Walmart’s Online Grocery Lead Is Being Won Inside The One-Hour Window

U.S. grocery ecommerce has grown more than 20% year over year for six consecutive quarters, a run that began in the fourth quarter of 2024 and held through the first quarter of 2026, according to the latest Brick Meets Click Grocery Shopper Survey. Online’s share of total grocery spending climbed above 19% in the first quarter, up from under 15% at the close of the third quarter of 2024. The growth is not spreading evenly across how orders get fulfilled. Delivery and ship-to-home, the two fastest formats, are expanding nearly three times faster than pickup and pulling spending out of physical stores as they go. Across all retail formats in the first quarter, same-day orders made up nearly 80% of delivery orders and more than 30% of ship-to-home orders, and orders arriving in under an hour accounted for 18% of delivery volume and 10% of ship-to-home volume. Same-day is no longer a premium tier; it has become the default.

Walmart is capturing a widening share of that growth. Brick Meets Click estimated Walmart at 31.6% of U.S. online grocery sales for the full year 2025, ahead of Amazon at 22.6% and Kroger at 8.6%, which on the firm’s math put Walmart’s 2025 online grocery sales above $40 billion. Walmart does not break out online grocery sales itself, so that figure is Brick Meets Click’s estimate. In its most recent survey, the firm has Walmart approaching 40% of U.S. online grocery sales, with larger share gains than Amazon over the period, and it credits the move specifically to orders delivered within an hour of checkout. Pickup built Walmart’s online grocery business over the past decade. The incremental share is now being won in the delivery window, and increasingly in the fastest part of it.

Walmart’s Lead Runs Through Its Own Stores

The reason the one-hour window favors Walmart is structural. Walmart fulfills its fast grocery orders from stores, and it has said it can reach about 95% of U.S. households from those stores in under three hours, with its fastest channel now delivering in under one hour. In its most recent quarter, the company reported U.S. eCommerce sales up 26%, led by store-fulfilled delivery, and in an earlier quarter it reported that sales through expedited store-fulfilled delivery channels grew more than 50%. The store is the fulfillment center. The inventory a customer wants in an hour is already sitting on a shelf a few miles away, which is a position a pure ecommerce network has to build from the ground up.

Amazon Is Chasing The Same Target From The Other Direction

Amazon is pushing hard on the same dynamic, which is what makes Walmart’s continued share gain notable. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has said Amazon is now the second-largest grocer in the United States, on more than $150 billion in grocery gross sales in 2025. The company has expanded same-day perishable delivery to more than 2,300 U.S. cities and towns, and in areas where fresh groceries are available for same-day delivery, nine of the top ten bestselling items are now perishables. It is rolling out Amazon Now, a 30-minute delivery service, across dozens of additional cities through 2026. Amazon has also reported that shoppers who add fresh groceries to a same-day order build baskets with nearly three times as many items and spend over 80% more than shoppers who do not. The read for suppliers is that two of the largest buyers of consumer goods in the country are now competing on the same axis, speed to the door, and both are using fresh grocery as the hook that pulls the rest of the basket along.

The Speed Shift Lands On 1P Suppliers First

For suppliers, the read depends on which side of the catalog they sell on, and the divide here is sharp. For 1P national-brand suppliers, this is your story directly. Fresh and consumable grocery moves through Walmart’s store-fulfilled delivery network, so a growing share of your volume is now flowing through digital baskets assembled for one-hour and three-hour windows rather than through the aisle. Brick Meets Click has tied much of Walmart’s eGrocery strength to its focus on first-party digital channels instead of third-party marketplaces, which means the customer relationship and the basket are Walmart’s to shape. The implication for replenishment and content teams is concrete. Store-level in-stock performance now determines whether your item is even available to a delivery shopper in real time, your online item content decides whether it gets chosen in a fast-moving basket, and paid placement matters more as the basket compresses. Walmart’s U.S. advertising business, Walmart Connect, grew 44% in the company’s most recent quarter, a sign of how much of the digital basket is now being contested through sponsored visibility.

For 3P Marketplace sellers, the ultra-fast fresh dynamic is largely not your lane, and the reason matters. Sub-one-hour fresh delivery is a store-fulfilled, first-party motion. Marketplace and WFS sellers feel the broader speed expectation through assortment breadth and fulfillment reliability, and shelf-stable grocery and general merchandise sellers can benefit from the larger baskets these fast trips tend to generate. But the fresh-grocery share shift described here runs through 1P, and reading it as a marketplace signal would misjudge where the volume actually sits.

The trajectory is what suppliers should plan against. Online has gone from under 15% of grocery spending to above 19% in roughly six quarters, and the formats compounding fastest are the ones with the shortest cycle times. Walmart reported that revenue through its expedited delivery channels grew about 70% year over year in a recent quarter, outpacing its overall ecommerce line and pointing to where the next round of fulfillment investment is going. The planning question for the next line review is no longer whether online grocery deserves a place in the plan. It is whether your in-stock discipline and your item content are built for a shopper who now expects fresh groceries at the door within the hour, and whether your Connect budget is sized for the moment that shopper is choosing between your item and the substitute one slot away.

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