Walmart wins the trip. Amazon wins the basket. It’s an equation gaining urgency as the retail behemoths compete for precious and fragile consumer spending. Walmart pulls tens of millions of people through its doors every week for the fridge-replenishment run, anchored by groceries. The conventional logic is that the grocery trip should carry the rest of the cart along with it. The consumer is already in the store. They can touch and feel the shirt, test the bike, weigh the cookware and drop any of it in the same basket as the milk. That’s the advantage eCommerce spent two decades and billions of dollars trying to replicate. Walmart has it for free, every week.
And yet Walmart is losing the broader cart.
The data beneath Walmart’s flat retail share compared to rival Amazon shows two businesses moving in opposite directions. One is the trip, and Walmart owns it. The other is the considered order, the things people decide they want and have shipped. Amazon owns that by a widening margin. The interesting part isn’t that Amazon is winning the order. It’s that the in-person trip, which should be Walmart’s launch pad into the online order, has stopped springing.
The trip belongs to Walmart
Start with the number that looks like a problem but is actually a fortress. Walmart’s share of total U.S. retail spending has sat inside a narrow band, roughly 7.2% to 7.8%, for seven straight years. Read as a growth story, that’s stagnation and a wall around the weekly run.
Groceries are the purest expression of that run. They are heavy, perishable and usually better fetched than shipped. Fresh food doesn’t stockpile, travel cheaply or wait, so the store is usually the better source for it. That’s why Walmart’s hold is both large and durable.
The size of the hold is striking. In Q1 2026, Walmart led Amazon by nearly 18 percentage points of category share in food and beverage. That’s the category Amazon is struggling most to enter. Amazon added just 0.2 percentage points of share in food and beverage over the year, its slowest gain anywhere, against more than a full point in categories like sporting and hobby goods, books, and music. Walmart’s moat is obvious.
The basket is the considered order, and Amazon owns it
The other half of retail spending behaves nothing like the grocery run. It’s furniture the consumer decides to replace, the laptop they research, the jacket they finally buy or the bike they wanted to snatch up for their kid. These considered orders ship well, don’t need to happen today and don’t require a trip to the store. They are, in other words, built for Amazon, and the share data says Amazon has taken them.
Across all retail, Amazon now holds about 19% more share than Walmart, 9.3% against 7.8%. This is the widest that distance has been recorded in a first quarter since Amazon first passed Walmart in 2024.
Amazon now leads significantly in four of the seven retail categories. In sporting and hobby goods, music, and books, it leads Walmart by nearly 28 percentage points. For electronics and appliances, it dominates by 24 percentage points. In furniture and home, by 13 percentage points. In clothing and apparel, by 11 percentage points. These are precisely the goods that travel well in a box, delivered the same day or the next in most cases. Amazon wins them all without owning a single aisle of shelf space.
It’s worth being fair to the obvious counterpoint here, which is that Amazon is simply the better eCommerce operator. The quarter supports that thesis. Amazon reached 9.28% of U.S. retail spending in Q1 2026, a record for any first quarter. That’s 8.1% growth in its retail share year over year, after a 2025 that saw its share grow by less than 1%. Amazon also gave back less share coming out of the holiday than it did a year earlier. Still, none of that explains why Walmart’s one structural weapon, the in-person trip, isn’t firing.
The inversion: the trip should win the basket, and it doesn’t
Here’s the puzzle: The oldest idea in mass retail is that you take a thin margin on groceries to drive the trip, and then you make the real money on the general merchandise people pick up while they are there. Grocery is the bait. The cart is the catch. Walmart is winning the bait and losing the catch.
Picture the mechanics that the store model is supposed to guarantee. A shopper is in the store for the weekly food run. The clothing racks are thirty feet from the produce. The home section is on the way to the registers. The shopper can pick up a throw pillow, check the fabric, decide on the spot and walk out with it in the same basket as their groceries. Proximity and inspection are the two things a store is supposed to be unbeatable at, and Walmart has both, for free, on every visit.
But the data shows it’s not converting. The shopper is making the run at Walmart and placing that considered order with Amazon—or simply not putting the item in the Walmart basket at all.
In Q1 2026, Walmart held 10.35% of retail spending in the trip categories and just 5.87% in the considered order categories. Its trip share is about 76% higher than its order share, the widest that distance has ever been.
The distance between Walmart’s two halves has grown more than five-fold since 2019. The same store, the same traffic, the same proximity, yet the order half keeps slipping while the trip half climbs. The lever is connected to nothing.
Why it matters: the margin is in the half that Walmart is losing
The backdrop makes the inversion expensive. Retail is shrinking inside the consumer wallet. It fell to 30.7% of U.S. personal consumption in Q1 2026, the lowest first-quarter share in the series, as healthcare and financial services take a growing share of the pocketbook. Within that smaller retail pie, the considered-order categories are growing as a share, reaching a fresh post-pandemic high as a share of retail.
In other words, the half of retail that Walmart is losing is the half that’s growing. It’s also the half where the margin lives. The trip is the hardest part of retail to make money on. It’s high-volume, low-margin and logistically punishing, and Walmart is defending that piece well. The order is where the dollars are healthier, and that’s the half walking out the door to Amazon. Walmart’s position is a strong defense of a low-margin castle, while the high-margin territory is ceded to a competitor that never needed the castle in the first place.
Which leaves the question that the next several quarters will answer. Walmart isn’t standing still. It has Walmart+, in-store and curbside pickup, a marketplace that keeps widening and the most valuable thing in retail: a reason for people to show up in person every week. It has OnePay, which offers financing for the goods that Walmart shoppers aren’t putting in their baskets. The question is whether any of that can reconnect the lever to non-grocery spending and whether the in-person trip can pull the basket again, the way the old model promised it would.
Or whether the trip and the basket have become two different businesses, one that Walmart owns and one that Amazon does, sharing a parking lot and almost nothing else.
About the data
For the latest edition of the “Share of Wallet: Amazon vs. Walmart,” a PYMNTS Intelligence exclusive series, estimates are based on Amazon and Walmart quarterly earnings reports, the U.S. Census Bureau Monthly Retail Trade Survey and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis Personal Consumption Expenditures series. Category share figures reflect each company’s share of U.S. consumer retail spending within a category for Q1 2026. Trip and order groupings are an editorial overlay on the report’s category data and describe how a good is purchased, not whether it is needed.
