A 10-Year-Old Acquisition Is Finally Paying off Big for Walmart. Should Amazon Investors Be Worried?
Key Points
Walmart didn’t just buy Jet. It effectively acquired Marc Lore and Amazon’s internal playbook.
The combo of Jet + Flipkart helped Walmart scale e-commerce and unlock a fast-growing ad business.
Amazon still leads, but Walmart has more room to grow, especially in higher-margin advertising.
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In August 2016, Walmart (NASDAQ: WMT) paid $3.3 billion for Jet.com, the largest e-commerce acquisition ever at the time. Wall Street was skeptical. Jet was barely a year old, hemorrhaging cash monthly, and had never turned a profit.
Walmart's own e-commerce sales had grown just 0.4% the prior quarter, while Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) was posting $21 billion in quarterly e-commerce revenue. The gap felt insurmountable.
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Walmart shut down the Jet.com brand in 2020. Most people filed that as a $3.3 billion write-off. They were wrong.
What Jet actually delivered was Marc Lore, a founder who had previously sold Diapers.com to Amazon, spent two years inside Amazon learning its entire e-commerce machine, and then left to build a direct competitor. It bought the one person in the world who knew Amazon's playbook from the inside and was motivated to beat it.
Image source: Getty Images.
The Jet.com deal was only the first move for Walmart
Under Lore, Walmart's e-commerce division expanded its online assortment from roughly 8 million items to over 35 million in under a year. U.S. e-commerce grew 29% in 2017, then 63% in the first quarter of 2018. By the time the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Walmart had the infrastructure to absorb a 74% surge in e-commerce in a single quarter.
But the Jet acquisition was only the first move. In 2018, Walmart made its largest acquisition ever: a 77% stake in Flipkart, India's biggest e-commerce platform, for $16 billion. The market hated it initially; the stock dropped 4% on announcement day, and analysts flagged a $0.60 earnings-per-share drag in fiscal 2020. India's e-commerce market, then generating $7.5 billion in GMV, was a speculative bet on a decade of growth.
That decade is now. Walmart's Q3 FY26 press release noted that its global e-commerce segment revenue rose 27% for the seventh consecutive quarter of 20%-plus growth, with international e-commerce -- led by Flipkart -- growing over 20%.
In the full fiscal year 2026, Walmart's online sales exceeded $150 billion for the first time. The advertising business -- itself a downstream product of the e-commerce flywheel -- hit $6.4 billion globally in 2025, growing 46% year over year.
Walmart Connect in the U.S. grew 41% in Q4 alone. For context, Amazon's ad business generated $68.6 billion in 2025, growing 22%. Walmart's ad growth rate is more than double Amazon's. That meant that a third of Walmart's operating profit in Q4 came from advertising and membership income. Five years ago, that sentence would have sounded absurd for a company built on low-margin groceries and $5 t-shirts.
Should Amazon investors be worried?
Amazon investors should probably be more worried than they are. Amazon's advertising revenue penetration of its own GMV is roughly 8%, while Walmart's sits around 4%. That gap used to mean Amazon was winning. Now it means Walmart has more runway.
Amazon's CFO John Rainey has acknowledged openly that Walmart still has "a long ways to go to get in the neighborhood of some of the best-in-class competitors" -- meaning Amazon -- but Rainey was saying that about Walmart itself.
The student is closing in on the teacher, and the teacher hasn't built anything in the past 10 years as strategically dense as Flipkart plus Jet stacked together.
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Micah Zimmerman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon and Walmart. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
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