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| Amazon Sellers |
Have you considered selling on Walmart.com? Amazon's biggest competitor in 2021 is Walmart's marketplace. Here are a few examples of comparisons.
We wrote about why you, as an Amazon seller, should consider selling on Walmart.com as well around the end of 2019. We still believe this to be true, especially given Walmart's continuous growth since then.
We usually recommend diversifying your platforms in the long run. While Amazon is a terrific place to start and learn the ropes of e-commerce, as your business grows, you should consider expanding to other platforms as well.
In the e-commerce market, Walmart is only second to Amazon, and it's surely one of the areas you should consider expanding to next.
Read on for some crucial aspects concerning Walmart's e-commerce portion of the pie, as well as a few quick tips on how to sell on Walmart.
(By the way, if you've previously sold on the Walmart marketplace, tell us about your experience.) What aspects of the Walmart.com platform do you like or dislike?)
Walmart's e-commerce platform continues to expand at a breakneck pace.
On this one, we'll let the numbers speak for themselves.
Walmart's e-commerce business is still growing. Quite a bit. They're only a few steps behind Amazon.
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| Walmart’s marketplace e-commerce growth |
Walmart's e-commerce growth in the United States was 35% in the fourth quarter of 2019; it was 69 percent in the fourth quarter of 2020! That's a 97 percent rise from the previous year.
According to Marketplace Pulse, Walmart's US e-commerce sales accounted for 6.2 percent of total sales at the end of 2020, rising 195 percent year over year from 2.1 percent.
6.2 percent may not seem like a significant percentage, but consider how busy your local Walmart shop is as a large box retailer. Consider how much foot traffic there is in every Walmart store across the country, and then double that by 93.8 percent of sales, with the remainder done online.
That's a lot of growth!
Walmart produced $15.7 billion in e-commerce revenue in 2019 — and that number is expected to rise to $21.5 billion in 2020!
Granted, e-commerce is booming across the board, thanks in no small part to COVID-19, but this pandemic has shown that e-commerce is a crucial part of our daily life. It's no longer a unique convenience; it's a need.
Referral fees are comparable to those charged by Amazon, but without the monthly costs.
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| Amazon Fees vs Walmart Fees |
A similar fee scheme is used by Walmart. I analyzed Amazon and Walmart's product category fees, and their referral fee rates are nearly comparable, which might be a pro or a drawback depending on your perspective.
On the one hand, you won't save money over Amazon in terms of costs, but Walmart.com's referral fees will be familiar to you and won't have a significant impact on your prospective profits.
One minor perk is that Walmart waives the $39.99 monthly cost for your "professional account."
Walmart filters out the dime-a-dozen scammers
You know the type!
A quick anecdote: during college, one of my dozens of odd jobs was performing ordinary grunt labor for a two-person e-commerce company (I was the third). Their business model was primarily dropshipping, although Amazon Prime was just being started in the early 2010s.
Basically, this guy's business plan was to register an Amazon account, list a number of low-quality electrical items from China, and then trash the account once the ranking sank due to the inevitable influx of negative reviews.
Isn't that perfectly ethical?
While I don't believe that is the normal business plan for most black hat merchants, no one likes to interact with the – customer or seller. Not only does this make customers leery of private label products, but it also lowers the market's general quality.
As a result, one of Walmart.com's key advantages is that not just anyone can open a seller's account.
Selling on Amazon has a comparatively low entry hurdle. You only need contact information, a credit card, a bank account, and a way to authenticate your identity. As a result, scores of dishonest merchants may run amok and compete for the buy box.
When you request to become a seller on Walmart.com, however, you will be assigned an account professional who will personally evaluate your information with you. They only deal with well-established companies who offer a valuable, high-quality product, so this isn't the place for e-commerce newbies.
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| Become a Seller on Walmart.com |
Walmart goes above and above to ensure that you are a real person. Before allowing you to register as a vendor, they examine your company's product offers to check whether they meet a specific quality requirement.
Furthermore, once you've been accepted to register on Walmart.com's marketplace, you must still post your products and have all of your listings approved with promptly fulfillable inventory, among other requirements.
Your account won't be approved to go live until they've double-checked that everything is in order.
In general, fewer suppliers mean less competition for the buy box, which leads to more sales.
Merchant-fulfilled and Walmart-fulfilled options
Walmart's marketplace now offers an in-house fulfillment option, similar to Amazon's FBA model, as of February 2020 – but you'll need to fill out another application to determine whether you qualify.
Walmart maintains that its fees are competitive with other e-commerce fulfillment services, dubbed "Walmart Fulfillment Services" or WFS.
Walmart appears to be keeping rigorous eligibility restrictions for the WFS program at the present, emphasizing the importance of quality over quantity. If you qualify, you'll have fewer but higher-quality merchants to compete against.
The following are some of the WFS eligibility requirements:
- Walmart fulfillment centers require products to be transported from within the US (so no shipping straight from an overseas supplier)
- There are no perishable or controlled items.
- The maximum weight of the product is 30 pounds.
- Dimensions of maximum product: 25′′ x 20′′ x 14′′
Meanwhile, for those that have their own fulfillment operations, whether in-house or through a 3PL, the merchant-fulfilled model, like FBM, is favorable.
Walmart now enables dropshipping, which is great news for those of you who use this strategy.
You have more control over customer service, returns, and other aspects of your business.
One of the most significant advantages of Walmart over Amazon, in my opinion, is that Walmart sellers can define their own purchasing procedures, such as return/exchange timelines.
Almost every Amazon seller has had to deal with Amazon's strict return procedures, which almost always favor the customer. As you've surely witnessed, Amazon goes out of its way to accommodate the buyer's every desire, accepts returns without inquiry, and in most cases, it's you who pays the tab.
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| Money Machin |
Meanwhile, Walmart establishes minimum conditions for return policies, such as the typical 30-day return period (with exceptions for certain products like laptops or luxury items). Customers can also return their items to an actual Walmart store.
Overall, as a Walmart seller, you'll have more control over the returns process, the restocking fees you may charge, and so on, which is important if you're doing your own fulfillment.
You have more control over the customer support process as a Walmart seller. Unlike Amazon, which is infamous for being stringent about customer communication, on Walmart's marketplace, you're in charge, delivering direct customer support to your shoppers.
Because Walmart shoppers don't need a membership to take advantage of marketplace perks like fast delivery, you'll be reaching a different audience and shopper avatar overall.
Walmart-Shopify integration
You can link your Walmart and Shopify inventory, just like you do with Amazon, and import listing updates and live inventory tracking across the two platforms.
The following are some of the unique features that this integration provides:
Partial order shipment: If a customer orders numerous things but you only have a few in stock, you sell the ones you have and pass the rest of the order to other sellers who can fill the gaps (as long as you had the buy box for that purchase of course).
Cross-platform listing editing: SKUs and listings can be uploaded and "transferred" between the two platforms, then edited separately.
Make sure you're not putting all your eggs in one basket.
We'd like to emphasize that diversifying your e-commerce platforms is generally a good idea. Expanding your business, whether it's through Shopify, eBay, Walmart, or another platform, allows you to reach a larger audience and scale-up.
It also assures that if your Amazon account is suspended or your listings are blocked for whatever reason, you'll still be able to earn money from other platforms while your Amazon account is resolved.
Do you sell on Walmart.com's marketplace right now? Comment here or join our new Helium 10 Winning with Walmart club to share your thoughts and experiences!
