What Walmart’s $1T market cap means for your brand’s strategy

Walmart joining the $1 trillion market cap club is more than a milestone headline. This is a clear signal that a traditional retailer can now operate in the same weight class as major tech platforms.

The market is rewarding a very specific shift. Walmart has moved from a low‑margin, store‑first model to an omnichannel engine where commerce, retail media, and membership drive a growing share of profit. eCommerce sales grew 27% and advertising revenue grew 53% in the latest quarter. That growth profile is why a company built on stores now sits in a group dominated by digital‑first firms.. That growth profile is why a company built on stores now sits in a group dominated by digital‑first firms.

For brands, this is your cue to move beyond treating Walmart as “the place we protect base volume.” Understanding where Walmart is investing (in its shopper base and loyalty, in AI surfaces on and off platform, and in a more connected retail media and measurement stack) is one of the most direct ways to grow alongside the retailer. If you align your assortment, data foundations, and media strategy to that growth agenda, Walmart becomes a place to win new shoppers and profitable share, not just hold the line.

The rest of this piece explores:

• How Walmart’s model has evolved over time while maintaining an emphasis on price, selection, and convenience

• How this updated model has expanded Walmart’s shopper base, and how that impacts your approach to assortment

• How to prepare for Walmart’s AI roadmap, and showing up wherever shoppers are searching

• How to think about your Walmart media strategy as a full funnel, measurable way to reach hundreds of thousands of shoppers effectively

How Walmart’s model has changed: from price and pallets to a connected tech ecosystem

Walmart’s core competitive advantages remain the same: a unique balance of price, selection, and convenience. What’s changed is how those strengths are wired together in a tech‑led ecosystem. Today, that ecosystem looks like:

• Price: Everyday value that still anchors big weekly shops and repeat baskets.

• Selection: A blended first‑party and marketplace assortment online that ranges from staple to emerging brands, with store inventory evolving in a similar nature.

• Convenience: The ability to move seamlessly between Walmart’s app and its 4,700 stores, with curbside pickup and same‑day delivery creating a level of convenience most retailers can’t offer.

For shoppers, this is a seamless digital and in‑store shopping experience, backed by curbside and same‑day delivery and made stickier by the Walmart+ loyalty program. This gives brands a way to reach these shoppers in more missions, from the big weekly trip to “need it tonight,” with a clearer line of sight to who they are and how often they come back.

Strategic bets like Jet.com laid the groundwork for scaling Walmart’s Marketplace and building a more flexible eCommerce and fulfilment stack. Add Vizio on the media side and you have a retailer that now spans living room screens, local stores, and mobile checkouts with a more closely tied identity footprint underneath, allowing brands to tie their advertising directly to sales outcomes.

It’s time to rethink the Walmart shopper

A big part of the growth story is who Walmart serves today and how that maps to your portfolio. Value‑focused households still anchor the base: families doing big weekly trips, rural shoppers who rely on the local supercenter, and budget‑conscious consumers stretching every dollar. That’s still the picture many brands hold when they think “Walmart.”

But the mix is shifting in important ways. In Walmart’s Q3 2025 earnings call, CEO Doug McMillon discussed a notable increase in both younger and more affluent shoppers.

• Younger shoppers use Walmart.com and the app for speed and convenience, then see those same brands show up on shelf on their next store trip.

• More affluent households layer Walmart into a broader mix of retailers, often starting digital‑first and expecting premium and emerging brands to be available.

• Loyalty and app usage (Walmart+) deepen Walmart’s relationship with all of these cohorts, making it easier for them to default to Walmart across more missions, not just the stock‑up trip.

That changing shopper base is also reshaping selection. Emerging and insurgent brands launch on marketplace, prove demand, and then get pulled into thousands of stores. This can send a very different signal to a 25–34-year-old or more affluent shopper than a wall of legacy staples.

Many established brands still default to negotiating staple, low‑risk items onto Walmart shelves and into their digital assortments. That approach made sense when the goal was mostly defensive: protect share with value‑seeking families. Today, you need a more proactive plan:

• In line reviews and merchant conversations: Come in with a clear point of view on new products, formats, and price points designed for younger and more affluent Walmart shoppers.

• On marketplace: Use Walmart’s marketplace as the place you do control, where you can showcase new assortment, test innovation aimed at these newer cohorts, and build the proof points that make it easier for merchants to pull those items into stores.

Walmart now functions as a growth environment for a broader mix of shoppers than most brands are planning around, and your Marketplace assortment is often the fastest way to reach them and prove what deserves more shelf space.

Walmart’s AI advantage: winning the query before the cart

Walmart’s AI strategy sits on top of this omnichannel model. The approach that most retailers have taken in regards to AI-driven search has been straightforward: capture traffic wherever it starts, then work to bring that intent into owned surfaces.

On one side, Walmart is plugging into external AI environments. The Gemini partnership and Universal Commerce Protocol integration let shoppers link their Walmart and Sam’s Club accounts into Google’s assistant. When they ask Gemini for “back‑to‑school snacks” or “a lightweight vacuum for pet hair,” Walmart’s catalog, prices, and fulfillment options can show up directly in that conversation, and shoppers can link their Walmart or Sam’s Club account directly to the experience. Additionally, Walmart has parted with OpenAI to enable checkout directly within the ChatGPT interface. These are practical ways to catch demand that begins outside Walmart’s owned channels.

On the other side, Walmart is raising the stakes for journeys that start on its own properties. The goal is simple: get more shoppers to start at Walmart.com or in the app, keep them there, and close the loop from discovery to checkout in a way that’s fully measurable when ads are in the mix.

That’s why Walmart is investing so heavily in its owned AI surfaces. Sparky, Walmart’s AI assistant, is being threaded through that experience as a set of features that refine search, suggest items, help build baskets, and, now, surface ads.

That last piece matters for brands. As Sparky begins to serve ads in more contexts, competition for those AI‑driven results will tighten. Walmart wants Sparky to be the most effective way to get the right Walmart answer, so more queries begin and end inside the Walmart ecosystem.

So what does this mean for brands? To show up in these queries, wherever they are happening, brands must be ready for the AI search revolution. This will require a clean product catalog shaped with machine readability and human language in mind, as well as a re-evaluation of assortment for these often quick, “need to have it now” queries. If your catalog is messy or your offers don’t make sense in Walmart’s context, you’re effectively asking the system to recommend someone else.

Retail media at Walmart: turning reach into measurable trips and baskets

Advertising is the other major pillar of the $1T story. Retail media has become a significant growth engine for Walmart, with ad revenue up 53% in the most recent quarter. The logic feels familiar if you work with other platforms, but Walmart brings its own strengths:

• A growing loyalty footprint: Walmart+ and app usage deepen its view of households and trips across store and online.

• A CTV channel it controls end‑to‑end: The Vizio acquisition gives Walmart a CTV presence it can connect from device to ad stack to cart, tying exposure to in‑store and online sales outcomes.

Looking ahead, a major unlock for Walmart will be further investing in identity resolution and advertiser‑accessible clean‑room style tools that will:

• Make it easier to run precise omnichannel campaigns (CTV, offsite, onsite, in‑store)

• Help brands understand which combinations of media and offers actually moved behavior, not just impressions

Scintilla fits into that broader potential by giving brands a clearer view of in‑store versus online performance today, and how media, pricing, and merchandising interact across both. As Walmart’s broader measurement stack matures, questions like these become easier to answer in one place:

• When we reach a specific audience on CTV or offsite, how does that change eCommerce baskets and in‑store trips?

• Which product and offer combinations perform best when someone sees an ad on a Vizio device and then shops in a supercenter that week?

• How did a specific Walmart Connect activation affect our category share across channels, not just onsite ROAS?

Walmart is working toward a media and measurement environment where campaigns run across channels and you can see store and online performance together, instead of reading each channel in isolation. If you treat Walmart advertising as a series of disconnected tests, you’ll miss the larger efficiency gains as targeting and measurement improve.

Three ways to update your Walmart strategy for 2026

Against this backdrop, a few shifts in how you think about Walmart can change your results.

1. Think beyond “low price” when you plan your portfolio

Yes, Walmart is a value environment and price pressure is real. But it is also one of the few ecosystems where you can reach:

• Value‑focused families running big weekly trips

• Younger shoppers building mostly‑digital habits

• More affluent households that now expect premium and emerging brands to be available

That mix should influence which products you offer. This requires rethinking how you balance marketplace versus first‑party assortment, where you test innovation and premium lines, and move beyond relying on which staples you protect.

2. Treat data foundations as a growth lever

Catalog quality, attributes, creative, and offer structures are no longer exercises in hygiene. They are direct inputs for your products surfacing in Sparky, in Gemini‑powered experiences, and within whatever comes next. As Walmart’s AI surfaces evolve, brands with disciplined catalog management will see their advantage compound. The fact that Sparky already serves ads is a signal: the quality of your data and creative will control how often you show up when it matters.

3. Build Walmart media into a connected, multi‑channel plan

Walmart is investing in exactly what advertisers say they want: better audience construction, cleaner connections between CTV, offsite, onsite, and in‑store, and stronger tools to tie it all together. Your plans should reflect that by:

• Digging into which shopper cohorts drive your business, and build audiences that both deepen loyalty with those shoppers and capture similar new‑to‑brand buyers.

• Linking CTV, offsite, and onsite Walmart Connect activations to in‑store and eCommerce outcomes as this data becomes more widely accessible

• Pushing for measurement that lines up with how you manage your P&L - from incrementality, category share, and repeat purchases, to long‑term value - not just impressions and last‑click ROAS.

Walmart’s move into the $1T market cap club proves that a retailer can compete with, and behave like, a tech platform once it builds a true omnichannel ecosystem. The brands that win will be the ones that take Walmart’s strategy seriously and design their own plans around the way Walmart now acquires, serves, and measures shoppers.