What Is Walmart Marketplace?
The Walmart Marketplace is a well-known e-commerce platform operated and owned by Walmart. By partnering with different Marketplace Sellers, Walmart enables and brings millions of brands, products, and selections to its customers.
In simple words, the Walmart Marketplace allows a third-party seller to list his/her items on Walmart.com, similar to what you do on eBay or Amazon.
Selling on Walmart’s online marketplace is one of the easiest ways to popularize your products, as they boast an immense audience. The marketplace products appear in the search results of Walmart.com beside the other items on the platform. Most sellers work with Urtasker.com who specializes in helping them increase sales and profit in these online marketplaces.
Walmart keeps appending their list of Marketplace Sellers frequently and thus, bringing more product choices. For sellers, this is a great boost with the newer opportunities.
Notable Years Of Walmart
During the 1960s, Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart had a vision that each American should have complete access to top-quality products for affordable prices. With this thought in mind, Walmart continues to grow even today.
- The Walmart’s first store was opened in the year 1962.
- In 1962, Walmart’s network expanded to 24 stores.
- In 1970, Walmart became a publicly traded company.
- In 1979, Walmart established its own foundation.
- In 1980, Walmart launched its first Supercenter.
- In 1988, Walmart opened its first Supercenter in Washington.
- In 1990, Walmart ranked No.1 retailer in America, and with this, it went international.
- In 1993, Walmart earned its first 1 billion USD within a week.
- In 1994, Walmart expanded its stores to Canada.
- In 1997, Walmart earned 100 billion USD within a year.
Benefits Of Selling On the Walmart Marketplace
Did you know that 140 million Americans on average visit the Walmart store either online or in-person?
This is indeed a big opportunity for third-party sellers. Selling at their marketplace can turn out to be highly beneficial. In fact, it is something that most online sellers aspire and desire to do.
It is apparent that every seller desires to reap the benefits, the fame, and increase their customer base, with the support of the marketplace they are selling in.
It features an incredible revenue stream, creating a group of brands, and higher conversions. All these can be accomplished via the Walmart Marketplace Program.
Before a seller can achieve all of these, the first responsibility is to get their products “maximum visibility.”
This is possible through multi-channel selling, as it minimizes the risk by maximizing the products’ visibility. Selling on a place like Walmart is indeed the best bet (if you have any other online presence, perhaps, on any other platform, it makes it even better).
How Is Walmart Marketplace Different From Amazon?
- Less Competition
Due to the steep obstacle to entry, Walmart Marketplace has much less competition than other bigger platforms. This means that the sellers have a greater chance to stand out.
It is predicted that Walmart features about 1,000 3rd party sellers — where hundreds of new sellers are added every month. When you compare this figure with a giant like Amazon (it has 2 million 3rd party sellers), it is very less.
Now, as a seller, this is good news for you because you don’t have much competition and you can easily win the Walmart Buy Box.
As far as Walmart’s Buy Box is considered, whoever sells the product for the lowest prices, comes on the top position.
On the other hand, Amazon’s Buy Box considers multiple factors like sales performance, reviews, product defect rate, fulfillment, and so on.
- Entry Barrier Is Steep
Of course, the most apparent difference between both platforms is Walmart’s steep entry barrier. This means that a seller has to be invited in order to sell on Walmart’s Marketplace. Again, this can take from 2-5 weeks.
Now, this can turn out to be a big drawback for many sellers out there but it is actually a great thing in another way. The moment sellers are accepted, getting started is straightforward and can generate higher conversions.
- Fulfillment By Walmart (FBW)
Like Amazon FBA, Walmart also adopts a similar process to pick, package, and ship the products to their customers.
However, the key difference between FBW and FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) is that Walmart incorporates various ways to fulfill its orders. It utilizes its “store distribution centers, fulfillment centers, and transportation fleet in order to ship their orders.”
On the other hand, Amazon fulfills its orders from MFN (Merchant Fulfillment Network), Seller-Fulfilled Prime, AND Fulfillment Centers.
Walmart uses a diverse set up to meet their shoppers’ demands. Although it might not be that optimized as Amazon is, it still has a greater potential to delight its customers.
Should Walmart Be A Part Of Your Multi-Channel Strategy?
Since Walmart is increasingly inclining its growth every year, it is great news for all marketplace sellers out there. After all, the idea is to woo potential shoppers and offer competitive advantages to sellers.
Doug McMillon, Walmart CEO, has stated that their 2-day free shipping concept has already given “an amazing uptick” in terms of sales. So, this makes it a great time to think about multi-channel selling. However, this might not be as easy as it sounds.
The more channels and SKUs you manage, the higher are the possibilities to lose track of your inventory and orders. However, you could go with intelligent automation tools to help you with that.