Amazon Just Ended Walmart's 13-Year Reign. Don't Get Too Excited.
Walmart held the title of America's biggest retailer for 13 years straight. Not anymore.
In February, Walmart reported $713.2 billion in revenue for its fiscal year, its highest ever. Two weeks earlier, Amazon had already posted $716.9 billion. A few hundred million dollars settled a rivalry that's been building since Amazon was selling books out of a garage. By June, J.P. Morgan confirmed Amazon had also passed Walmart in gross merchandise value, the number that reflects retail sales instead of AWS and ad revenue padding the total. Amazon now controls something like 47% of U.S. ecommerce and 9.3% of all consumer retail spending, compared to Walmart's 7.8%.
Cue the headlines. Everyone loves a changing of the guard.
Then Prime Day 2026 happened, and the plot got a little more interesting. The event pulled in $26.4 billion in U.S. sales over four days, up 9.3% from 2025's $24.1 billion haul. That's a real number worth celebrating if you're on Amazon's investor relations team. But that growth came partly from stretching the event to four days instead of two, and from leaning harder on discounts, not from shoppers suddenly discovering more money. Electronics went from 23% off in 2025 to 24% this year. Computers jumped from 13% off to 15%. Sporting goods, toys, and TVs all went deeper too. Mobile carried more than half the sales, and buy now, pay later touched $2.1 billion in orders. None of that reads like a market where demand is exploding. It reads like a market where the platform is working harder to get the same shopper to click “buy.”
Which lines up uncomfortably well with what's coming next. eMarketer is projecting 6.6% ecommerce growth for the 2026 holiday season, basically flat with 2025. That's the second year running that holiday growth has trailed the rest of the year instead of spiking above it. Shoppers aren't disappearing. They're just spreading purchases out instead of blowing the budget in one November weekend, which is a far less exciting sentence than “record holiday sales expected,” but it's apparently the actual state of things.
Meanwhile, Amazon isn't exactly making the back end easier for sellers heading into that flatter holiday season. According to seller-fee trackers monitoring Amazon's 2026 rate card, the peak fulfillment surcharge kicks in October 15 and runs through January 14, adding roughly $0.32 to every unit shipped out of a fulfillment center. Storage fees jump too, from $0.87 per cubic foot in the Jan-through-September window to $2.40 in October through December for standard-size inventory. And the aged-inventory surcharge, which used to give sellers 271 days before penalizing slow-moving stock, reportedly now kicks in at 180 days. Translation: Amazon is charging more to hold and ship your inventory during the exact stretch when eMarketer says shoppers will be spending at roughly the same modest pace as last year.
So, here's the part that matters if you sell on Amazon and don't just watch it from the sidelines: being the biggest retailer in the country doesn't mean the pie is getting bigger for everyone selling into it. Amazon's growth right now looks a lot more like winning share away from Walmart and everyone else than like new demand showing up out of nowhere. That's a fine story for Amazon's board. It's a different story for a brand that assumed “Amazon had a record Prime Day” automatically means “my Prime Day sales will take care of themselves.”
If discount depth is what's driving Amazon's topline up, and holiday growth is stuck around last year's modest pace, the brands that come out ahead this Q4 are going to be the ones with an actual plan, not the ones coasting on platform-level momentum. That means locking in your deal calendar and inventory timing early, since Amazon already moved several holiday deadlines up this cycle. It means building demand off-platform through social and UGC so you're not solely dependent on organic Amazon traffic. And it means being honest with yourself about whether your margins can survive matching a 24%-off-electronics-style discount if your category needs to keep pace, on top of higher storage and fulfillment fees for the same three months.
Amazon is also holding its annual seller conference, Amazon Accelerate, September 22 through 24 in Seattle, which is usually where the next round of tools and program tweaks for the FBA New Selection Program and listing optimization gets announced. Worth watching if you want to know what's changing before your competitors do, rather than after.
Amazon being bigger than Walmart makes for a great headline. It doesn't make your November easier. That part's still on you.