The Business John Furner Inherited — and What It Demands From Suppliers
The Transition That Isn’t Really a Transition
When John Furner officially became Walmart’s president and CEO on February 1, 2026, the coverage was predictable: 32-year company veteran, former Sam’s Club chief, the man who ran Walmart U.S. since 2019. The storyline was continuity. Steady hands. Keep the ship on course.
That framing is accurate as far as it goes. Furner inherited a business posting full-year net sales growth of 4.8% to 5.1%, its 11th consecutive quarter of double-digit U.S. e-commerce gains, and a market cap that crossed $1 trillion in early February. Doug McMillon left him a company that is, by most measures, performing well. The Nasdaq listing in December 2025, the AI partnerships with OpenAI and Google, the company’s first profitable e-commerce quarter in May 2025 — all of it reflects a retailer that has spent a decade repositioning how it competes and, more specifically, how it makes money.
But for Walmart’s suppliers and marketplace sellers, continuity at the CEO level is not the same thing as continuity in vendor expectations. The platform Furner inherited is structurally different from the one his predecessor was running in 2020, and it is still moving. The useful question is not what changes under Furner. It is whether your business is calibrated to the version of Walmart that already exists.
How Walmart Makes Money Now
The clearest way to understand what the Furner era demands from suppliers is to look at where Walmart’s growth is actually coming from — not at the topline, but underneath it.
In fiscal 2025, Walmart generated $4.4 billion in global advertising revenue. Its U.S. retail media business, Walmart Connect, grew between 22% and 33% in every quarter for more than two years running — consistently outpacing both total sales and e-commerce growth in those same periods. In the first quarter of fiscal 2026, global advertising grew 50% while total company revenue grew 2.5%. CFO John David Rainey disclosed in 2024 that advertising had grown to represent nearly one-third of Walmart’s overall operating income. For a business generating $681 billion in annual revenue, that is a remarkable concentration of profit in a division that barely existed as a meaningful revenue stream five years ago.
The marketplace has followed a similar arc. Industry tracking estimates put active third-party sellers above 200,000 by mid-2025, with roughly 44,000 new merchants joining in the first five months of that year alone. U.S. marketplace GMV grew 34% in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2025. E-commerce turned its first profitable quarter through a combination of denser delivery routes, growing express fee adoption — over 30% of customers who received a store-delivered item paid extra for faster arrival — and the compounding contribution of advertising revenue to overall e-commerce margins.
In the third quarter of fiscal 2026, Walmart reported total revenue of $179.5 billion, up 5.8% year over year. U.S. comparable sales grew 4.5%. E-commerce grew approximately 27%. Those are strong numbers, but the structure generating them is what matters for suppliers. Store-fulfilled home delivery grew nearly 50% in Walmart’s fiscal second quarter. The physical store network is now a fulfillment infrastructure, and the margin profile of that infrastructure is being sustained by advertising and services revenue more than by product margin.
This is the business John Furner inherited. It is not primarily a store-and-shelf operation. It is an integrated commerce and media platform where suppliers participate in multiple overlapping economic relationships simultaneously — and where performance expectations in each of those relationships are rising.
The Retail Media Reality
For CPG suppliers and first-party vendors, the most operationally significant shift in Walmart’s recent evolution may be the changing economics of product visibility on Walmart.com.
In 2019, then-Walmart e-commerce chief Marc Lore publicly distinguished the company from Amazon by stating that Walmart did not sell the top search positions to advertisers. That positioning has since been abandoned entirely. Sponsored listings now routinely lead Walmart.com search results, pushing organic products further down the page. Modern Retail reported in October 2025 that in a search for “women’s shirts,” the first organic listing did not appear until the thirteenth slot. Retail analytics firm Pentaleap has found that sponsored listings appear in 97% of Walmart searches — nearly matching Amazon’s coverage, and a figure that reflects years of deliberate inventory expansion by Seth Dallaire, Walmart’s chief growth officer, who applied the advertising flywheel he helped build at Amazon after joining Walmart in 2021.
Marketplace Pulse, which tracks advertising trends across major platforms, has documented that advertising has outpaced Walmart’s underlying sales growth every single quarter since the company began reporting advertising metrics. When that gap is consistent and widens over time, the conclusion is straightforward: Walmart is extracting more revenue from existing traffic by converting screen real estate into paid placement. The organic shelf is narrowing.
This does not mean paid advertising is the only lever available to suppliers. Walmart’s Listing Quality Score — factoring content completeness, offer competitiveness, and fulfillment performance — directly influences organic search placement, and a score above 80 correlates with first-page visibility. Walmart Connect itself recommends maintaining a score of 90 or higher to maximize Buy Box eligibility and consistent discoverability. Strong organic positioning and paid investment are not alternatives; they compound each other. Suppliers investing in content quality, in-stock rates, and delivery speed alongside their Connect budgets will outperform those treating paid media as a substitute for weak fundamentals.
The broader point is that Walmart is following the monetization path Amazon paved — and the sellers who recognized that shift early on Amazon, and adjusted their cost models accordingly, had a durable structural advantage over those who waited.
Fulfillment Is the Ante
Furner came to the global CEO role having overseen Walmart U.S. through a period in which the company converted its store network into a same-day delivery infrastructure at genuine scale. By February 2026, Walmart could reach approximately 95% of U.S. households for same-day delivery — up from 76% just two years prior. That reach was built by treating 4,600-plus Supercenters as fulfillment hubs, investing in automated distribution infrastructure, and engineering the logistics network to deliver at consistent speed. On Christmas Eve of 2025, 77% of Walmart’s same-day orders were express deliveries completed in under two hours.
For marketplace sellers, that infrastructure raises the floor on what acceptable fulfillment looks like across the platform. Walmart’s baseline performance standards — cancellation rate below 2%, on-time delivery above 90%, valid tracking above 99% — are enforced with increasing rigor as the platform’s seller count grows and Walmart’s ability to substitute underperforming sellers improves. Warnings, listing suppressions, and account suspensions follow from persistent shortfalls on any of these metrics.
Walmart Fulfillment Services has become the clearest path for sellers who want to stay competitive on delivery speed without building their own logistics capability. Walmart’s own data, covering orders fulfilled between July 2024 and June 2025, shows sellers using WFS averaging a 50% GMV lift on items tagged Walmart Fulfilled with two-day delivery. Independent analysis by Trellis found that WFS sellers achieve 40% higher Buy Box share compared to self-fulfilled sellers. Approximately 66% of active Walmart marketplace sellers were using WFS as of mid-2025, according to Red Stag Fulfillment’s market research — a rate that reflects both the performance benefits and the competitive pressure created by a platform that has moved delivery expectations significantly in a short period.
WFS also expanded next-day delivery to major metros including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Houston, and Atlanta in 2025. For sellers operating outside WFS in those markets, the gap between their delivery promise and a WFS competitor’s is not static — it is widening with each logistics investment Walmart makes.
The Competitive Intelligence Gap
Here is the dynamic that most suppliers have not fully internalized: the intelligence Walmart makes available through its data platform cannot be sourced from anywhere else. Ninety percent of American households shop with Walmart annually. The first-party transaction data that generates — 150 million weekly purchases, across every income level and geography in the country — is without peer in U.S. retail. Suppliers who actively engage with that data operate from a fundamentally different planning position than those who don’t.
Walmart Luminate, rebranded as Scintilla in early 2025, is the company’s flagship supplier analytics platform. It provides access to aggregated shopper behavior data, channel performance metrics, and customer perception surveys drawn from that transaction base. The platform has moved well beyond post-purchase reporting. Scintilla’s Digital Landscapes module, launched in 2024, lets suppliers track shopper behavior before a purchase is made — analyzing how customers find products across Walmart.com, the Walmart app, search engines, and social platforms. That pre-purchase visibility is genuinely new intelligence for most suppliers, and it directly informs where media investment should go and when.
Walmart has now connected Scintilla to Walmart Connect, allowing Charter-tier subscribers to apply Walmart’s first-party audience insights directly to display advertising campaigns. Suppliers can identify which customer segments are switching away from their products, which are purchasing less frequently, and reach those segments with advertising informed by the same proprietary data. Bimbo Bakeries, Kimberly-Clark, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, and Chobani have all publicly reported using the integration to inform both creative and media strategy. As Retail TouchPoints has documented from Walmart Data Ventures, what Walmart is building is a system where data, advertising, and merchandising decisions reinforce each other — and where the performance gap between engaged and disengaged suppliers compounds over time.
The tariff environment makes this more urgent. In Walmart’s Q3 fiscal 2026 earnings, management noted that prices at Walmart U.S. rose approximately 1% overall, with higher increases on electronics, toys, and seasonal items due to tariff cost pressure. Rainey was direct: “The pressure is real.” For suppliers navigating the same environment, Scintilla’s switching and basket data can be the difference between a price adjustment that holds share and one that accelerates customer loss to a competitor.
The Consumer Has Changed, Too
One strategic reality Furner inherits is a Walmart shopper base that no longer fits a single profile.
During Q3 fiscal 2026 earnings, McMillon told investors that upper- and middle-income households were driving Walmart’s growth, with market share gains “more pronounced in the upper-income segment.” Rainey added that higher-income shoppers had responded specifically to store remodels and faster deliveries — investments Furner was responsible for executing at Walmart U.S. These are not temporary visitors drawn in by a promotional moment. Kantar research has estimated that households earning over $100,000 annually drove approximately 75% of Walmart’s recent market share gains. That cohort is not going back to where it used to shop.
For suppliers, a bifurcated shopper base creates real assortment complexity that cannot be resolved with a single merchandising strategy. Value-positioned SKUs with efficient price-pack architecture remain essential for the core value-seeking customer who has always been Walmart’s foundation. But the higher-income household now placing express delivery orders and walking Walmart’s remodeled stores responds to premium positioning, category differentiation, and brand storytelling — and Walmart’s own store investments signal that leadership wants to serve them well.
Walmart has also been developing the infrastructure for localized assortments, using AI-driven merchandising systems to calibrate product selection by region, store cluster, and demographic. Suppliers who can support that flexibility — through regional packaging, formulation variations, or assortment depth that enables store-level customization — will be better positioned to participate in those programs as they mature.
What Acceleration Looks Like From the Vendor Side
Furner’s first public communications as CEO made his operating philosophy clear. In a memo to employees on his second day, he described technology and AI as tools already “helping reduce friction in our work, simplify decisions, improve inventory flow, and free up time.” That is not aspirational language. It describes systems that are already influencing how Walmart makes ordering decisions, evaluates assortment, and manages inventory flow — all of which have direct consequences for supplier relationships.
The appointment of David Guggina — an Amazon alumnus — as the new president and CEO of Walmart U.S. reinforces that signal. UBS analyst Michael Lasser noted that this is “not a traditional appointment the ‘old’ Walmart would make.” It is a deliberate choice to place someone with Amazon-scale digital operating experience in charge of the business segment where Walmart’s transformation is most visible and most consequential for suppliers.
What this combination — Furner’s merchant and operator background at the global level, Guggina’s digital infrastructure experience leading Walmart U.S. — means in practice is that the agenda McMillon set is not being reviewed. It is being handed to people whose job is to execute it faster.
For suppliers, the risk is not that Walmart changes direction. It is that the pace of change continues while vendor strategies stay static. Content quality expectations are being raised by AI-assisted listing tools that compress how quickly Walmart can assess and surface or deprioritize a product. Fulfillment speed expectations are being raised by a delivery network that now reaches 95% of U.S. households same-day. Retail media investment expectations are being raised by a search architecture that monetizes an increasing share of available screen space.
The Furner era is not a turning point. It is a forcing function. The direction has been clear for years. The platform is now built out enough that Walmart can enforce what it expects — and has enough supplier alternatives that it does not need to carry those who fall short.
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