Walmart: The Rival That Was Always BiggerNarrow moat

The comparison people expect to be lopsided is not. Walmart's fiscal 2026 revenue of roughly $713 billion sits within a few billion of Amazon's $717 billion¹ — two of the largest companies in the world, at the same scale, arrived at from opposite directions. Walmart built stores and added digital; Amazon built digital and is slowly adding physical.

Online, though, the gap is not close: Amazon holds roughly 38% of American e-commerce against Walmart's 6%². Walmart's answer has been to compete where its stores are an asset rather than a liability — grocery, which Amazon has never cracked despite Whole Foods, and same-day delivery from locations that already sit near the customer. Its online sales grew about 24%, extending a long streak of double-digit quarters, and it is building the same high-margin adjacencies Amazon did, with an advertising arm growing roughly 46%.

That last detail is the tell: Walmart is not trying to be Amazon, it is copying the parts of Amazon that make money. The competitive question is whether a retailer with 4,600 American stores can convert proximity into the one advantage Amazon cannot replicate quickly. Watch Walmart's e-commerce growth rate against Amazon's North America segment, and watch grocery share — the largest category in retail, and the one where Amazon's twenty-year advantage simply never materialised.