Amazon Dethrones Walmart as Top US Retailer by GMV

Amazon became the largest retailer in the United States by gross merchandise value sometime in 2025, and the pressure now lands hardest on Walmart, brands and sellers that built their retail plans around the old store-first order. The Amazon top US retailer shift was reported by Seeking Alpha citing J.P. Morgan, according to PYMNTS.

The headline is bigger than bragging rights. XOOMAR analysis: Amazon has turned retail scale into a machine built on selection, pricing, delivery speed and platform monetization. Walmart still has enormous reach, especially in groceries and stores, but the center of gravity has moved toward commerce systems that don’t need aisles to control the basket.

Amazon top US retailer by GMV: Walmart’s store-first advantage hits its limit

J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth and his team attributed Amazon’s gains to selection, pricing and fast delivery, per the PYMNTS report. That matters because this was not framed as a narrow online win. It was a U.S. retail GMV win.

GMV is not the same as net sales. It captures the total value of goods sold through a platform, including marketplace activity. That distinction is central to understanding why Amazon can look larger by platform volume while Walmart still remains a massive retailer with a different mix of stores, groceries, first-party retail and online sales.

The key question for Walmart is blunt: can a store network beat a platform when shoppers increasingly expect endless selection and fast delivery in the same transaction?

PYMNTS Intelligence found that Amazon surpassed Walmart in share of consumer retail spending in the first quarter of 2024. By the first quarter of 2026, Amazon held a 9.3% share, up from 8.6% a year earlier. Walmart held 7.8%, unchanged from the first quarter of 2025.

“These are precisely the goods that travel well in a box, delivered the same day or the next in most cases,” the PYMNTS Intelligence report said. “Amazon wins them all without owning a single aisle of shelf space.”

That sentence captures the structural problem for Walmart. The store still drives traffic. But many higher-fit retail categories no longer require the store at all.

Investors should separate Amazon’s GMV crown from revenue optics

Amazon’s retail lead looks different depending on the metric. PYMNTS reported Amazon became the largest U.S. retailer by GMV sometime in 2025. CNN separately reported that Amazon posted $717 billion in sales in 2025, while Walmart recorded $713 billion.

CNN reported that Amazon’s revenue growth in cloud computing, advertising and other businesses helped it overtake Walmart by sales. It also reported that Amazon Web Services brought in nearly $129 billion last year, while Amazon generated more than $100 billion combined from advertising and Prime subscriptions.

For investors, the question is this: is Amazon’s retail business valuable because it sells goods, or because it routes commerce into higher-margin businesses around ads, subscriptions, seller services and cloud-supported infrastructure?

XOOMAR analysis: GMV leadership strengthens Amazon’s long-term story even if retail margins remain pressured, because the retail interface feeds multiple profit pools. Walmart’s scale is still real, but Amazon’s model monetizes the transaction before, during and after checkout.

Sellers and brands now operate inside Amazon’s marketplace gravity

PYMNTS said Amazon’s retail business outpaced broader eCommerce market growth in the first quarter, and J.P. Morgan estimated Amazon now holds 47% of the U.S. eCommerce market. That gives sellers access to enormous demand. It also makes Amazon harder to avoid.

Third-party marketplace volume is the core difference between Amazon’s model and a traditional retailer. Amazon can expand selection without owning every unit of inventory. More selection attracts more shoppers. More shoppers attract more sellers. More sellers deepen selection and sharpen price competition. Fast delivery then locks more spending into the same interface.

Where does that leave brands that need Amazon but don’t want to surrender the customer relationship?

XOOMAR analysis: The tradeoff is access versus dependence. The PYMNTS data supports the access side clearly. The dependence side follows from Amazon’s market share and category strength, but the supplied source does not provide seller fee, ad cost or platform-rule data, so those remain areas to verify before drawing harder conclusions.

The current sales calendar shows how tightly Amazon has trained shopper attention. Prime Day ran June 23-26, while Walmart Deals ran June 22-28, according to PYMNTS. For related XOOMAR coverage on the promotional battle around that window, see Anti-Prime Day Deals Undercut Amazon's Sale Prices and Walmart Connected TV Advertising Ignites Prime Day Data War.

Walmart shoppers still give the chain a grocery moat Amazon hasn’t matched

Walmart is not collapsing. PYMNTS Intelligence found that Walmart still has a greater share in food and beverages and auto parts. CNN reported Walmart’s U.S. sales grew 4.6% last quarter, led by middle-class and upper-income households trying to save money.

That makes groceries the clearest line of defense. Grocery trips are frequent. They build habit. They keep Walmart relevant in household budgeting even as Amazon pulls ahead in categories that ship well.

Amazon holds a significant lead in four of seven retail categories cited by PYMNTS Intelligence:

• Sporting and hobby goods, music and books
• Electronics and appliances
• Furniture and home furnishing
• Clothing and apparel

Amazon also holds a 0.1 percentage point lead in health and personal care.

Can Walmart turn grocery frequency into broader retail spending again? That is the fight.

Walmart’s new CEO John Furner framed the company as still moving with the market. CNN quoted him saying:

“The pace of change in retail is accelerating. Our financial results show that we’re not only embracing this change, we’re leading it.”

The statement is defensive, but not empty. Walmart still has stores, grocery traffic and household reach. Amazon has the broader GMV lead. Each company controls a different kind of habit.

Buyers, competitors and fintech players face a more platform-controlled retail market

For consumers, the upside is clear from the J.P. Morgan framing: selection, pricing and delivery speed. The cost is less obvious. XOOMAR analysis: when one interface captures more retail intent, shoppers may get convenience while becoming more dependent on a single platform’s search, recommendations and fulfillment defaults.

For retailers, matching Amazon now means competing against more than online prices. They have to compete with delivery expectations, marketplace depth and shopper habit. Walmart’s June sales event shows it is still fighting for the same promotional calendar, but the PYMNTS data shows Amazon has already widened its lead in several non-grocery categories.

For fintech and payments companies, the signal is practical: where retail GMV concentrates, checkout, co-branded cards, seller financing, embedded payments and merchant cash-flow tools become more valuable. The source material does not provide payments data, so this is an inference, not a reported fact.

Which companies benefit if more commerce flows through a small number of dominant retail platforms? That is the next commercial question for banks, processors and fintech infrastructure providers.

Groceries, ads and AI will decide whether Amazon’s lead becomes harder to reverse

Amazon’s next test is not whether it can sell more boxed goods. PYMNTS already shows it leads in several categories that ship well. The harder fight is groceries, household essentials and other repeat purchases where Walmart still has an edge.

Amazon signaled that groceries and household essentials would be a “real focus” of Prime Day, while Walmart offered deals both online and in stores. That is where the battle narrows. Amazon wants more of the weekly basket. Walmart wants to keep grocery traffic from becoming a narrow trip that Amazon monetizes around the edges.

The AI layer could sharpen the divide. Deseret News reported that Walmart has worked with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini on a virtual assistant called Sparky, while Amazon’s Rufus has already helped with over 300 million users and nearly $12 billion in incremental sales last year, according to Amazon as cited by Deseret.

The evidence that would confirm Amazon’s lead is widening: further gains in consumer retail spending share, continued strength in the four categories PYMNTS identified, and progress in groceries and essentials. The evidence that would weaken the thesis: Walmart taking back share outside food, accelerating online sales while defending grocery, or proving that stores can pull digital demand back into its own retail orbit.

For now, Amazon top US retailer is more than a ranking. It’s a signal that retail power has shifted from shelf ownership to transaction control.

The Bottom Line

• Amazon’s rise signals that platform scale is overtaking store-first retail as the main driver of U.S. shopping volume.
• Walmart remains powerful, but its physical-store advantage is under pressure from faster delivery and broader online selection.
• Brands and sellers may need to rebalance retail strategies around Amazon’s marketplace influence and GMV leadership.