Walmart: e‑commerce at scale
Walmart’s e-commerce now represents roughly 20% of company revenue, with online sales topping $150 billion last year and management bullish on Marketplace growth. That shift means supplier economics are increasingly shaped by digital assortment, fulfillment costs and promotional visibility rather than purely by in-store dynamics. (talkbusiness.net)
Walmart used to win by getting a pallet onto a store shelf. Now it is doing more than $150 billion a year online, and its finance chief says e-commerce is roughly 20% of the business. (talkbusiness.net) That changes what “good shelf space” means. On Walmart’s website and app, the new shelf is a search result, a sponsored placement, or a fast-delivery badge that gets a shopper to click before they ever see a store aisle. (marketplace.walmart.com) Walmart’s own results show how fast the mix is moving. In the quarter ended January 31, 2026, global e-commerce sales grew 24%, Walmart United States e-commerce grew 27%, and e-commerce reached 23% of overall mix. (corporate.walmart.com) The company is leaning on stores to make that possible instead of treating stores and online as separate worlds. Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey said Walmart’s 5,000 United States stores act as fulfillment and delivery nodes, helping it serve 95% of America in less than three hours. (talkbusiness.net) That speed is not a side feature. Walmart said store-fulfilled delivery was up about 50% in the fourth quarter, which means the nearest store is increasingly doubling as a mini warehouse for online orders. (cnbc.com) Marketplace is the other half of the shift. Instead of owning every item it sells, Walmart lets outside merchants list products, and Rainey said Marketplace revenue is growing at roughly 20% while categories like home, hardlines, and fashion are growing north of 30%. (talkbusiness.net) The scale of that catalog is getting hard to picture in store terms. Rainey said Walmart now has roughly 500 million items listed on Marketplace, and during the holiday period it had about three times the number of sellers it had a year earlier. (talkbusiness.net) Once millions of outside products show up in search results, suppliers are no longer just fighting for endcaps and checkout lanes. They are fighting for listing quality, in-stock rates, delivery promises, reviews, and ad bids inside Walmart Connect, whose United States sales grew 41% in the fourth quarter. (corporate.walmart.com) That is why flat store comps no longer tell the full story. Talk Business reported that in-store comparable sales were basically flat in the back half of 2025 even as online grocery logged a 15th straight quarter of at least 10% annual growth and online sales kept outpacing legacy parts of the business. (talkbusiness.net) For brands that grew up selling to Walmart like a physical retailer, the playbook is being rewritten in real time. The old question was whether a buyer gave you space in a building; the new question is whether Walmart’s software, delivery network, and ad system decide to show you to the customer first. (talkbusiness.net)
