the second.
What changed
This week’s deals put Costco’s full assortment on all three apps, while its own fleet keeps growing:
Uber Eats: nearly 600 warehouses across 47 states, up from 17 states. Shoppers enter a membership number at checkout. Uber waives its fees on orders over $60. Non-members can buy a membership inside the app and get 30% off their first order.
DoorDash: every US warehouse and 4,000-plus items, including Kirkland Signature. DoorDash already delivered for Costco in Australia, New Zealand and Sweden, so this is its first US listing. It says Costco was one of the most-searched retailers missing from its app.
Instacart: still the main partner, and the service behind Costco’s own same-day website. It added custom cakes and party platters last month.
Costco Logistics: items delivered rose 29% to more than 4.5 million in fiscal 2024, led by appliances and furniture, then grew another 13% in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025.
Shoppers pay for the convenience, however. Costco’s own customer-service page says app prices are “marked up higher than your local warehouse” because the markup pays for delivery. Costco doesn’t publish the size of it, but outside cart comparisons have put it between 10% and 24%.
Costco’s chief executive, Ron Vachris, explained the split on the May earnings call, after an analyst asked whether Costco could keep relying on partners while Walmart and Amazon get faster. Costco bought its heavy-goods fleet “because we felt that there was a significant opportunity in shortening the delivery times there,” he said. For same-day, on the other hand, “we have very good third party partners... at the current time, we are happy with the partners that we have.”
So far, same-day orders average under 45 minutes in the US, and members rate the service 4.8 out of 5, Gary Millerchip, the Chief Financial Officer, said on the same call. Same-day is also growing faster than the rest of Costco’s online business, which grew comparable sales 21.5% in the quarter.
The pattern
Costco is at least the sixth large retailer in about a year to put its stores on all three delivery apps, and the largest of them by sales. But none of the others gave up a fleet it already owned.
Tractor Supply joined Instacart in July from 2,400 of its 2,435 stores, at shelf prices. Meanwhile, it is building its own Final Mile network toward 375 hubs by year-end to carry feed, fencing and mowers. That is the closest match to Costco: rent the light basket, own the heavy load.
Kroger closed three Ocado-automated fulfillment centers in November and paid Ocado $350 million to cancel a fourth. It now runs same-day delivery from its stores through DoorDash, Uber Eats and Instacart instead.
Ace Hardware, Academy Sports and Foot Locker each went from one app to three within a year. Ace’s DoorDash deal, for example, was exclusive when it launched in September 2025, yet Uber Eats and Instacart followed within eight months.
The retailers give the same reason for adding apps rather than picking one. Academy’s chief executive, Steve Lawrence, told investors there is “minimal overlap between the customer bases for each of these services,” so each new app reaches shoppers the others miss.
These chains share plenty of big stores close to customers and no fleet built for small, fast orders. The apps, by contrast, already have drivers in those neighborhoods.
The counter
Walmart made the opposite call. In 2022, it dropped DoorDash and built its own Spark driver network. This month, it started delivering for Dunkin’ and Subway through its own app, which puts it in competition with Uber Eats and DoorDash rather than on them, CNBC reported. Target, likewise, owns Shipt outright.
Renting also means Costco’s members pay the markup on every app order, since that markup is how the delivery gets paid for. Most of all, no retailer in this group, Costco included, has said how many orders the apps bring in or what those orders earn. Academy’s 17% digital growth, for instance, covers its whole online business, not just the apps.
What’s next
Vachris didn’t close the door on building. The question “will be continued to be reviewed if we need to get further vertically integrated,” he said. That review will face its test as Walmart and Amazon push toward 30-minute delivery. When Costco reports its fourth quarter later this month, the figure to watch is whether same-day keeps outgrowing the rest of its online business now that three apps are sending shoppers into the same 600 warehouses.
