eMarketer forecast: Walmart to overtake Apple as No. 3 US online retailer by the end of 2018, after capturing 4% of all online retail spending, up 39.4% YoY
Big-box retailer has one of the fastest-growing online businesses — Heading into the fiercely competitive holiday shopping season …
Context & Ripple Effects
This forecast caps a two-year climb: Walmart grew its online catalog from 10M to 50M items through 63% YoY sales growth in early 2017, and eMarketer now projects it passing Apple for the No. 3 spot with 4% of US online retail spending, up 39.4% YoY heading into the holidays. The ceiling remains Amazon, which eMarketer pegs at nearly half of all US online spend in its $258B 2018 estimate.
The significance is that a brick-and-mortar grocer, not a consumer-electronics brand, is becoming the credible No. 3 — and the mechanism is groceries, which Walmart would confirm months later when it reported 43% YoY US e-commerce growth in Q4 driven by grocery pickup and delivery.
First-order effects
- Apple drops to No. 4 in US online retail by year-end 2018 per eMarketer, while Walmart enters the holiday season with one of the fastest-growing e-commerce businesses among large retailers.
- Amazon's ~49% share of US online spending is untouched by this move — the contest is for the distant No. 3 position, not the top.
Second-order effects
- Grocery becomes Walmart's e-commerce engine: pickup and delivery turn thousands of existing stores into fulfillment infrastructure, a cost structure pure-play online rivals cannot easily replicate — validated by the 43% Q4 growth reported after this forecast.
- Target, Best Buy, and other big-box retailers face pressure to match Walmart's grocery-and-store-fulfillment model or cede the mid-tier of online retail to it and Amazon.
Third-order effects
- Scaled first-party transaction data from grocery-led e-commerce sets up Walmart's later monetization layer — the retail media business that reached $3.7B in projected 2024 revenue per eMarketer — turning market-share gains into a high-margin advertising platform.
- If the pattern holds, US online retail stratifies into Amazon at scale, Walmart as the store-anchored challenger, and everyone else competing for single-digit shares — with rankings increasingly decided by fulfillment networks rather than product categories.
The trend: Brick-and-mortar retailers are converting store networks into e-commerce and retail-media platforms, steadily eroding the gap between traditional chains and digital-native leaders like Amazon.