Walmart’s “You Win. We Win” Mantra Is Its Digital Superpower

“You Win. We Win.” Those were the words of Walmart U.S. CEO John Furner at this week’s Walmart Marketplace Seller Summit, and I was lucky enough to get a front row seat into what this mantra means for Walmart as it continues to push an aggressive omnichannel growth agenda. 

Picture this: 2,000 Walmart Marketplaces sellers, all cheering for Walmart executives, as if they were rooting for their college alma mater. No joke. It was a sight I never would have expected. 

You see, I have been to many conferences like this in the past, nearly a half dozen or more during my time at Target, at least. In my experience, these conferences are often a cavalcade of executives prancing about onstage, telling the audience how lucky they are to be working with such a great retailer, and then ultimately using the meeting as a way to push the vendor community to spend more money.

This Walmart summit wasn’t that at all. This was different. You could cut the camaraderie in the room with a knife because it really felt like the vendor audience and Walmart were in it together.

You Win.We Win.

But feeling it is different than knowing it, so in my time there, I set out to understand how and why Walmart could engender so much enthusiasm from those in attendance, with the ultimate aim of being able to recap my key lessons learned in this week’s Wramblings article. All told, we interviewed eight folks this week onsite at the conference, everybody from Walmart’s Chief eCommerce Officer, David Guggina, to one of Walmart’s biggest seller success stories, Dreo. 

And, as Manish Joneja, SVP of Walmart U.S. Marketplace and Walmart Fulfillment Services told us, Walmart is “barely scratching the surface” of its potential.

And you know what? He is absolutely right. 

Walmart Is Already Winning

Let’s start with what is likely one hell of an uncomfortable truth for Walmart’s competitors. While everyone else talks about growth, Walmart has actually been delivering it at an astounding pace. 

In addition to Walmart’s strong top line revenue performance quarter after quarter, Walmart’s e-commerce business is currently growing at a rate of 26%, according to Guggina, and its online marketplace also has seen double digit growth for 13 consecutive quarters, which, for those keeping score at home, means Walmart has kept up that pace now for over 3 years. For comparison, industry e-commerce growth across the most recent quarter, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, was only 5.2%.

Walmart is massive. It has over 4,600 stores and, according to Joneja, “There are 270 million customers who shop with us every week around the world.”

It is the size and the scale of this achievement which makes everything so impressive, driven in part by how quickly Walmart has caught up to (and possibly even exceeded) Amazon.

Take a look at this quote from Guggina: “Today, about one-third of our scheduled deliveries are fast. That means sub three hours . . . 25% of those fast deliveries are delivered in under 30 minutes. Our fastest delivery to date was four minutes.” 

That’s not just logistics efficiency. That’s a sound byte that sparks the imagination.

Walmart’s About To Lap The Competition

While competitors chase quarterly improvements or try to convince people that getting back to things like, “elevated and joyful,” is hardcore strategy, Walmart has been building its retail infrastructure from the ground up. The innovation happening across fulfillment and digital commerce represents systemic transformation, not incremental BS.

Mohit Puthuraya, VP of Seller Success, Marketplace, Walmart Fulfillment Services, and E-commerce, outlined the cost advantage at play: “The WFS (Walmart Fulfillment Services) cost of services is about 15% cheaper than some of our competitors.”

But that’s only part of the story. 

The other real innovation is multi-channel fulfillment. As Kyle Carlyle, VP of Walmart Fulfillment Services also told us that: “They (Walmart Marketplace Sellers) can leverage our service to fulfill for other other channels as well. So like Shein, Temu, even Amazon. They can fulfill their orders via our inventory in WFS.”

Read that again. 

Walmart is so confident in their operational superiority that they’re helping sellers fulfill orders for direct competitors. That’s marketplace disruption right where it hurts Amazon the most.

Right in the keester of its own infrastructure.

Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em

The back–end delivery infrastructure is just one side of the digital commerce coin, however. The other side is the front end commerce experience. 

On the digital commerce front, Tracy Poulliot, SVP of Digital Shopping Experiences, revealed how Walmart is thinking about things. She told us, “What (AI) has finally given us is this big innovation that allows us to create more intuitive, engaging, and immersive experiences at scale that we just couldn’t do before AI.” She then contrasted this with the past, saying “Really what we have historically over the last couple years is just a digital catalog . . . the challenge has always been scale. How do you do that at scale across a very large assortment like we have where there are hundreds of millions of items?”

What this all means is that, while most retailers with whom I speak treat AI as a feature set, Walmart is looking at it as the lighter fluid for infinite scale. 

So “scratching the surface,” as Manish Joneja calls it? 

Hell yes.

“AI is like a spectrum of capabilities, right? We use ML, it’s there. Where we classify, we predict and obviously like gen AI is a thing right now. We create content and then we think about conversational AI which you heard from Latriece (Walmart’s Chief Merchandising Officer) speak about Sparky (Walmart’s AI agent) and then we are also trying to think about agents who can act on your behalf and then multi-agent,” Tracy Poulliot

Translation – Walmart is thinking about AI differently than most. And, more on this in two seconds, but that is because Walmart understands what digital commerce is really all about.

The Secret To Walmart’s Success

Here’s why Walmart’s approach becomes genuinely disruptive to traditional retail thinking. While competitors focus on zero-sum market share battles, Walmart has embraced collaborative growth that expands its entire ecosystem.

Joneja articulated the philosophy clearly: “We are not here to compete with you. We want you to win . . .  If our sellers win, our customers win, and then we win. It’s a win-win proposition all around.”

This isn’t corporate speak. Joshua Gunn from Dreo, a seller who got a stage shout-out in a panel I led at the summit, provided proof. He said, “Our experience has been nothing short of fantastic . . . the reason I say that is Walmart marketplace provides you the backbone to be successful online.” 

His advice to other sellers: “Don’t dip your toes—jump in.”

Mohit Puthuraya revealed why this approach works. “We are ultimately a human-led rather than people-led organization . . . many sellers tell us we just don’t want to be another automated workflow,” he said. 

Ooh, shots fired. Direct hit, Amazon (and others, I know well).

Despite 44% WFS penetration, 26% e-commerce growth, 13 consecutive quarters of double-digit marketplace expansion, 270 million weekly customers, and overall sales comps that are the envy of the industry right now, Walmart’s leadership genuinely believes they’re at the beginning, and not even close to approaching maturity.

That in itself is pretty remarkable.

Walmart has figured out how to combine 60 years of retail mastery with cutting-edge technology, while maintaining a collaborative growth philosophy that only strengthens as it scales. The four-minute delivery claim, for example, is more than a marketing gimmick. It’s a guiding light for the impossible to become routine. 

Similarly, the 15% cost advantage in fulfillment, while serving competitor platforms, is not braggadocio. It’s well earned laurels from operating 4,600 stores, day in and day out. 

And, the AI strategy to move from classification to multi-agent systems is also more than the latest shiny tech penny on the ground waiting for someone to pick it up. It is the ultimate unlock for infinite scale. 

But, most importantly, it is Walmart’s human-centric approach to bring sellers overtly into the system and to share in their success, that sets Walmart apart. Because when you blend the human element with delivery expertise, cost scale advantages, and smart IT strategy together, I am reminded of one of my favorite maxims in business: the greatest accomplishments of the individual come from the accomplishment of the team.

Admittedly, I stole that from Bill Simmons and his Book of Basketball, but it still works regardless. Because it is as true in basketball as it is in business, especially when digital is involved. 

The beauty of digital is the network effect. Things just scale faster and more efficiently. The more people you have bought into the system, the more you win. Walmart, by way of its 4,600 plus stores, logistics, and AI dreams has the most scale to offer, by far.

So “You Win. We Win?” 

It’s the ultimate “how good is my good” flex, and I love it.