Amazon's revenue for the fourth quarter of 2024 is expected to surpass Walmart's, marking the first time the e-commerce giant will have ever bested the big box retailer's quarterly earnings.

According to CNBC, financial data firm LSEG estimates that Amazon will report roughly $187 billion in Q4 revenue for 2024, compared to a projected $180 billion for Walmart. Although Walmart's total year revenue for 2024 is still expected to come out ahead of Amazon's, the expected fourth quarter shift represents a sea change in the hierarchy of U.S. retailers. This would also be the first time Walmart hasn't occupied the top spot for quarterly revenue among the country's retailers since it dethroned Sears in 1993. 

While Walmart has long operated off the strength of its grocery and retail business, Amazon has been helped along by the rapid growth of its cloud computing and web hosting arm, Amazon Web Services, which has seen its business double since 2020, while accounting for around 17% of the company's total sales. According to website usage data platform W3Techs, AWS hosts the highest share of websites of any service at 5.3%, followed by Shopify at 4.7% and Hostinger at 3.6%. Amazon's e-commerce business has also grown dramatically since the pandemic, having seen its annual North American sales rise by more than 100% since 2019.