Retail giant Walmart and JD.com have formed a strategic alliance that will see the two companies working on a range of business initiatives in both the online and retail sectors.

Walmart will buy a 5% stake in JD.com, and JD.com will take ownership of Walmart’s Yihaodian marketplace. Walmart will continue to operate the Yihaodian direct sales business, and remain a seller on the online marketplace.

In addition the Chinese branch of Sam’s Club will open a store on JD.com. The two companies will link up their supply chains as well.

JD.com will list Walmart’s Chinese stores as preferred retailers on its crowd sourced delivery platform, Dada. According to Walmart this should “drive online traffic to Walmart stores” and enable customers to order fresh food as well as other items from their local Walmart stores, for a 2 hour home delivery service.

Walmart will continue to operate its own physical stores.

Richard Liu, CEO of JD.com, said, “Walmart is synonymous with trusted-quality efficient retailing, and we believe that this tie up will increase both product selection and overall user experience. We look forward to further developing Yihaodian, which has tremendous strength in important regions of eastern and southern China. Yihaodian will continue offering the outstanding user experience its customers have come to expect, which we will further augment by leveraging our unparalleled logistics capabilities and breadth of product categories.

“We are also delighted to welcome the Sam’s Club flagship store onto the JD.com platform. Sam’s Club’s unique, high-end product selection meets the demand from China’s increasing affluent consumers for high-quality, imported products and has already proven popular in the Chinese cities where it has stores.”