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Walmart rolls out series of initiatives to attract customers to its stores and boost ecommerce business: The retailer is opening a cashierless Sam鈥檚 Club store, adding pet care centers, and automating more distribution centers.

Over 360 Walmart locations have a Claire's store-within-a-store, as part of a partnership in which Claire鈥檚 accessories and jewelry are available in more than 2,500 Walmart stores. Walmart is also working with pop-up shop marketplace platform Popable to allow small businesses to rent retail space in Walmart stores across the country for short-term leases.

Retail marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, and Shopify have incorporated generative AI into their platforms to help merchants and consumers alike, while companies like The Coca-Cola Co. and Abercrombie & Fitch are even using it to develop new products. The lesson: ChatGPT introduced the world to generative AI, and the explosion it set off will have rippling effects for years to come.

Amazon late last year launched its own low-cost marketplace, Haul, where products retail for $20 or less. It also cut its commissions in some key categories. At the same time, Amazon is on a relentless push to lean into its Prime advantage鈥攆ast delivery times鈥攖o keep shoppers clicking the buy button.

Amazon accounted for 80% of marketplace sales, 40% of ecommerce sales, and 4% of retail sales in the US in 2023, per Marketplace Pulse.

Walmart Connect and international expansion power retail giant to 26% advertising growth. Walmart's global advertising revenues rose 26% in Q2 as the US-focused Walmart Connect division outperformed with 30% growth. Walmart Connect's growth has been fueled by a surge in advertiser participation, including marketplace sellers.

Last week, retail marketplaces Thrive Market and Faire joined the growing number of retail media.

Semrush data cited by Reuters found that Temu and Shein were buying Google ad space on search terms like 鈥淲补濒尘补谤迟 Black Friday,鈥� 鈥淏ed Bath Beyond,鈥� 鈥淲补濒尘补谤迟 Clothes,鈥� and other key terms with major competing brands in hopes of targeting consumers during the Cyber Five. CPCs on 鈥淲补濒尘补谤迟 Clothes鈥� increased 16 times from August 2022 to August 2024.

And ultimately I think that would hurt the small and mid-sized retailers that rely on these marketplaces to drive sales. Marcus Johnson:. So, it's a big deal, as you said, marketplace sales going up is 60% of the sales more than on Amazon's site coming from third party sellers. As you mentioned as well, this could affect all marketplaces: Walmart, eBay, beyond, so not just Amazon's.

This could make consumers more comfortable with using these payments, increasing adoption, especially as big names like Walmart start to offer the payment method. Increases digital wallet competition. Given it鈥檚 now easier to switch between different providers, digital wallets will now have to work harder to keep their users.

Walmart has expanded its beauty assortment to draw Gen Zers and younger shoppers with buzzy beauty brands such as Bubble, Dossier, and Jake Paul鈥檚 W. It has also launched Premium Beauty on its fast-growing third-party ecommerce marketplace. Target鈥檚 partnership with Ulta Beauty to put shop-in-shops in hundreds of stores across the country has yielded positive results.

But No. 2 Walmart will be a big ecommerce winner: Its holiday season online sales will rise 16.8% to $20.37 billion this year. Walmart will see strong growth as it continues to ride the grocery ecommerce wave, absorb consumers who are trading down, and benefit from its expanding ecommerce marketplace.

At least five retailers and marketplaces in Canada鈥攍ed by Advance鈥攁re on buyers鈥� radar, per our survey. But they still have much work to do to steal share from Amazon Ads and Walmart Connect, the latter of which is No. 2 in buyer awareness and activity. Download our survey data in full here.

Marketplaces (eBay, Amazon). Mass merchandisers (Walmart, Target, Best Buy). Discount warehouses (Costco Wholesale). Grocers (The Kroger Co.). Department stores (Macy鈥檚). Category specialists (The Home Depot). Delivery services that support retailers (Instacart). Retail media鈥檚 scope is expanding as networks move further into video and CTV.

Walmart and Amazon see (mostly) clear skies ahead while Target warns of headwinds. Mass merchants Amazon, Walmart, and Target presented varying pictures of consumer spending in Q3.

You got a strong competitor like Walmart building up their marketplace pretty well right now so I do wonder about the long term ramifications of those increased fees. Marcus: Yeah. Really quickly, you mentioned store sales. So physical stores net sales. So it's about a four percent share of the pie for Amazon and they grew 11 percent full year making about 19 billion dollars.

But back in April, they announced that they were seeing positive growth from marketplace sellers within sponsored search ads so they opened up sponsored display ads to marketplace sellers and they pointed to that as being one of the key drivers of their growth. So they're innovating, they're iterating.

Amazon will continue to gain market share, but new competition from Temu, Walmart, and other retailers could stunt future dominance.

D2C brands will need to become adept at the cost-effective buying of sponsored product ads on retail media networks (RMNs) as they look to retailers and marketplaces for sales growth. With Amazon鈥檚 ad marketplace becoming increasingly competitive, D2C brands should look to fast-evolving RMNs like Walmart Connect and Roundel (Target) to deliver improved ROAS.

Not just Temu and Shein, but places like Walmart, which has launched another marketplace to compete with Amazon as well. Sara Lebow:. It's really wild to be talking about Amazon as no longer the cheapest option.

Walmart, in particular, has emerged as a strong competitor as it builds out its marketplace capabilities. Amazon works on its physical presence: In Q4, Amazon grew physical store sales by 6%. Though brick-and-mortar business is a small percentage of Amazon鈥檚 total business, it鈥檚 been the subject of much discussion in the past few months.

While Amazon has a definite advantage over competitors given the strength of its marketplace and Prime offering, it鈥檚 facing competition from the likes of Roku, Disney, and Walmart鈥攖he latter having quietly paused its live commerce experiments in favor of testing interactive shoppable ads on Peacock.

Today鈥檚 retail media networks fall into five categories: digital marketplaces or platforms (Amazon, Shopify, Etsy), mass merchandise or department stores (Walmart, Target, Macy鈥檚), category specialists (The Kroger Co., CVS, The Home Depot), commerce intermediaries (Uber, Instacart, Gopuff), and other commerce verticals (Expedia, Klarna, Marriott).

Though Amazon and search engines like Google are the No. 1 and No. 2 places consumers start their search for products online, per Jungle Scout鈥檚 Q2 2024 Consumer Trends report, they face competition from other retailers like Walmart and Target, as well as social platforms like TikTok and Pinterest. The catch: Visual search hasn鈥檛 hit mainstream adoption.

And thanks to the marketplace that Amazon and Walmart operate, thanks to the business partnerships that lots of grocers have with CPG brands, those relationships exist already. They maybe not fit together as perfectly as they should be to get business started that day, but they're close enough, and so I think that that's something that we're going to see happen pretty quickly. Sara Lebow:. Yeah.