Among the two juggernauts of the online retailers, Amazon and eBay, another player is growing its ranks and looking to overtake its competition, Walmart Marketplace.
With over 100 million monthly shoppers, no monthly fees, low competition, personalized shipping methods, and easy transactions, this is the platform that you should look to get your business on ASAP!
With the average user browsing the platform for over 5 minutes, and a huge customer pool between Canadian and American shoppers, the answer to how you will sell your products online has just been answered.
So let’s talk more about why you should sell on Walmart Marketplace.
- Huge Exposure: Your brand will get instant eye-balls from the current, and ever-increasing, customer base of Walmart. Not only that but by having your products listed on the platform millions of people will be exposed to your brand’s name, simultaneously growing your brand awareness and potentially increasing the number of leads your business generates all through Walmart Selling.
- Low Monthly Fees: Yes, you heard that right. Unlike Amazon, Walmart doesn’t charge a setup fee, monthly fee, or a subscription fee — they only charge a referral fee for each sale that occurs on the platform, and that fee varies based on the product category.
This means you can get your business set up on the platform with minimal capital upfront, and start Walmart selling right away.
- Low Competition: Walmart Marketplace is an invitation-only, professional seller community that carefully vets who they accept onto their platform. This means that your business will have to compete with less third-party sellers and deal more with providing an exceptional product for customers that care.
This is a great thing as it gives customers the peace of mind knowing that the brands they see on the platform are all trusted, secure, and valuable. This translates to customers confidently shopping on the platform guaranteeing that Walmart has exclusively selected the right brands for them; and you can be one of those brands!
In order to successfully qualify for the platform, your brand must meet the following four main criteria:
- Offer a unique product catalog
- Offer fair and competitive market pricing
- Provide an exceptional customer experience
- Fulfill orders quickly, efficiently, and hassle-free.
If however, you don’t know where to start on growing your brand within the Walmart Marketplace Canada, join an accelerator program to kick-start your eCommerce success.
- Personalized Shipping & Fulfillment: Walmart Marketplace allows for sellers to choose their own methods of self-fulfillment. This means you fully control shipping carriers, the shipping rates, and at least 1 of the 5 shipping company methods offered by the platform.
In order to properly manage order fulfillment, here are a few questions you should ask yourself:
How will the order be processed?
You will need a way to know when an order comes in from a customer, and it should happen in a timely manner so as to not delay shipping times.
What sort of packaging materials are the right fit?
Properly sized boxes, appropriate SKU’s dimensions, and packaging materials are critical in safely and cost-effectively shipping your products to your customers.
How will the orders get packaged?
Once an order comes in and has been confirmed, now you must retrieve the product, verify the order, assort the box, add any supplementary packing materials and wrap up the box shut. This step is critical in ensuring a clean and satisfying unboxing experience for your customers.
What sort of label do you need to include, and what shipping carriers to use?
This step will involve daily trips to your nearby post office, and a printer that will have all your shipping label information on-demand. However, once your business begins to grow, you can look into more advanced and hands-off solutions to scale your shipping experience.
How will the order be tracked?
Your job isn’t done until the order gets to your customer, this means making sure that the customer will have an easy way to keep track of the package while it’s on-route. If this step is skipped, you can expect a lot of unhappy customers and inquiries coming in.This also means you need to have a solid return policy in place, just in case.
- Easy Transactions: Walmart doesn’t charge a per-order transaction fee to sellers, and every order is processed securely through Walmart. Another added bonus to the seller is that Walmart only charges you when a customer actually buys your product.
That’s right, you only pay when a customer converts!
This makes it an incredibly budget-friendly platform for your business, and a great place to see your profit margins increase while building up your brand name.
Making Your Product Listings Stand Out
So we discussed why you should do Walmart selling, now let's get into how you can gain an edge on the platform over your competition.
Great product listings have the power to convert casual browsers into buyers.
This can be achieved through organic or paid methods.
Organic methods range from writing stellar product titles, descriptions, using clean product photography, and fair pricing.
Ways to improve on organic methods:
- Use attribution to define the make of your product.
This will ensure that Walmart correctly categorizes your product catalog and better serves it to customers.
2. Ensure you have an optimized product title
This MUST INCLUDE: brand name, user, and make of the product. Use user-friendly keywords so customers can easily search and find your products.
3. Write an SEO optimized description
Also known as the “About this item” section, this is where you want to put all the information that you believe a customer will want to know about your product. Writing a solid, concise, and informative description has been proven to increase conversions.
4. Use the best possible images
Showcase your product using the sharpest, clearest, and crispest images possible, after all, a picture speaks a thousand words.
Some guidelines to follow:
- Use images that are in focus, centrally-placed with a white background
- Do not include any accessories, only showcase the product
- All images need to follow Trust and Safety standards
- Do not include watermarks, logos, graphics illustrations, or text on the images
5. Use meta keywords
This is your bread and butter to success with Walmart selling. Meta keywords will help boost the visibility of your products based on customer search results, so make sure to accurately describe your images.
For example, if you are selling a shoe, include meta keywords such as, “Leather Based Low Lace-Up”, as these will be common words that people will input when searching for shoes.
Paid methods include using Walmart’s advertising mechanism to boost your product’s visibility (not currently available in Canada).
However, as a quick overview, these include similar advertising options that you find in other platforms such as banner ads on category home page, landing page ads based on product category, and sponsored ads in the product grid layout.
All of these options will run a CPC (Cost Per Click) campaign, meaning you only get charged when someone presses on the ad and lands on the desired page.
Conclusion
Although not completely universal, fairly exclusive, yet extremely budget-friendly, Walmart Marketplace is definitely a place where you would want to get your business listed.
Not only will it bring huge exposure to your brand, save you on monthly fees, pay you weekly through easy transactions and allow you to sell among fewer competitors, it will also completely give you full control over how you want to ship and fulfill your orders to ensure that your brand delivers on exceptional customer experience.
End of the day, Walmart Marketplace is here to make a big impact and is an upcoming great alternative for independent brand labels looking to connect with potential customers and scale their business to heights unimagined.
Amazon might finally have some serious competition.
IMPORTANT FAQ
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- What is the referral fee per order?
Referral fees are calculated as a percentage of the gross sales proceeds from the sale of each product. The referral fee is based on the product type that you choose during the item setup phase.
- Difference between CA and US Walmart Marketplace?
Walmart Canada does not give any preference to sellers of Canada over the US, however, US sellers must be a pre-approved member of the Custom Self-Assessment program (CSA), must comply with DPP, and must require a Canadian Business Number from the Revenue Canada Agency.
- How are returns managed?
Walmart provides a link to contact the seller. If however the product is returned in-store, then it will be shipped back to the seller’s warehouse with the full cost of shipping rates covered by Walmart Canada.
- What about taxation when selling on Walmart Canada?
As a seller, you are responsible for registering yourself, as required by applicable law, for the selling of any Canadian goods or service to ensure that Sales Taxes are charged, collected, and remitted to the applicable tax jurisdiction. Read more here.
