Selling on Walmart Marketplace: 10 Tips for Success

Amazon may represent the largest platform for selling goods online, but that doesn’t mean other e-sales options are irrelevant – particularly not Walmart Marketplace. With over 100 million unique visitors every month, Walmart Marketplace connects sellers to a massive segment of online shoppers via the Walmart.com website, allowing their products to find new audiences and buyers. 

Those interested in taking advantage of Walmart Marketplace may apply to become a Walmart seller – a simple, albeit thorough process that requires a 10-minute application followed by registration and profile setup. Companies that provide “first-class customer service, a compelling product assortment, competitive pricing, and fast, reliable fulfillment” make ideal candidates for a Walmart Marketplace partnership. 

Becoming a Walmart seller, however, does not automatically translate to being a successful Walmart seller. Finding success on the Walmart Marketplace requires an understanding of the platform and its features to optimize how you use it.  

We’re here to help. Here are the 10 most essential tips for successful selling on Walmart Marketplace. 

1. Test Products Before Launch 

Walmart Marketplace enables sellers to preview products before making them live online.  

Take advantage of this feature by using it to test the process of ordering a given product as a customer, which will allow you to see how the interface works and practice preparing the goods for delivery. As part of testing, you can also play out possible deviations in orders, including cancellation and adjustments. 

Getting practice with the platform and catching potential errors will be much less stressful with yourself than with live customers.  

2. Run Walmart Performance Ads 

Walmart Performance Ads (WPAs) display your products to shoppers across the Walmart website. Like Amazon ads, WPAs operate according to a pay-per-click model, meaning you only pay when users click on your advertisement. This makes advertising on Walmart.com more cost-effective. 

Additionally, the Walmart algorithms will sort your ads by relevancy and keywords, which helps to determine the best location and customer demographic for your advertisement. 

3. Know Your Target Audience 

While Walmart’s online advertising system helps to sort your ads by relevancy, understanding your audience still matters. 

Consider the general customer profile of those using the Walmart website – likely customers seeking affordable deals on everyday essentials. From there, try to gather more specific insight on the type of customer interested in your specific product, and use that to tailor your product descriptions and the copywriting of your advertisements.  

You may even decide some of your goods are not suited to sell through this platform, which is just as important as determining what you should be selling. 

4. Walmart SEO 

Separately, Walmart.com offers a search bar option so that customers may directly search for particular items. As such, it is important to identify keywords that customers might use when searching for your type of product and include them in your product descriptions, titles, and images. 

Doing so will help your goods rank higher in search results. However, avoid overstuffing your product page with too many keywords, or words that don’t make sense for your item. Doing so could lead Walmart to sanction your account. 

5. Designing Attractive Product Pages 

When customers click on a link to your product, Walmart.com will direct them to your product page. This page can be the deciding factor for a customer between purchasing your product or going with a competitor. 

In general, the simpler the better. Customers will appreciate, clear, to-the-point copywriting, easy page navigation, and quality photos of the product.  

6. Bundling Items 

In the Seller Center on the Walmart Marketplace platform, you can create product bundles that allow customers to buy multiple items in one package. 

For best practices, try bundling a high-selling item with a low-selling item, so long as they are related. For example, selling gardening gloves along with a trowel. If you cannot find complimentary items, you can offer a second item at a discounted price to attract buyers too. 

7. Optimized Pricing 

Given constant fluctuations in the market, customers may react to prices differently throughout the year, month, or even day. One way to adapt to these fluctuations is through dynamic pricing, a pricing strategy that involves adjusting prices according to certain market factors.  

Examples of price adjustments include increasing price due to the popularity of an item or item category or lowering prices to make products more competitive.  

Cymax Group’s Channel Gate platform offers a Dynamic Pricing engine that helps brands optimize SKU prices across marketplaces with AI-enabled pricing algorithms. We use nearly 20 years of consumer data and machine learning. As a result, you can price more than 500k products in real-time. 

8. Customer Service 

Given the prevalence of one-click shopping, next-day delivery deals, and 24/7 customer support, customers have shorter patience for order delays and issues nowadays. 

As such, customer service is more important now than ever. Ensure that you have reliable and dedicated support when a problem inevitably arises.  

9. Dependable Logistics Network 

The larger your sales operation grows, the more your business will rely on a streamlined logistics process to meet order demand. Be proactive and sort out a scalable logistics procedure before becoming overwhelmed with product requests. 

That way, you’ll avoid an order bottleneck and the associated service complaints. 

Cymax Group’s integrated, all-in-one intelligent logistics platform connects you to a comprehensive network of freight service providers. Algorithm optimization matches appropriate carriers and service levels for each shipment to ensure an exceptional end-consumer experience. 

10. Winning the Buy Box 

The “Buy Box” refers to the button next to a listed product that enables a customer to add the item to their shopping cart or purchase it immediately. On any eCommerce website, the “Buy Box” button results in the most sales generation for a given seller and product. 

On Walmart Marketplace, multiple vendors can sell the exact same product, but only one may link to the “Buy Box” button. Whoever “wins” the button, then, presumably wins a large share of the sales for that product. 

Winning the “Buy Box” relies on a multitude of factors, including prices, reviews, and inventory.  

Grow Your Business on Walmart Marketplace 

Walmart Marketplace offers a promising opportunity to supplement your product reach and sales in addition to Amazon and eBay. So long as you follow the tips above, you’ll put yourself in the best position to find success on the platform. 

At Cymax Group Technologies - one of the top-rated sellers on Walmart, we help our clients amplify their business by providing them with a higher probability to win the buy box. Book a free consultation with us today and learn how to boost your Walmart sales.