Entering a new marketplace as a seller can be daunting, especially when you lack knowledge about the platform. You may wonder if it’s even worth the investment. But, when it comes to selling on Walmart Marketplace, it’s easier than you think.
Walmart has been improving its eCommerce platform to make it a more seamless experience for sellers. In the past few years, Walmart has introduced advanced selling tools and its own fulfillment service. With Walmart’s established brand and large customer base, the opportunity for growth is massive.
If you already have experience selling online, then selling on Walmart may have better odds for success. So, if you want to take advantage of the 2023 eCommerce wave and reach new customers, selling on Walmart should be on your to-do list.
In this blog, we will discuss why you can have an edge selling on Walmart and how Trellis can make the onboarding process even more seamless.
Why you should start selling on Walmart Marketplace
While there are several reasons to start selling on Walmart, here are some that apply to anyone looking to sign-up on Walmart Marketplace.
Ride the eCommerce wave 2023
With eCommerce sales expected to jump in 2023, you can expect Walmart Marketplace to be a part of that growth. Selling on Walmart Marketplace puts you in front of a different audience. This gives you an additional opportunity to be in the right place at the right time when sales start to spike.
Successful eCommerce sellers understand trends, global demand, and the importance of diversifying marketplaces. As Walmart emerges as the big eCommerce player, having a presence there early-on puts you steps ahead of the competition.
If you want to launch new products, Walmart is a great opportunity in 2023. For established brands, it can give them an even bigger market share.
If you can ride the eCommerce wave with Walmart while it’s young, you can establish an organic customer base before the market is saturated.
Early adopter gets a bigger slice
New marketplaces are usually unattractive for sellers as they do not have enough customers. But there is also less competition for sellers. With Walmart, it’s different, as it already has a huge, trusted customer base. That makes Walmart a greater opportunity for early adopters.
Even before opening its online marketplace, Walmart was one of the biggest retailers in the US. Now, Walmart has more than 100 million monthly visitors on their website; which is quite sizable, compared to eBay marketplace which has been running for more than two decades.
With millions of visitors and fewer competitors on the platform, it could be easier to get a larger share of the shelf leading to more sales. With fewer competitors and proportionally more customers, you may also enjoy a lower cost per click (CPC), making it cheaper to get clicks. This low-cost exposure can lead to more conversions for less.
More visibility for niche products
If your product is unique or falls under a sub-category, there will be less competition on new marketplaces such as Walmart. Being the second biggest online retailer in the US and selling products in almost all major categories, Walmart can give your niche product more visibility.
If you sell a monitor screen with a USP such as a tilt feature, your product has a greater chance of getting more sales since there will be fewer competitors with that same feature than a marketplace like Amazon. If someone does a close-match search on Walmart for; ‘monitor with tilt adjustment’, you will be up against fewer listings.
This is an opportunity for small to medium-sized businesses that don’t have one major value proposition on the product but a few small ones. The combination of a tilt feature, 3 HDMI ports, and a high refresh rate may be a unique combination not covered elsewhere on a marketplace with less competition.
As you begin showing up for searches for “monitor with tilt adjustment” users will be able to further qualify you against fewer competitors who may suffer in a category you thrive in.
Additionally, in smaller marketplaces, niche products have an opportunity to show up for broad-match searches. Users simply looking for “computer monitors” may only find the biggest brands in their searches on a larger marketplace. However, with fewer big names there is likely affordable ad space and organic inventory for brands that normally can only target long-tail keywords getting you proportionally more conversions than you would get on Amazon.
Incentives for new sellers
Starting on a marketplace is always a bit intimidating as you develop new keywords, new listings, and find new types of customers. To provide a smoother onboarding process, Walmart has introduced a New-Seller Savings Offer.
It includes incentives to support new sellers in the US with savings of up to 25% and a $500 dollar ad credit. You can get them through Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS), the repricer tool, and other referral fees.
Considering the savings, new sellers can get started in 2023 and mitigate some early growing pains to get an early foothold in the Walmart Marketplace.
How to sell on Walmart Marketplace as an Amazon Seller
If you are already selling on Amazon or other marketplaces, you may be a few steps away from starting. All you have to do is bring your products and selling experience to Walmart Marketplace.
Economies of scale
By expanding marketplaces, you can further take advantage of the economies of scale. By opening new selling channels, your warehousing costs, product development costs, and operational costs can be spread out to multiple marketplaces.
For instance, if you are warehousing your products for your online store, you can use the same warehouse for your Walmart store. This redistributes your total warehousing cost between the two marketplaces for your business.
Similarly, if you have an Amazon Virtual Assistant (VA), you don’t need another resource for Walmart.
As you profitably grow, instead of your VA wearing multiple hats, you can hire specialists for content, advertising, and customer service. This would not only help you further scale but improve the quality of your output.
Leverage merchandising workflows
When entering a new marketplace, you don’t need to create new processes. You can repurpose and reuse a lot of your workflows such as getting shipments from the manufacturer, sorting them out in the warehouse, getting them listed online, shipping them to the customer, or dealing with returns/refunds.
If you’ve been using Amazon ads, you can use similar campaigns on Walmart ads. This saves you a ton of time figuring out the best-converting keywords for Walmart.
For product listings, you also save time and money by not needing to create original content or get new product images.
For packaging, you can incorporate new labels within the same workflow. You don’t need to disrupt your previous operating procedures.
An edge for established brands
If you have an established brand on other marketplaces, you may have a higher chance of success with Walmart.
The registration process on Walmart Marketplace is not like Amazon. Walmart requires more business documentation and sales history from sellers. It is easier for established brands to get those requirements fulfilled than the new sellers. While registration requirements could be a deterrent for them, established brands have an edge.
Walmart has a more rigorous approval criteria than other marketplaces as it wants to partner with more reliable sellers to keep up with Walmart’s brand. For Walmart sellers, this means less competition from new sellers and potentially smaller brands.
Leverage catalog more effectively
If you have been selling on other platforms, you already know which of your products sell well and which ones have not performed.
Most catalogs will fall under the Pareto Principle i.e. 20% of your products will bring 80% of the revenue. If you already know what those 20% products are, then you can focus on them in the new marketplace. This saves you time and money by not running the trial and error of testing your products.
Tested products and advertising strategies can give you lower ACoS right from the start of the campaign. This is because you already know your best-converting keywords and you can focus on them.
Here are some ways you can leverage your tested products and strategies:
- Maximize your returns in shopping seasons. Since you already know what products or categories performed last season, you can create Promotions for those specific ASINs.
- Attract new customers to your brand at low prices. If your products are at the end of the life cycle, you can sell them on a newer marketplace as a loss leader.
- Sell your clearance inventory faster. If you want to clear your inventory quicker, you can do it through two marketplaces rather than one.
Walmart Sellers use data science
One of the biggest challenges sellers come across is maximizing the return on their ad spend. Trellis understands how to leverage your data to execute advertising strategies efficiently.
To run efficient ad campaigns, you need to continuously test, analyze, and optimize. To compete against other advertisers, you need to stay on top of your keywords. While that is possible with PPC experts, it can be costly and time-consuming. Trellis resolves this through automation.
Keyword harvesting
One of the most time-consuming tasks is finding the right keywords. This is where automation is most useful.
Harvesting high-performing keywords continuously is a difficult task even for the experts. Keeping up with various data points such as clicks, impressions, and conversions at different times of the day requires time and refined data analytics skills. PPC experts can find the right opportunities but AI does this way faster. Trellis simply automates the keyword harvesting process and implements full funnel targeting on keywords.
To optimize quickly and accurately, Trellis analyzes your results daily guided by high-level user control. This way you are in charge of the campaigns while still automating the data analysis and bid changes.
Automated bidding
Once you’ve discovered a set of keywords as opportunities, you also need to change bids regularly. You can manually update bids on hundreds of keywords every day, or you can simply automate bidding through Trellis.
Our platform continuously learns and iterates campaigns using your data. While bidding is automated, you can optimize for profitability or sales velocity. You may prefer to choose keywords that give you more profit but slower sales or choose ones that give you more sales with a higher RoAS.
Our algorithms consider the times of day when keywords are less competitive to bid on. For example, bids later in the day could win you cheaper clicks. This follows an assumption that competitors may have run out of budget earlier in the day. With Trellis, you don’t need to make assumptions or do the guesswork. Our algorithm analyzes results to find the most profitable bidding times for you.
While consumer behavior changes every season, campaigns need continuous analysis and testing. Running tests without automation throughout the year can be exhaustive. With automation, test cycles are shorter which allows quicker optimizations for your campaigns.
Trellis automates and helps execute your advertising strategy more efficiently even if you have a limited understanding of the Walmart advertising platform.
So, what are you waiting for?
Selling on Walmart is actually easier than you think. Particularly, if you already have experience selling on other marketplaces.
With a large customer base, advanced inventory management tools, and fulfillment services, Walmart provides a great opportunity for sellers to reach new customers, grow sales, and gain market share this year.
If you are looking to explore Walmart as a new marketplace for your brand, and still have questions, talk to us. Our experts have helped several customers hit the ground running with Walmart.