Walmart Connect in 2026: Serious Challenger or Still Playing Catch-Up to Amazon Ads?

When Walmart rebranded its advertising business to Walmart Connect in 2021, most Amazon sellers treated it as a footnote. Five years later, that footnote has grown into a $4.8 billion annual advertising business — up from an estimated $3.1 billion in 2024 — and the platform is increasingly showing up in serious DTC budget conversations. But growth in headline revenue doesn’t automatically mean the tooling has caught up. For operators running seven- and eight-figure catalogs across both marketplaces, the picture in mid-2026 is more complicated than the press releases suggest.

What Has Walmart Connect Actually Built in the Last 18 Months?

The most material developments at Walmart Connect since late 2024 center on three areas: closed-loop measurement, offsite display, and generative AI-powered creative. The platform rolled out its Walmart Measurement Suite in Q4 2025, which gives advertisers SKU-level attribution tied directly to in-store and Walmart.com purchase data — a genuine differentiator given Walmart’s physical footprint of roughly 4,600 US stores. That omnichannel signal is something Amazon structurally cannot replicate at scale.

On the offsite side, Walmart Connect expanded its DSP partnerships in early 2026, integrating with The Trade Desk to let advertisers activate Walmart’s first-party shopper data against inventory outside Walmart.com. This positions the network closer to what Amazon DSP has offered since 2018, but with the added hook of grocery and general merchandise purchase data that skews toward a different household income bracket than Amazon’s core base.

“The Walmart shopper data is genuinely useful for CPG and household brands. We’re seeing cost-per-acquisition that’s 20 to 35 percent lower than equivalent Amazon DSP campaigns for cleaning and personal care categories. The attribution is still rougher, but the economics make it worth the friction.” — Caitlin Moreau, VP of Retail Media, Tinuiti

On generative AI, Walmart Connect launched an AI Creative Studio in March 2026 that auto-generates sponsored product ad copy and image variants from existing item catalog data. Early adopters report modest click-through rate improvements — in the 8 to 12 percent range — but the tooling is widely described as first-generation compared to what Meta Advantage+ and even Amazon’s AI ad builder are already delivering.

Where Does Walmart Connect Still Fall Short for Serious Sellers?

Despite the momentum, conversations with agency leaders and direct brand operators consistently surface the same friction points. Sponsored Search on Walmart.com still lacks the keyword-level bid granularity that Amazon Seller Central advertisers have used for years. Auto-campaigns remain relatively blunt instruments, and negative keyword functionality — basic blocking hygiene on Amazon — was only partially rolled out on Walmart as recently as Q1 2026.

• Reporting lag: Walmart Connect’s standard reporting window runs 48 to 72 hours behind, compared to near-real-time dashboards on Amazon Ads. For sellers using third-party tools like Perpetua or Skai to automate bid adjustments, this lag creates compounding inefficiencies.
• Brand Store limitations: Walmart Brand Shelves — the platform’s equivalent of Amazon Brand Stores — still don’t support video modules or A/B content testing as of May 2026, limiting the brand-building use case for DTC operators.
• Category coverage gaps: Sponsored Display for third-party sellers remains restricted in apparel and electronics subcategories, two of the highest-volume verticals for crossover Amazon merchants.
• API maturity: The Walmart Advertising API, while improved, still trails Amazon’s Advertising API in documentation depth and webhook reliability, frustrating engineering teams at larger agencies trying to build custom automation layers.

“We run Walmart Connect for about 40 of our clients. The measurement story has genuinely improved — the Measurement Suite is real. But I still have analysts who spend twice as long pulling Walmart reports as Amazon reports because the data architecture is just less mature. That time cost is real money.” — Jason Feldkamp, Director of Marketplace Advertising, Bobsled Marketing

How Does Walmart Connect Stack Up Against Amazon Ads and Criteo Retail Media?

The honest competitive answer in 2026 is that Walmart Connect is a clear number two in US retail media — and not particularly close to number one. Amazon Ads generated an estimated $56 billion in revenue in 2025 and commands roughly 75 percent of retail media spend among the sellers tracked by Jungle Scout’s Q1 2026 State of the Seller report. Walmart Connect’s $4.8 billion, while impressive for a platform that barely existed as a serious ad product five years ago, represents less than 9 percent of Amazon’s scale.

Criteo, which powers retail media networks for Target, Macy’s, Best Buy, and dozens of regional grocers, is arguably the more nuanced competitive threat. Criteo’s Commerce Max platform lets brands activate shopper data across multiple retailer networks from a single UI — something Walmart Connect explicitly does not support, since Walmart’s strategy depends on keeping its first-party data proprietary and inside its own ecosystem.

For sellers making allocation decisions, the practical calculus in 2026 looks roughly like this: Amazon Ads for scale and search intent precision; Walmart Connect for grocery, household, and CPG categories where Walmart’s customer base over-indexes; Criteo-powered networks for mid-tier retailers where niche category authority matters.

Instacart Ads, now operating under the Maplebear umbrella, is also emerging as a credible alternative for food and beverage brands, capturing budget from both Walmart Connect and Amazon Fresh advertising allocations. Its Q1 2026 ad revenue was up 31 percent year-over-year, according to the company’s earnings call in April.

Who Is Running Walmart Connect’s Strategy — and What Does That Signal?

Walmart Connect’s day-to-day leadership sits under Rich Lehrfeld, who has served as SVP and GM of Walmart Connect since 2020 and has been the platform’s most consistent external voice. Lehrfeld’s background in brand marketing at American Express gives Walmart Connect a different cultural orientation than Amazon Ads, which grew out of engineering and seller-tools culture. The result is a platform that tends to lead with brand safety narratives and omnichannel measurement stories — compelling for CMOs but sometimes frustrating for performance-first operators who want CPCs and ROAS before anything else.

“Rich’s team has done a credible job building the agency relationships that Amazon spent years ignoring. The question is whether those relationships translate into budget when sellers are under margin pressure and defaulting to what they know converts.” — anonymous senior buyer at a top-20 Walmart advertising agency, granted anonymity to discuss a client relationship

In April 2026, Walmart also announced a deepened data-sharing partnership with Luminate, its retail analytics subsidiary, that will eventually feed real-time category velocity data into Walmart Connect campaign optimization. This is a meaningful structural move — it’s the kind of closed-loop integration that Amazon built organically years ago but that Walmart is now deliberately engineering.

What Are the Best Use Cases for Walmart Connect in 2026?

Based on operator and agency reporting, the categories where Walmart Connect delivers the clearest return in 2026 are well-defined:

• Grocery and consumables: Walmart’s grocery shopper base is massive and habitual. Brands with replenishable products — coffee, cleaning supplies, pet food — see strong repeat-purchase signal in sponsored search.
• Value-positioned general merchandise: Price-sensitive categories where Walmart’s customer skews differently than Amazon’s premium-leaning base.
• In-store activation: Brands running coordinated omnichannel campaigns that pair Walmart.com sponsored placements with in-store display are seeing the clearest measurement lift from the Measurement Suite.
• New item launches: Walmart Connect’s Item Accelerator program, which packages sponsored placements with Walmart editorial support for new SKUs, has shown strong early trial-to-repeat rates in CPG categories.

The categories where most sellers still struggle to justify meaningful Walmart Connect spend include apparel, electronics accessories, and high-ticket discretionary goods — areas where Amazon’s search volume and conversion infrastructure remain dominant.

Is Walmart Connect Worth Scaling in 2026 or Is It Still a Secondary Budget Line?

The honest answer for most mid-market Shopify and Amazon operators is: it depends on your category, and it probably warrants more budget than you’re currently giving it — with clear-eyed expectations about tooling maturity. Agencies including Tinuiti, Bobsled, and Acadia have all publicly stated they’re recommending Walmart Connect budget increases for CPG clients in 2026, typically in the 15 to 25 percent of retail media allocation range for brands with meaningful Walmart.com velocity.

For pure Amazon-native sellers without existing Walmart.com listings, the calculus is different. Standing up a competitive Walmart presence — optimized content, review velocity, pricing parity management — requires operational investment before advertising can work efficiently. Sellers who try to bolt on Walmart Connect spend without fixing the underlying catalog quality typically see poor ROAS and conclude the platform doesn’t work, when the real problem is foundational.

The platform’s trajectory is clearly positive. The Measurement Suite is a genuine product, the Trade Desk integration is real, and the first-party data moat Walmart is building around its grocery and in-store purchase base is structurally defensible. But sellers coming from Amazon Ads in 2026 will encounter a platform that is still, in several meaningful ways, where Amazon Ads was in 2019. The opportunity is real. The patience required to capture it is also real.