Home Depot Inc. expects to hire nearly 300 people for a massive distribution center in Wood County that will ship online purchases directly to customers across the Midwest.

The 1.6-million-square-foot facility won’t begin dispatching orders until late summer at the earliest, but stocking the 100,000-some different items the warehouse will carry has to start much sooner.

Stephen Holmes, a Home Depot spokesman, said the company is taking online applications now and plans to hold a hiring event sometime within the next couple of months. Officials say they need about 250 warehouse employees to go along with 30 management positions.

People can submit their applications online at careers.homedepot.com.

The facility is in Troy Township in a Joint Economic Development District set up by Toledo and the township.

Though Internet business is a sliver of the $83.2 billion in sales Home Depot did last year, it has been growing rapidly. The company’s online sales were up 36 percent last year — an increase of more than $1 billion.

Mr. Holmes said about 40 percent of online shoppers choose to pick up their items at their local store. The rest of the items either ship from Home Depot’s vendors or — more commonly — come out of one of the company’s distribution warehouses. And the company is trying to get better at that.

Home Depot has already opened two direct fulfillment centers in recent years to ship items directly to buyers. The Wood County facility will be the third and largest of the three. At 1.6 million square feet, it’s nearly twice the size of the recently opened Perris, Calif., facility. The first direct fulfillment center opened outside Atlanta, which is Home Depot’s hometown.

Highly automated and high-tech, the direct fulfillment centers stock about three times as many different products as an average store. Mr. Holmes said they’ll focus on the most popular purchases, but also stock many larger items.

“We have those small items, it may be a door latch, keys, brackets, small things like that. But what you’ll see are also very large things that we don’t keep in a store. For example, a Jacuzzi tub, because that takes up so much floor space and inventory space,” he said.

The goal of the direct fulfillment centers is to get any order received before 5 p.m. shipped out that same day. The center will generally operate 24 hours a day.

Home Depot hasn’t said how much it expects to spend on the project, though Wade Gottschalk, executive director of the Wood County Economic Development Commission, said in applying for tax credits the company projected a cost of about $130 million.

As many as 1,000 construction jobs were expected to come with the project. Toledo Edison built a new $1.2 million transmission line to service the warehouse, and development officials say a new public road should open another 200-plus acres to development.

Mr. Gottschalk said local officials granted a 15-year, 100 percent tax abatement to Home Depot, but the company has agreed to pay taxes to Penta and Eastwood Local Schools.

Home Depot had initially committed to creating 125 full-time jobs.

“They’re well ahead of what they committed. I think it was a good win and we hope to have more similar projects regionally,” Mr. Gottschalk said.

Home Depot has a warehouse in Hancock County that ships items to stores but not to online customers.

First Published March 10, 2015, 4:00 a.m.