Walmart’s investments in value, genAI, and advertising paid off in 2024

The overview: Walmart is flying high. The retailer’s reputation as a destination for cost savings is fueling steady growth as more shoppers across all income levels turn to it for everyday needs. At the same time, the company is challenging Amazon’s ecommerce dominance with investments in fast delivery, its Walmart+ program, and its rapidly expanding online marketplace.

Here’s a look back at some of Walmart’s notable achievements in the past year.

Walmart made inroads with a broad swath of shoppers. Customers of all income levels are turning to Walmart more often thanks to its low prices, convenience, and rapidly expanding marketplace.

• Three-quarters of the retailer’s share gains in 2024 came from higher-income consumers visiting Walmart for groceries and general merchandise like apparel. They’re also willing to pay more for faster delivery options.
• Walmart is courting those customers with a broader array of premium products across a number of categories, including grocery, beauty, and apparel.
• The retailer is also broadening its appeal to shoppers via its marketplace, which has expanded its assortment by nearly 700 million SKUs. Those efforts are paying off: Marketplace sales grew 42% YoY in Q3, the fifth-straight quarter of growth over 30%.

Walmart went all in on generative AI (genAI). The retailer made its ambitions clear in January, when it beat Amazon to the punch by rolling out genAI-enhanced search capabilities to mobile shoppers.

Since then, Walmart has launched several genAI-powered features to make the shopping experience more personalized and useful to customers, including:

• A shopping assistant that can answer shoppers’ questions and direct them to relevant products
• AI-generated product reviews, summaries, and comparisons to help customers decide which items best fulfill their needs
• And a customer support assistant that can identify who the shopper is from the start and take actions like find orders and manage returns—leading to better, faster customer service

All of those improvements are in service of Walmart’s broader goal: tailoring the customer experience based on shoppers’ wants, needs, and preferences—no matter how they choose to shop. By offering consumers convenience, personalization, and a seamless omnichannel experience, the retailer hopes to become their first port of call in their shopping journeys.

The retailer made big advertising moves, most notably its $2.3 billion acquisition of smart TV manufacturer Vizio. That deal gives Walmart entry into the lucrative world of CTV advertising, which provides a new revenue stream and makes its Walmart Connect retail media network more attractive to advertisers.

Other notable advertising updates this year include:

• Partnering with Disney Advertising so brands can target ads across Disney+ and Hulu using its shopper data
• Teaming up with NBCUniversal for shoppable ads during live sports, including the Thanksgiving Day NFL game
• Opening up offsite media to non-endemic brands
• Letting third-party sellers purchase onsite display placements on its web and mobile properties for the first time

Those initiatives enabled Walmart to grow ad revenues by 31.6% this year to $3.87 billion, per our forecast; we expect the retailer to maintain its heady momentum in 2025 thanks to increased ad spend from its marketplace sellers and growing interest in in-store retail media.

The year ahead: Walmart is in an extremely favorable position heading into 2025. Its reputation for value is helping make its offerings stickier for households of all income levels—which in turn is accelerating its ecommerce and advertising businesses.

That said, the imposition of tariffs next year could be a drag on the retailer’s performance— particularly general merchandise sales, which are only now showing signs of recovery.

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