Walmart says its US e-commerce sales grew 79% YoY in Q3
- Walmart's U.S. e-commerce sales soared by 79% in the third quarter, as customers continued to shop online during the coronavirus pandemic. — Instead of browsing store aisles, more customers are shipping purchases to their homes …
Context & Ripple Effects
Walmart's online growth has been compounding for years before the pandemic hit: the catalog expansion that took Walmart.com from 10M to 50M items powered 63% YoY growth back in Q1 2017, and the grocery pickup-and-delivery buildout drove another 43% quarter in early 2019. eMarketer had already forecast Walmart overtaking Apple as the No. 3 US online retailer on roughly 4% of US online spending.
Q3's 79% surge is that trajectory under acceleration: with shoppers avoiding store aisles, the grocery-led fulfillment machine Walmart spent years building became the default channel rather than the convenience option.
First-order effects
- US shoppers are shifting from browsing aisles to shipping purchases home, putting Walmart's grocery pickup and delivery infrastructure — not its stores — at the center of the customer relationship this quarter.
Second-order effects
- That e-commerce traffic is the audience feeding Walmart's higher-margin adjacencies: the related coverage shows its US ad business growing 30% a year later, with eMarketer projecting $3.7B in 2024 US retail media revenue, and the same rapid-delivery playbook scaling internationally through Sam's Club in China.
Third-order effects
- If pandemic-era habits hold, Walmart cements the top-three US online retail position eMarketer forecast, and its e-commerce scale becomes the foundation for an ads-and-membership profit pool layered on top of low-margin retail — the same structure Amazon built.
The trend: Walmart's grocery-led e-commerce buildout is converting pandemic-driven adoption into durable US online market share and a retail-media profit engine.