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While retail sales growth is expected to slow this year, ecommerce sales will grow by double digits to reach $1.148 trillion, buoyed by online grocery, health and personal care, and online resale. Here are five charts on the categories, retailers, and channels driving ecommerce growth

As retail media enters its next phase, marketing efforts are moving up the funnel toward new formats like open web, social, and streaming TV. By leveraging partnerships with social media companies, streaming platforms, and publishers, retail media networks can reach consumers earlier in the buying cycle and build brand awareness.

Amazon sits at the top of US ecommerce, accounting for 37.6% of sales this year, according to our forecast. In addition to generating billions of dollars in sales, Amazon鈥檚 ecommerce business propels its other ventures, including retail media and B2B ecommerce. By harnessing the power of generative AI, Amazon could leave its retail competition even further in the dust, and possibly catch up to the Google and Meta duopoly.

This year, Walmart ranks second on our list of top 15 US retail ecommerce companies by retail ecommerce sales share, making up 6.4% of total retail ecommerce sales, way behind Amazon鈥檚 37.6%. In terms of sales growth, Walmart sits third (behind Carvana and Chewy), with sales growing 10.9% this year and 11.3% next year to reach $81.75 billion, according to our forecast. 2.

Ten of the 15 fastest-growing companies worldwide in 2024 were retailers, according to our analysis of the 44 players we forecast and actively track. Six of the region鈥檚 leading retail and ecommerce platforms featured prominently in our global analysis鈥攊ncluding three from Brazil that posted triple-digit gains.

Booking, Airbnb, and LATAM Airlines rank among the top 15 most-visited ecommerce sites in Brazil. According to Similarweb, January 2025 user traffic for each was comparable with that of prominent retailers like Casas Bahia and Magazine Luiza鈥檚 Netshoes, underscoring the travel category鈥檚 growing digital footprint and advertising potential.

Companies like Apple resumed spending on the platform after a 15-month pause, while Amazon significantly increased its ad spending on X despite pulling nearly all of its ad spending from the platform in 2024. The change is largely in response to Musk鈥檚 new political power. Brands are hoping to improve relationships with Musk and, in turn, curry favor with the current administration.

Legacy pharmacy chains鈥� strategy of locking up items to prevent theft is frustrating shoppers and leading them to shop online. Amazon President and CEO Andy Jassy noted on an earnings call last August that products being locked up has been a boon for the ecommerce giant鈥檚 pharmacy business. Consumers are also facing longer lines at the pharmacy counter.

Alibaba鈥檚 open-source large language model (LLM), Qwen2, was recently ranked at the top of Hugging Face鈥檚 Open LLM Leaderboard, based on 15 benchmarks. Among marketers in China, content and creative ideas generation is the most popular genAI use case, according to a May 2024 iResearch Consulting Group survey. China is enthusiastic about genAI usage.

In fact, all FAANG companies (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) except Facebook are among the top 15 US OOH advertisers, according to Kantar and the Out of Home Advertising Association of America.

Eleven of the 15 fastest-growing companies worldwide were retailers, according to our analysis of the 39 players we forecast and actively track. Eight of Latin America鈥檚 most prominent retail and ecommerce players were well represented in the global ranking, with six posting gains north of 50%. TikTok was the only nonretailer to experience comparable growth in digital ad revenues, at 55.7%.

Industrial production鈥攑articularly for motor vehicles, a key export to the US鈥攁lso declined in April, after having risen strongly in the first three months of the year due to demand from businesses looking to get ahead of tariffs. Nearly 1 in 5 companies with 10 or more employees (17%) expected US tariffs to affect their businesses in May, according to an April ONS survey.