Walmart’s U.S. third-party marketplace grew nearly 50% year-over-year in the first quarter of fiscal 2027 (the quarter ending April 30, 2026). On the earnings call, CFO John David Rainey said third-party marketplace sales growth reached its highest level in two and a half years. For sellers weighing where to put a second-channel bet, the signal is straightforward: Walmart’s marketplace is compounding faster than at almost any point since it opened to international sellers, and it’s doing so from a base small enough that there’s a long runway left to grow into.
A Small Base With a Long Runway
That base is the context the headline growth number needs. Walmart’s marketplace GMV is estimated at roughly $15 billion — around 10% of its roughly $150 billion U.S. e-commerce business — compared with an estimated 69% of Amazon’s roughly $440 billion in U.S. GMV coming from third-party sellers. Walmart’s marketplace is accelerating precisely because it’s still early in that mix. The two companies are also finding growth from different directions: Amazon’s own first-party retail business has clawed back unit share from its sellers for two straight quarters, while Walmart’s growth is running the opposite way, led by third-party sellers expanding what the site can sell.
This Momentum Didn’t Start This Quarter
It’s worth noting this isn’t a sudden inflection so much as a continuation. Walmart’s marketplace was already growing roughly 50% year-over-year back in mid-2024, when its active seller base crossed 150,000 — up from just 50,000 as recently as 2022. By mid-2025 that had reached 200,000 active sellers, with 44,000 added in the first five months of that year alone. The current quarter’s near-50% growth rate isn’t a new peak so much as a continuation of a run that’s now stretched across multiple years, which argues the underlying demand shift is durable rather than a single strong quarter.
The Flywheel Driving It
Growth is being driven by the same seller-facing investments that have reshaped Walmart’s e-commerce economics more broadly. Its U.S. e-commerce operation, which lost more than $1 billion annually as recently as 2019, was profitable in every quarter of fiscal 2026, and the marketplace — which carries no inventory risk for Walmart — is central to that turnaround. Units shipped same-day or next-day through Walmart Fulfillment Services grew nearly 150% in the quarter, and Walmart can now reach roughly 60% of U.S. households within 30 minutes. Rainey directly credited those delivery-speed investments for the marketplace’s momentum, and Walmart’s dark-store fulfillment push is part of the same infrastructure buildout behind that speed.
- WFS adoption has long shaped where listings appear in Walmart’s search results, so faster fulfillment and better search placement reinforce each other.
- Walmart Connect, the advertising platform where sellers bid for placement, grew 44% excluding a one-time VIZIO comparison distortion.
- Third-party seller advertising spend rose more than 50% in the quarter as sellers competed harder for visibility inside a growing marketplace.
Assortment, delivery speed, and advertising are reinforcing each other in a single loop: faster delivery drives more visits and purchase frequency, which attracts more sellers and more advertising spend, which funds more of the infrastructure that makes delivery faster.
Cross-Border Expansion Extends the Same Playbook
Walmart has an estimated 200,000 active sellers on its marketplace, and it used the quarter to open new geography rather than just add more U.S. competition: a cross-border marketplace launch into Canada and Mexico, extending what Walmart describes as a “build once, scale globally” platform approach. For sellers already established on Walmart, that’s a path into new markets through infrastructure they’re already using, rather than simply more sellers competing for the same American shoppers.
What This Means for Sellers Weighing a Second Channel
Walmart’s marketplace remains a fraction of Amazon’s size, but the combination of faster growth, improving profitability, and integrated fulfillment/advertising/delivery is what turns a smaller marketplace into a genuinely compelling one rather than just a hedge. A few things worth weighing directly:
- Walmart’s seller approval process is more selective than Amazon’s, which means less competition once approved — a real advantage for a brand that qualifies, and a real barrier for one that doesn’t yet.
- WFS adoption isn’t optional in practice if search visibility matters: fulfillment speed is directly tied to placement, the same way Prime eligibility shapes Amazon’s Buy Box.
- Advertising costs are rising as more sellers compete for the same growing pool of Walmart Connect placements — entering earlier in a category’s growth curve is generally cheaper than entering after competitors have already bid up placement.
For a brand seriously considering this move, setting up and optimizing a Walmart Seller Central account is the practical starting point — catalog setup, WFS enrollment, and Walmart Connect all work meaningfully differently from their Amazon equivalents, and treating Walmart as “Amazon with different branding” is the most common way sellers underperform there.
The Bottom Line
Walmart’s marketplace is growing several times faster than the broader e-commerce market, it’s getting more profitable rather than less, and it’s now extending the same fulfillment-advertising-delivery integration into new countries. None of that makes it a replacement for Amazon for most sellers — the scale gap is still enormous. But for a brand managing multiple marketplaces from one system, this is one of the stronger moments in the marketplace’s history to add it as a genuine second channel rather than a token listing, since the infrastructure now backing it wasn’t there even two years ago.
