Amazon Takes Five Categories as Walmart Tightens Its Grocery Grip

Consumer retail spending finally leveled out, while ‘order’ categories continued to gain share.

For four straight years, retail’s share of consumer spending was shrinking. It peaked at 34.7% in the second quarter of 2021, at the tail end of pandemic-era shopping, then slid to 31.1% by 2025, a drop of roughly 10%. From April through June 2026, those declines leveled out, with purchases in the order category ticking up slightly to 24%.

Beneath those headline numbers, the kinds of retail purchases that consumers make are shifting. They’re relying less on trips to physical stores and more on online orders. Order categories’ share of the retail market reached a new high in Q2 2026. It hit 24.0% of retail spending, up from 21.1% in 2019. In general, there’s been a gradual shift toward purchases people plan for and usually have delivered rather than pick up on the way home from work.

This shift affects Amazon and Walmart because the two retailers don’t compete evenly across the trip and order categories. Amazon’s eCommerce business obviously skews toward orders, and Walmart’s toward trips, so as order categories’ slice of consumer retail spending creeps upward, that spells good news for Amazon.

Amazon gained the largest lead over Walmart yet.

Amazon captured 9.59% of total U.S. retail spending in Q2 2026, a new high. Walmart, meanwhile, fell to 7.50%, down from 7.72% a year earlier, its first Q2 decline in two years. The gap between them (i.e., Amazon’s share minus Walmart’s) widened to 2.09 percentage points, which is roughly double the 1.05 percentage point gap recorded a year earlier. Amazon now captures roughly 28% more consumer retail spending than Walmart, a complete reversal from 2019, when Walmart’s 7.34% share was nearly double Amazon’s 4.24%.

It’s not all doom and gloom for Walmart, though. While the company’s overall retail share fell, its share of food and beverages spending rose 0.31 percentage points over the same stretch to a Q2 high of 20.97%. In short, Walmart’s slide is concentrated in the categories where Amazon was already ahead, not spread across its whole business.

Amazon is now winning in five of the seven categories that comprise consumer retail spending.

While Walmart may be retaining strength in grocery, Amazon leads in most consumer spending categories. The company gained share year over year in all seven retail categories tracked, and it now leads Walmart in five of them: every order category, plus health and personal care (one of those categories close to the line between trip and order). In the latter category, Amazon’s lead gained 0.44 percentage points year over year.

The categories where Amazon has the largest lead are hardly surprising: sporting and hobby goods, music, and books (+29.8 percentage points); electronics and appliances (+26.8); furniture and home furnishings (+14.3) and clothing and apparel (+11.8).

In grocery, Walmart has a wide 18.0 percentage point lead. The only other category where Walmart is winning is auto parts (+3.3). These are both trip categories, the kind of purchase that still usually sends someone to a physical location.

The retail market has changed a lot since 2019. Four categories have shifted at least 12 percentage points toward Amazon: sporting and hobby goods, music, and books (+18.5 percentage points), furniture and home furnishings (+15.8), electronics and appliances (+14.2) and clothing and apparel (+11.8). (Sums of individual items may not equal totals due to rounding.)

Health and personal care and auto parts rose too. Food and beverages, however, barely budged. Amazon’s own share of the category grew, but Walmart’s grew faster, widening the gap from a 16.6 percentage point lead for Walmart in 2019 to an 18.0 point lead in 2026, a change of just 1.4 percentage points. Grocery looks to be the most stable category and the one most anchored to an actual trip to the store.

At this rate, it would take Amazon almost 100 years to close Walmart’s grocery lead.

That stability is what keeps Walmart in the fight. The food and beverages category makes up roughly 60% of Walmart’s retail business, a share that has held steady since 2019. Moreover, Walmart’s share of overall consumer spending in the category climbed to 21.0% in 2026, up from 18.4% seven years earlier, a Q2 high. Grocery is keeping Walmart relevant in shoppers’ lives, bringing them through the door every week, where they often pick up other items along the way.

Amazon is chipping away at the category, but very slowly. Its share of food and beverage spending grew from 1.78% in 2019 to 2.95% in 2026, a roughly 1.7-fold increase. Still, the gap between the two companies widened slightly in absolute terms, from 16.6 percentage points to 18.0 percentage points. At its current seven-year pace, Amazon would need close to a century to match Walmart’s current share of the grocery aisle.

In general, Amazon and Walmart are increasing their strengths in the categories where they do best, rather than fighting over the same ground. Amazon keeps winning in areas where the store trip has become optional. Walmart has held its footing and even made gains in its grocery stronghold, where most consumers still choose brick-and-mortar.

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Methodology

“Shopping Showdown: Amazon Wins Orders While Walmart Wins Trips,” the September 2026 edition of the PYMNTS Intelligence Share of Wallet: Amazon vs. Walmart series, examines each company’s share of U.S. retail spending as of Q2 2026. The estimates draw on PYMNTS Intelligence’s analysis of Amazon and Walmart quarterly earnings reports, combined with the U.S. Census Bureau’s Monthly Retail Trade Survey and Personal Consumption Expenditures data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Trip categories (food and beverage, health and personal care, auto parts) are goods people typically buy in person on a regular store run—where perishability, urgency, size or immediate need make physical presence useful. Order categories (furniture and home goods, electronics and appliances, clothing and apparel, sporting goods/hobby goods/music/books) are goods that don’t require a store trip. Consumer behavior within order categories varies—from deeply researched purchases like electronics to routine reorders like household staples—but the common feature is that the trip is optional.