Ecommerce businesses closely monitoring the pulse of the industry are making the smart move to expand to the Walmart marketplace. Growth is explosive, the potential for third-party profitability is enormous, and Walmart now offers tools putting it on near-even footing with Amazon. Ignoring Walmart could be a costly mistake.
If you’re not yet convinced, here are six compelling reasons why now is the time to expand onto Walmart.com:
- Walmart currently has less competition than Amazon
- The marketplace can put your brand’s products in front of new audiences
- You’ll get to piggyback on Walmart’s brand loyalty
- Diversification will make your business stronger and more flexible
- Now is your brand’s best chance to tap into enormous growth potential
- The tools for success are ready and waiting for your business
Prefer to learn about Walmart via video? We’ve got you covered! Check out the replay of our most recent live webinar co-hosted by Walmart and Teikametrics:
What’s New For Walmart Marketplace Sellers in Q3
1. Walmart currently has less competition than Amazon
The competition on the Amazon marketplace can be fierce. Amazon has over 8 million sellers worldwide. That’s a lot of competition for a customer’s attention whenever they log on to shop.
Meanwhile, Walmart is just a fraction of Amazon’s size. The newer marketplace recently passed 50,000 sellers. The smaller number of sellers creates a great deal more freedom to sell on Walmart.com without having to devote a significant amount of strategy or ad spend on handling competition.
2. The marketplace put your brand’s products in front of new audiences
Walmart’s customer base overlaps with, but is not identical to Amazon’s. Joining the marketplace opens up the opportunity to reach new audiences.
The demographics Walmart shares regarding their online customers are compelling. More than half of Walmart shoppers are homeowners with a medium-high household income. Over a third of Walmart’s online customers are millennials, between the ages of 23 and 38. They also attract families. More than half are married or partnered and almost as many have children.
Walmart has built its brand around saving money for its customers, so people often come to Walmart looking for a deal. If you are offering competitively priced products, you have an especially great chance to win net new customers and increase your profit.
3. You’ll get to piggyback on Walmart’s brand loyalty
Walmart is the largest retailer in the United States, and is well liked by shoppers. In more than one study, Walmart has ranked highest for customer loyalty. When your brand sells on the Walmart marketplace it’s piggybacking on that credibility.
That positive customer sentiment comes even without a customer loyalty program, but it’s expected that Walmart will be rolling out a new competitor to Amazon Prime which they’ll call Walmart Plus.
A program like that has the potential to bring new shoppers to the site as well as increasing the loyalty of existing shoppers. If that bet plays out well, it will make Walmart an even more valuable marketplace for sellers.
4. Diversification will make your business stronger and more flexible
It’s best practice to diversify logistics and strategy so that an interruption in service or operations in one area won’t mean your business halts across the board. Many sellers who hadn’t planned for diversification learned this lesson the hard way in March when reliance on single sources for products or components disrupted entire businesses.
A seller who relies on only one marketplace like Amazon or eBay runs the risk that something going wrong on the retailer’s side could threaten the whole business. Expanding to Walmart makes a business more flexible and ready to respond to disruptions.
Moving onto a new marketplace doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch. Much of what’s been tested and proven to perform well on other marketplaces can port over as a good starting point for Walmart. There are some critical differences though, so it’s important to rely on trusted sources of education on the unique characteristics of Walmart.
5. Now is your brand’s best chance to tap into enormous growth potential
Walmart may only have 50,000 sellers, but that number is double from just a year ago, and the marketplace is still growing. With their recent integration with Shopify, Walmart is seriously investing in increasing the size of the marketplace.
Sales volume is also scaling rapidly. During the pandemic, Walmart’s ecommerce business grew by 74%.
If your business plan has Walmart’s marketplace somewhere on the horizon, it makes sense to start now and establish your brand’s presence before the competition on the marketplace accelerates.
6. The tools for success are ready and waiting for your business
We’ve written a comprehensive guide to getting started on Walmart. It covers how to get onto the marketplace, tactical issues like fulfillment and listing optimization, and our recommended best practices for ad management.
Teikametrics also offers fully managed ad services based on our deep experience in the ecommerce advertising space. As one of the few service providers with Walmart advertising API access, we can help your business better scale while supporting increasingly sophisticated ad management capabilities as they are released.
Teikametrics’ managed service offering includes:
- Performing account audits and sharing account-level insights
- Building targeted auto & manual targeting campaigns for success programmatically via the Walmart Sponsored Products API
- Leveraging best-performing marketplace search terms and keywords and ingesting them as keywords into manual campaigns on Walmart Sponsored Products
- Continuous programmatic bid adjustments catered to Walmart’s first-price auction
- Budget optimization to control inefficient spend
- New keyword harvesting and refining keyword coverage for improved ad targeting
- Daily performance monitoring and optimization
- Weekly reporting summarizing performance on Walmart Advertising
- Regular cadence for meetings to review progress and discuss next steps
Your business will also have around the clock on-demand access to our Walmart Ads Dashboard, which features customizable date ranges and an export functionality so your team can deeply analyze performance data. The dashboard includes all the most important ad metrics: impressions, clicks, CPC, ad sales, ad spend, total and ad-direct ROAS.
Teikametrics is already managing over 150 brands on Walmart, and we’d love to help you grow your Walmart business. Learn more about how Teikametrics can help to profitably grow your business on Walmart.
