Walmart's eCommerce Sales Are Surging

Walmart, Inc. is a company of superlatives. It has been leading the Fortune Global 500 list of companies with the highest revenue in the world for years, it is the biggest private employer in the world with a workforce of more than two billion, and it is the most valuable retail company globally with a market capitalization of US$344 billion in 2020 according to Forbes. Walmart is primarily known for its hypermarkets and department stores, which are present across all continents, but it has also become a billion-dollar heavy eCommerce business, generating significant revenue from first-party, marketplace, and multichannel services. As far as Walmart’s first-party eCommerce net sales are concerned, they are contributing an ever-greater share to the company’s overall sales. No wonder, given the more than impressive year-on-year growth rates of Walmart’s first-party eCommerce net sales over the past years:

Walmart’s eCommerce business has been gaining ever more weight in the past few years. While in 2014, first-party online sales were responsible for a tiny share of 2.5% in Walmart’s overall net sales, the share slowly but constantly increased to 4.9% in 2018. In 2019, the share that first-party eCommerce sales contributed to Walmart’s total net sales jumped to 7.6% and made another leap of 4 percentage points in 2020. eCommerce net sales in other words contributed more then four times as big a share to Walmart’s overall net sales in 2020 than they did six years before. A look at the absolute figures is also worthwhile: Two years in a row, Walmart’s total first-party online net sales increased by around 60% year-on-year. 2019 saw an increase of 58% to a total of US$39.7 billion. 2020 then broke all records and brought along a first-party eCommerce net sales increase of a stunning 63% – which by the way comfortably beats competitor Amazon’s growth of close to 40% in pandemic 2020, which for its part was already unprecedented. Walmart runs several online stores, but its main store walmart.com is responsible for the bulk of first-party online sales. Out of the 2020 total, US$41.1 billion or a share of 63% were generated via walmart.com.

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