Amazon Overtakes Walmart In Revenue 📈

Happy Friday! Amazon has finally seized the retail crown, overtaking Walmart in total revenue. This milestone marks a historic shift toward tech-led commerce models.

Success now hinges on AI assistants and massive infrastructure scaling. Can legacy retailers bridge the gap through agentic tools and logistics?

In today’s MarketMaze focus:

+Handpicked recent news you need to know

LET’S ENTER THE MAZE!
- Artur Stańczuk, MarketMaze Founder

The Maze: Amazon ended Walmart’s 13-year streak atop the revenue rankings by surpassing Walmart with $716.9 billion in revenue, marking a symbolic pivot in the retail hierarchy as tech-first models win.

Why it matters: The battle has shifted from physical shelf space to massive computing power. Success now requires mastering agentic AI and automated logistics to maintain relevance in a winner-takes-all economy.

☝️ Vote to see results!

AdQuick makes Out Of Home (OOH) advertising easy, measurable, and performance-driven. Built for marketers who expect digital-level precision, it brings the power of the internet to real-world campaigns.

Marketers know OOH drives awareness, brings in new customers, and reinforces brand messaging—but scaling it has always been a challenge. With AdQuick, planning, launching, and measuring campaigns is as simple as running PPC or social ads, putting real-world growth at your fingertips.

Learn more, visit AdQuick.com

The Maze: OpenAI is reportedly closing a funding round that values the company at over $850 billion, providing the war chest needed to scale its foundational AI technology. This capital injection ensures the firm remains the dominant player in the global race for artificial intelligence supremacy.

Why it matters: This massive capital infusion validates that AI is no longer a speculative experiment but the core utility of the future digital economy. Ecommerce brands must pivot from seeking instant productivity wins toward building resilient, AI-native operations.

When your deal pipeline actually works, nothing slips through the cracks. HubSpot Smart CRM uses AI to track every stage automatically, so you can focus on what matters. Start free today.

Get Started Free

The Maze: Southeast Asian leader Sea is partnering with Google to deploy advanced AI tools across its Shopee marketplace and Garena gaming division. This expansion targets building games and agentic shopping prototypes.

Why it matters: Shifting from keyword search to intent-driven commerce allows platforms to capture higher intent and increase conversion rates. Merchants who adopt these agentic tools will likely see improved unit economics and deeper customer loyalty as AI handles complex shopping tasks.

The Maze: The 2025 eCommerce graveyard is shaped by a simple reality. Companies without clear differentiation or defensible economics are collapsing under competitive pressure.

• Several retailers ceased online operations in 2025 due to cost pressures and competition from low-price platforms.
• Other brands either paused online units or folded them into parent structures to cut losses.
• Markets with weaker logistics or higher acquisition costs were hit first, showing the geometry of competitive stress varies by region.

Why it matters: Ecommerce is not dying, undifferentiated eCommerce is. Only businesses with scale, unique value, or operational precision survive where acquisition costs are rising and customers are fickle.

The Maze: Instagram is the social platform U.S. adults most prefer for shopping, with TikTok close behind. Other platforms lag far behind, and a large share of adults still don’t shop via social at all.

• 37.2% of U.S. adults say Instagram is their most likely place to shop from social.
• 30.5% pick TikTok, showing a two-platform social commerce duopoly.
• Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube are all in low single digits, and 21% say they don’t shop on social.

Why it matters: Social is not a uniform channel. Instagram is the most preferred checkout surface today, but TikTok is the flame that ignites demand that often converts elsewhere.

🇬🇧 eBay UK detailed its 2026 roadmap, focusing on the 'AI Activate' suite for sellers and the expansion of its interactive eBay Live shopping feature.

🇬🇧 UK Retailers warned of potential losses of up to 74,000 jobs as rising employment costs drive CFOs to freeze recruitment and reduce headcounts.

🇪🇺 Fashion Retailers increased mid-market pricing by over 50% in Europe, as brands look to adopt premium narratives to differentiate themselves from fast-fashion competitors.

🌎 Perplexity pivoted its advertising strategy away from broad reach to target high-value niche audiences, signaling a shift in how AI search platforms intend to monetize.

🌎 Archive Intelligence deployed a suite of agentic commerce tools designed to optimize warehouse logistics and style discovery specifically for the resale market.

🌎 WalletConnect hired a former Checkout.com veteran as CTO to lead the technical push for integrating crypto and stablecoin payments into mainstream checkout networks.

🇬🇧 Parcel2Go released its 2025 courier reliability rankings, identifying the UK's most trusted delivery services for domestic and international shipments.

SHARE THE MAZE

Your network thinks you’re as smart as the content you share. Share smarter stuff and help us grow. Win–win. Here’s what you get when friends join the Maze:

Here is your unique referral link to share with friends:

{{rp_refer_url}}

and link to the hub to check your progress.

You’re the reason our team spends hundreds of hours every week researching and writing this email. Please let us know what you thought of today’s email to help us create better emails for you.

If you enjoyed it please share it with a friend, or share it on LinkedIn and tag me (Artur Stańczuk), I’d love to engage and amplify! 

If this was forwarded by a friend you can subscribe below for $0 👇

See you next time in the maze!
MarketMaze team