Are you considering selling on Walmart.com? Going into 2022, Amazon’s most significant competitor is Walmart’s marketplace.
If you haven’t expanded beyond Amazon in 2021, you should consider selling on the Walmart Marketplace. Walmart has continued to see growth and continues to see enormous opportunities for sellers.
Amazon is a great marketplace to get your feet wet, learning e-commerce, but you need to focus on other platforms as you continue to grow.
Walmart is right behind Amazon when it comes to growth.
These numbers are going to be inflated because of COVID-19. The pandemic has demonstrated that eCommerce shopping is a necessary part of our daily living. At one time, eCommerce was a convenience but now has turned into something essential.
Walmart and Amazon have very similar referral fee structures, which will be no surprise to you, Amazon Sellers.
You’re not going to save money selling on Walmart when it comes to the fee schedule, which means you won’t see a drastic change in potential profits.
The most significant benefit is that Walmart does not charge a $39.99 monthly fee to sell on their platform, which is the most crucial difference between selling on the two marketplaces.
Walmart’s biggest strength is that it doesn’t just allow anyone to make an account and sell on its platform.
When you think about the sellers on Amazon, you will notice that the barrier to entry is shallow. Amazon has done a little better in 2021, but it is still not that difficult to set up an account. If you have contact information, a credit card, bank account and prove your identity, you can be a seller on Amazon. Oppose to Walmart, where they have an account specialist whose job is to review your seller application. Walmart only wants to deal with genuine sellers, real businesses who have had a track record of successful e-commerce sales.
Walmart Due Diligence differs from Amazon because:
See More Here At Walmart Seller Guidelines
One of the other big selling points of selling on Walmart is the ability to set your shipping policies, such as return/exchange timelines.
As an Amazon seller, if you have not experienced Amazon’s rigid return policy, it will be a matter of time until you realize it will always favor the customer. The seller will continuously lose the battle with an Amazon customer because Amazon has made it clear that the customer can return without question.
Walmart does things differently and sets minimum requirements on returns, such as a standard 30-day window. Customers can also return anything to a Walmart retail location.
As a seller, you have more control over the returns, restocking fees that you can charge, which makes it easier to handle fulfillment yourself.
Customer service is another advantage to sellers over Amazon. Amazon has stringent policies on communication with the customer, while Walmart gives you the ability to provide customer service to your buyers.
While Amazon customers pay a yearly subscription to get fast shipping, also known as prime, Walmart doesn’t provide such service, which means you will be reaching a different audience and shopping persona.
You can sync your Shopify store and your Walmart account, which will track your inventory and import listings. You can do the same with Amazon; however, you can do a few things with Shopify and Walmart that you can’t do with your Amazon account.
Partial order shipment: If a customer orders multiple items, but you only have certain ones in stock, you sell those and the rest of the order is passed to other sellers who can fulfill the remaining items (as long as you had the buy box for that purchase of course).
Cross-platform listing editing: You can upload and “transfer” SKUs and listings between the two platforms, then edit them separately.
We want to repeat that it’s usually a clever strategy to expand to different e-commerce platforms. Whether that’s Shopify, eBay, Walmart, or others, boosting enables you to reach more people, diverse audiences, and scale up.
It also secures that should your Amazon account be suspended or your listings suppressed for any reason, you’ll still have revenue from other platforms while you fix your Amazon account.
Fewer sellers on Walmart means less competition to win the buy box and increase your sales.
You have many options when it comes to selling your products online. Many brands and manufacturers use marketplaces such as Amazon, Walmart, Wayfair, and many others to sell their products because they know the consumer is already present. The challenging part of selling on these marketplaces is managing the platform while following the rules and expectations set by the marketplace.
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