Amazon has surpassed Walmart as the world's top retail seller outside China; FactSet says people spent $610B+ on Amazon in the 12 months ending in June
Proof that the online future has arrived: The biggest e-commerce company outside China has unseated the biggest brick-and-mortar seller.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second time Amazon has crossed Walmart, but the first on selling volume rather than stock price: back in July 2015, Amazon's market cap passed Walmart's while its actual sales still trailed far behind. FactSet's tally — more than $610B spent on Amazon in the 12 months ending in June — is the moment the volume crown itself flips.
The gap had been narrowing for years: eMarketer flagged Walmart's online push as early as 2018, forecasting it would pass Apple as the No. 3 US online retailer on the strength of 39% annual growth. What this 2021 milestone set up came later in the record — Amazon taking the quarterly revenue lead in early 2025, then dethroning Walmart in full annual revenue in 2026.
First-order effects
- Walmart loses its status as the world's largest retail seller outside China, meaning suppliers and brand partners deciding where shelf space lives now face an Amazon whose annual sales volume is, for the first time, the benchmark they measure against.
- Amazon gains a clean, investor-legible scale metric: FactSet's $610B+ trailing-twelve-month spend figure lets Wall Street compare the two companies' retail businesses head-to-head instead of arguing across business models.
Second-order effects
- Walmart's counter-move is visible in the coverage trail — its e-commerce build-out, the one eMarketer tracked in 2018, shifts from side bet to core strategy, because store-count dominance no longer decides who ranks No. 1 in retail.
- Capital and supplier attention reprice around fulfillment and online-catalog economics rather than physical footprint, pressuring every brick-and-mortar-first retailer that competes with either company.
Third-order effects
- The pattern held through the rest of the record: Amazon passed Walmart in quarterly revenue in February 2025 and then took the full-year title in 2026, reporting $717B in sales versus Walmart's $713.2B — the retail crown converting into the largest-company-by-revenue crown.
- Structurally, industry rank in retail now tracks digital catalog breadth and logistics scale rather than store networks, leaving physical-footprint leaders competing from behind on the very metric that defines the top spot.
The trend: Global retail leadership has shifted from the operator with the most stores to the one with the largest online catalog — a handover that ran from Amazon's 2015 market-cap crossover to its 2026 dethroning of Walmart in total revenue.