How To Win on Walmart Marketplace

Walmart is the number two ecommerce retailer in the U.S. Its strength comes from its massive physical footprint and logistics machine, its reputation as a trusted retailer — built up over many years — and its commitment to better-serving shoppers with continual digital innovation and investment.

Walmart Marketplace offers brands an opportunity to grow sales and market share by reaching new shoppers with less competition. Learn about the basics and benefits of the marketplace, as well as best practices to find success as a seller.

What Is Walmart Marketplace?

Walmart Marketplace is another means of product distribution owned and operated by Walmart with more than 120 million monthly online visitors. Instead of selling through a traditional wholesale relationship to Walmart, when you sell on the marketplace, you're selling directly to consumers.

To a consumer, there's no difference in the shopping experience. For brands, there's no selling in bulk to a category buyer.

While Walmart processes shoppers' payments, it's the brand’s responsibility to manage and support the rest of the order process, including shipping and handling, customer service, exchanges, and returns.

Walmart is looking to build relationships with sellers who share their values of trust, transparency, and fairness.

Walmart Marketplace for Sellers

Selling directly to consumers is all about building relationships with them. But in a crowded ecommerce landscape, it’s often hard to stand out and get their attention.

The marketplace offers an alternative to Amazon for brands trying to differentiate themselves from competitors and grow sales and market share. There are currently more than 150,000 sellers on the marketplace, according to SellersFi. That may sound like a lot, but compared to the 9.7 million Amazon sellers worldwide, it’s a far less saturated marketplace.

While Amazon designed its sign-up policy to get as many sellers into the marketplace as quickly as possible, Walmart took a different approach. Selling on the marketplace requires an approval process designed to ensure that only the sellers with a good fit for Walmart can sell.

In a Salsify webinar, “How to Build a Winning Walmart Marketplace Strategy,” Alicia DeFinis, former director of partnerships for Walmart Marketplace, highlighted the reason for this process.

“The number one thing we're concerned about is customer trust,” DeFinis says. “We want to make sure that all the sellers we have are providing legitimate products and that we have very low rates for fraudulent or counterfeit activity. We are keeping a very high bar for sellers, so you will be in good company when selling on Walmart.com.”

An Ample Opportunity To Reach Shoppers

With less competition, there’s an ample opportunity to reach shoppers more easily. But you can also stand out with captivating product content. Rich media — also called enhanced content or A+ content on Amazon — includes content assets like images, videos, comparison charts, and more.

No matter what channel they’re shopping on, consumers today want this kind of product content. A whopping 76% say product images are “extremely” or “very important” to their purchasing decision, according to Salsify’s “2024 Consumer Research” report.

This kind of rich product content is so important, that 45% of shoppers will abandon their cart if they don’t see high-quality product images, and 42% will ditch their purchase if product information is incomplete or poorly written.

By setting up shop on the marketplace, you get access to millions of shoppers — but your product content has to be in top shape if you want to secure their business.

Added Benefits To Selling on Walmart Marketplace

A less-crowded seller pool isn’t the only benefit you can gain from setting up a virtual storefront on the marketplace. The marketplace also provides sellers with resources to help them optimize their presence and pull in more customers.

• Walmart Connect enables sellers to create custom advertisements that can increase discoverability in search.
• The Repricer automated pricing tool helps sellers set and adjust pricing thresholds according to their selling strategies.
• Discounts on referral fees to Connect, Repricer, or Walmart Fulfillment Services make enhancing your business easy and affordable.

The marketplace also offers turnkey tools, shipping templates, and more to ease sellers’ day-to-day operations. On top of these benefits, sellers get access to a community of like-minded businesses eager to grow their sales on the platform.

How Do I Get Started?

Walmart private label, brands, small businesses, and individuals all sell on Walmart Marketplace. What sets the marketplace apart from Amazon is its intentionality in selecting sellers. The process is relatively fast and efficient, but makes sure that Walmart brings only the best sellers for Walmart’s shoppers.

There are four steps for brands to start selling:

• Step 1: Ensure you meet all of Walmart’s required qualifications, including being able to provide documentation proving a history of ecommerce success, a business ID number, a product catalog that aligns with Walmart’s policies, and more.
• Step 2: Create a seller account and profile on Walmart’s site.
• Step 3: After your account details are approved, submit your required documentation for verification and set up details such as where to send payments and which shipping partners you’ll be using.
• Step 4: When you’re ready, Walmart does a final review, and then you can start selling.

Walmart Selling Best Practices

Walmart expects its sellers to meet certain performance standards, including selling competitively priced, high-quality products, delivered with best-in-class fulfillment and customer service. 

Here are three areas to keep in mind when crafting your strategy to sell on the marketplace.

Ensure Products Are in Stock

While anyone can apply to be a seller on the marketplace, what will set you apart is continuously keeping your products in stock. Use order and inventory management software to prevent stockouts and plan for the ebbs and flows of business.

Streamline the Fulfillment Process

Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS) can also help alleviate the stress of the order fulfillment process while giving you access to loyalty-boosting two-day delivery and reduced inbound shipping rates. Products using WFS see a 30–50% lift in conversion.

Meet Walmart Product Page Requirements

Update your content to meet Walmart’s product page requirements. Failing to do this can cause Walmart’s algorithm to make your products less visible in search results or even get them unlisted.

It can be tempting to try to “copy and paste” from your product listings on other sites. Instead, set your brand up for success with a tailored strategy for Walmart Marketplace.

Remember these best practices when setting up your product pages:

• Display high-quality product pages, regularly updated with the freshest, most compelling brand and product content, including rich media.
• Keep your products in stock with smart inventory management to prevent stockouts that harm your page ranking.
• Continually meet product listing requirements to maintain and improve your page rank.

Salsify and Walmart Marketplace: A Winning Combination

“Salsify can make [signing up] a really easy plug-and-play process, and you can go live in a matter of days if you're an existing Salsify customer,” DeFinis says.

Salsify offers a centralized approach to selling on marketplaces, including Walmart Marketplace. With Salsify Product Experience Management (PXM), you can centralize product content and listing data into a single source of truth. 

PXM helps brands automate processes, streamline content review to get to market faster, and access multiple layers of content validation to ensure everything that goes live on the marketplace is consistent and accurate.

Within the booming ecommerce market, sellers today need to diversify their selling channels and proactively make sure they stand out from the crowd. Using Salsify PXM to optimize your presence on Walmart Marketplace can help you capture new routes to market to grow sales and make your mark on the digital shelf.