Walmart vs Costco: e-Commerce Revenue, Mix, and Growth

Currency. Pexels Images.

This article compares the e-commerce revenue between Walmart and Costco. We will look at the e-commerce revenue in several category, including the absolute revenue numbers, growth, and e-commerce as a percentage of merchandise sales.

Let’s look at the numbers!

For the detailed statistics of Walmart and Costco’s e-commerce revenue, you may find more resources in these pages:

Walmart

• Walmart eCommerce revenue: U.S., International, and Sam’s Club,

Costco

• Costco e-commerce revenue and e-commerce comparable sales,

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Definitions

To help readers understand the content better, the following terms and glossaries have been provided.

Walmart vs Costco in Fiscal Schedules: Walmart’s FY2026 financial results are compared against Costco’s FY2025 results due to differences in their fiscal year reporting.

Walmart operates on a fiscal calendar that ends on January 31, meaning its FY2026 includes February 2025 to January 2026. In contrast, Costco follows a fiscal year ending in August, making its FY2025 cover September 2024 to August 2025.

Since Costco’s FY2026 results are not yet available at the time of Walmart’s latest fiscal report, analysts and industry comparisons often use Costco’s FY2025 as the closest match when evaluating the two retailers’ financial performance.

This approach ensures that the most recent annual results for both companies are used while accounting for their differing fiscal schedules.

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Insight & Summary of Walmart vs Costco in e-Commerce Revenue

The following analysis consolidates the trends observed across Walmart vs Costco’s e-commerce revenue for the 2018–2025 period.

• The e-commerce revenue differential between Walmart and Costco is the most pronounced competitive gap in the entire comparative dataset — and it has widened consistently over the period. Walmart generated $150.4B in e-commerce revenue in 2025 versus Costco’s $18.9B — an 8x advantage that reflects Walmart’s far more aggressive and structurally deeper investment in digital commerce infrastructure, marketplace development, and omnichannel fulfillment.

• In 2018, the earliest year with comparable data for both, Walmart’s $25.1B already dwarfed Costco’s $5.5B by a 4.6x margin — confirming that Walmart entered the period with a commanding digital lead that has compounded rather than narrowed over time. The absolute gap has expanded from approximately $19.6B in 2018 to $131.5B by 2025, making this the defining asymmetry in the Walmart-Costco competitive comparison.

• The growth trajectories of the two businesses have been broadly correlated in directional terms — both surged during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, and both experienced moderation thereafter — but have diverged significantly in pace and consistency. Walmart’s e-commerce growth has reaccelerated from 2023 onward, reaching 20.8% and 24.4% in 2024 and 2025 respectively, reflecting the compounding contributions of Walmart+, advertising, marketplace expansion, and same-day delivery penetration.

• Costco’s growth has been more volatile — peaking at 63.9% in 2020, contracting to -8.5% in 2023, and recovering to 22.5% and 8.1% in 2024 and 2025 — a pattern that reflects the inherent limitations of Costco’s e-commerce model, which remains tightly coupled to its warehouse membership experience rather than operating as an independent digital channel. Costco’s single-year contraction in 2023 — the only decline in the dataset for either company — underscores the structural ceiling that the warehouse club format imposes on standalone e-commerce penetration.

• The e-commerce penetration rates as a percentage of net sales reveal the most strategically significant divergence. Walmart’s e-commerce penetration has grown from 4.9% in 2018 to 21.3% in 2025 — a trajectory that, if sustained, will bring digital commerce close to representing the majority of Walmart’s incremental revenue growth within this decade. Costco’s penetration, by contrast, has remained range-bound between 4% and 7% throughout the period — never sustaining above 7% and reverting to 6–7% after the pandemic-driven temporary elevation.

• This structural ceiling reflects a deliberate strategic choice: Costco’s business model is engineered around the in-warehouse experience, treasure-hunt shopping behavior, and bulk purchasing — dynamics that are inherently more difficult to replicate digitally than Walmart’s broader general merchandise and grocery assortment. The contrast is not indicative of Costco’s digital underperformance in absolute terms, but rather of two companies pursuing fundamentally different roles for e-commerce within their respective business architectures — Walmart deploying digital as a primary growth and market share vehicle, and Costco treating it as a complementary channel that enhances, rather than substitutes for, the member warehouse experience.

The table below combines Walmart and Costco e-commerce revenue metrics into a single view for the latest three fiscal years.

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Walmart vs Costco: e-Commerce Revenue

For the definition of the fiscal schedules of Walmart and Costco, you may refer to this section: Walmart vs Costco in fiscal schedules.

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Walmart vs Costco: e-Commerce as % of Merchandise Sales

For the definition of the fiscal schedules of Walmart and Costco, you may refer to this section: Walmart vs Costco in fiscal schedules.

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Walmart vs Costco: e-Commerce Revenue Growth

For the definition of the fiscal schedules of Walmart and Costco, you may refer to this section: Walmart vs Costco in fiscal schedules.

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References and Credits

1. All financial figures presented were obtained and referenced from Walmart and Costco’s quarterly and annual reports published on the respective investor relations pages: Walmart Investor Relations and Costco Investor Relations.

2. Pexels Images.

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Disclosure

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to assist us in writing some of the text in this article. However, the data is directly obtained from original sources and meticulously cross-checked by our editors multiple times to ensure its accuracy and reliability.

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