Discount store chain Target is trying to outpace rivals Amazon and Walmart in meeting the desire of shoppers for faster deliveries to doorsteps with a new batch of warehouses designed for sorting goods ordered online, investing $100 million in buildings no customers are expected to visit.

Target, the Minneapolis-based operator of roughly 2,000 stores, said Wednesday it plans to build at least six more centers where purchases will be sent and routed to try to get them to local areas overnight. Its goal is to expand to more than 15 so-called sortation facilities by the end of 2026.

Companies such as e-commerce juggernaut Amazon, and in many cases brick-and-mortar retailers such as Walmart, are filling online orders from large distribution centers. But in Target's case, it's expanding its bet on using the backrooms of its stores for employees to gather goods and send them to centers where, as the name implies, they are sorted for loading onto delivery trucks.

Target's expansion of these centers is designed to enhance its “next-day delivery capabilities to guests across major U.S. markets,” according to the company, as Americans increasingly base where they buy online on how fast they can receive their order. This growing importance on delivery speed has various brick-and-mortar retailers racing to expand their industrial real estate footprints.

Target already has nine sortation centers, in Minnesota, Texas, Colorado, Illinois, Georgia and Pennsylvania, including three recently opened facilities in the greater Chicago and Denver areas. The company declined to comment on where the new roughly half-dozen centers will be located.

“Now more than ever, our guests rely on us to deliver their everyday essentials and Target favorites when they want and need them most,” Gretchen McCarthy, Target’s chief global supply chain and logistics officer, said in a statement. “Through our sortation centers and Target last-mile delivery capabilities, we’re able to move faster and with more precision — while controlling costs and expanding our network capacity — for years to come.”

Even so, retail competition is heating up in an era when consumers want the convenience and choice of shopping either in a store, by ordering online for delivery, or picking up their purchases. For Target and other chains, matching the speed and convenience of online delivery provided by Amazon and Walmart, the largest U.S. retailer by revenue, isn't easy. That's because those companies have built out supply chains to speed the filling of online orders more efficiently and less expensively.

Target has taken a somewhat atypical approach to handling its rising number of online orders compared to a competitor such as Walmart, according to Bill Read, executive vice president at real estate firm Retail Specialists.

"In general, Walmart will use all its resources — whether it's a distribution center, a hub or a store — to fulfill all orders," he said. "Typically a Target will fill the vast majority of all its orders from the store, and will be using a sortation center to help speed up those deliveries."

Last August during an earnings call Target disclosed its plans to open not only more sortation centers but additional distribution centers. Last March, the company also discussed efforts to develop its distribution network.

For Target, in markets with a sortation center, packages are retrieved daily from 30 to 40 local stores — depending on the market — and transported to the center to sort, batch and route them for delivery to local neighborhoods by a third-party carrier or a Shipt delivery route, depending on the lowest-cost carrier option, according to the retailer. Shipt is a delivery company that Target acquired in 2017 for $550 million.

With sortation logistics dedicated off-site at the centers, stores have more room for picking and packing items for orders, Richard Dean, director for the Target store in Edina, Minnesota, said in a statement. That store is supported by a sortation center in Minneapolis.

“By removing the sorting process from the backroom of stores, Target saves valuable time and space for store teams to fulfill additional orders and serve more guests,” the company said. “These moves demonstrate the transformative power of our stores-as-hubs strategy, which leverages our store network as a launchpad for online orders. Sortation centers represent the next phase, ensuring faster delivery for guests, saving shipping costs and fueling our long-term growth.”

Customers love the added speed. Since Target’s first sortation center opened in 2020, the company said it’s seen a 150% increase in the number of orders delivered to customers the next day.

The centers delivered 26 million packages to shoppers in 2022, and that number is expected to double to 50 million this year, Target said.

In partnership with Shipt, Target said it’s expanded options for drivers to take advantage of bigger routes where they can use larger-capacity vehicles that can hold up to eight times more packages per route.

The retailer is testing these third-party partnership delivery vans in two of its sortation-center markets and plans to roll them out to all markets in the next few years.