Walmart sells $150B online. Its ads are growing faster

A $150 billion online store hiding inside a supercenter

Ask most shoppers where Americans buy online and they'll say Amazon. Walmart's filings tell you to add a second name. In fiscal 2026, the year that ended January 31, 2026, Walmart reported about $150.4 billion in e-commerce net sales across its three segments. Six years earlier the same figure was about $39.7 billion.

That total is our sum of three numbers Walmart discloses in every 10-K: about $99.6 billion from Walmart U.S., $35.8 billion from Walmart International (Flipkart in India, Walmex in Mexico, plus China and Canada) and $15.0 billion from Sam's Club U.S. Use the toggles on the chart above to see each one, or switch to the online share of Walmart U.S. sales.

That last view is the one worth a pause. In fiscal 2020, e-commerce was 7.1% of Walmart U.S. net sales. In fiscal 2026 it was 20.6%. One in five dollars at the biggest U.S. retailer now starts with a tap, even if a store associate packs the order. For context, the Census Bureau put e-commerce at 17.1% of all U.S. retail sales in Q2 2026, which you can track in our U.S. e-commerce share chart. The two figures aren't measured the same way, so treat them as a rough comparison, not a ranking.

Why the curve didn't flatten after 2020

The pandemic gave Walmart's online business its biggest single jump: U.S. e-commerce grew almost 80%, from $24.1 billion to $43.0 billion, in fiscal 2021. What happened next is more interesting. Growth slowed to about 12% a year for two years, then picked back up to roughly 21% to 24% a year from fiscal 2024 on.

Walmart's own explanation is mostly about speed. Its stores double as warehouses, and the company keeps pointing to store-fulfilled delivery as the engine. In Q2 FY27 (May to July 2026), store-fulfilled delivery grew about 43%, and deliveries promised in under three hours made up about 37% of store-fulfilled orders. Walmart U.S. e-commerce has now grown 20% or more for ten straight quarters.

The mix by segment barely moves, which surprised us. Walmart U.S. has been about two-thirds of the online total in every year since fiscal 2021. Drag the slider on the donut and watch the slices hold their shape while the whole ring grows. Sam's Club is small, but it grew at almost exactly the same pace as the rest.

The faster business riding on top

Here is the part that matters most for brands. Every online visit to Walmart is also an ad impression, and Walmart has gotten much better at selling them.

Walmart reports a "global advertising business" once a year in its fourth-quarter release. It was $2.7 billion in fiscal 2023, $3.4 billion in fiscal 2024, $4.4 billion in fiscal 2025 and nearly $6.4 billion in fiscal 2026. That last jump, 46%, includes VIZIO, the smart-TV maker Walmart bought in December 2024 for net cash of $1.9 billion. So don't read the whole leap as organic.

The cleaner signal is Walmart Connect, Walmart's U.S. retail media business, which Walmart reports excluding VIZIO. Switch the quarterly chart below to "Advertising." Walmart Connect grew in the 20s through most of fiscal 2025, moved into the low 30s in fiscal 2026, then hit 41% in Q4 FY26, 44% in Q1 FY27 and 43% in Q2 FY27. Now switch to "E-commerce." Walmart U.S. online sales grew 24% to 27% in those last three quarters. The ad business is growing faster than the traffic it sells against.

Walmart CFO John David Rainey said as much on the August 20 call: for the model to work, ad growth has to outpace e-commerce growth, "and that's actually what we've been seeing." In the same quarter Walmart closed its purchase of Vibe, a self-serve ad platform, to reach smaller advertisers.

Keep the scale in mind, though. Amazon reported $68.6 billion in ad sales for calendar 2025, roughly 11 times Walmart's figure. We broke that down in Amazon's revenue mix. Walmart is the challenger here, but it's the challenger growing at more than 40% a year.

Marketplace sellers are the other half of the story

Advertisers on Walmart aren't only big CPG brands buying sponsored listings. In Q4 FY25, Walmart said Walmart Connect growth was helped by a 50% increase in the number of marketplace sellers advertising. And the marketplace itself keeps speeding up.

U.S. marketplace sales grew 52% in Q2 FY27. Nearly half of that marketplace business now flows through WFS, Walmart's fulfillment program for sellers. More third-party sellers means more competition for the same search results, more bidders for the same ad slots, and more listings fighting for the Buy Box on a shared product page.

What it means for brands

If you sell consumer products in the U.S., a few practical points follow from these numbers.

Walmart is no longer a side channel. About $99.6 billion of U.S. online sales is a bigger pool than many brands' planning assumes. If your Walmart content, pricing and stock get less attention than Amazon's, you're leaving a growing share of shelf space to whoever pays attention.

Plan for ad costs to rise with the auction. When ad sales grow 40% while e-commerce grows 25%, more money is chasing each shopper. Watch total ad cost against total sales (TACoS) rather than campaign-level numbers alone, and check whether organic rank is holding up as you spend.

Fix the product data first. Walmart's search, its ads and its new AI shopping agents all read the same catalog fields. On October 21, 2026, Walmart opened a gateway for outside AI agents to shop on a customer's behalf, which we covered in Walmart's agent gateway post. Agents compare attributes, pack sizes and prices directly. Missing fields make a product hard to pick, however much you spend on ads. That is what agentic commerce looks like in practice.

Measure across retailers, not one at a time. Walmart and Amazon report on different calendars and define e-commerce differently, and your own dashboards probably do too. A single view of sales, ad spend and share across marketplaces makes these trends visible early. We explain why in unified marketplace data.

Methodology

Annual e-commerce figures come from the revenue note in Walmart's 10-K filings for fiscal 2021 through fiscal 2026, which give an approximate e-commerce amount for each segment. Our all-Walmart total adds the three segments. The online share divides Walmart U.S. e-commerce by Walmart U.S. net sales from the same table. Quarterly growth rates and annual ad totals are quoted from Walmart's earnings releases, and the Q2 FY27 marketplace and fulfillment figures come from that quarter's presentation and call. Walmart counts store-fulfilled online orders and certain ad arrangements as e-commerce, so its figures are not directly comparable to Amazon's or the Census Bureau's. Full notes and every source are below.