We know ecommerce news stories keep coming fast and it can be hard to sort through what’s a flashy distraction (Amazon’s delivery drones still won’t be ready for a while yet) and what’s potentially a big deal you need a strategy for (all the ways Walmart is innovating on their marketplace).
So we put together a panel of our analyst leaders to break down which news needs your attention and why. Scroll down for a full replay of this half-hour coffee break, or use the timestamps to jump to the news stories most important to you.
Breaking: Walmart cut its minimum Sponsored Products budget threshold by 90%
Advertisers can now launch a Sponsored Product campaign on the Walmart marketplace with a maximum budget commitment as low as $100 and/or a maximum daily budget of $50. Previous budget amounts were $1,000 for maximum campaign budget and $100 daily.
Andrew Waber, Director of Insights, says if you’re a smaller brand that’s selling on Walmart, these budget requirement changes make it a lot easier to get up and running. This also gets Walmart Sponsored Products a little closer to Amazon Sponsored Products.
Walmart+ Launches
We’ve been hearing rumors about it for months, and now we finally have details on the Walmart+ program.
Ryan Walker, Senior Director, Client Strategy, points out that comparing Walmart+ to Amazon Prime, as commentators have been doing, doesn’t really make sense for the time being. Walmart+ is focused on groceries and household products. So a better comparison would be to Instacart Express.
Andrew Waber adds that it will be interesting to see where Walmart goes from here with Walmart+: “I doubt this is the last story on Walmart+.”
Amazon Is Running Early Black Friday Deals in the EU
UK sellers will have until October 19 to submit Early Black Friday Deals for Week 1. It’s not clear what this might mean for the US.
Kelsey Robb, Team Lead, Ecommerce Strategy, remembers last time we hosted a news panel we were in the midst of India’s Prime Day. Now we have EU updates, but still Amazon is being tight-lipped about Prime Day in the US.
Kelsey advises working Prime Day into Q4 advertising budgets and thinking about how those budgets fit with Black Friday and Cyber Monday also in the same quarter.
Does all this talk of Black Friday Deals in our roundtable have you wondering if you’re ready for Q4? Watch our Getting Your Amazon Business Ready For Q4 on-demand webinar and be sure you have solid plans in place for fulfillment, advertising, & more
Walmart Is Considering Purchasing TikTok
Walmart’s interest in TikTok could be big news for ads and shopping channels
Meghan Gleason, Team Lead, Ecommerce Strategy, says the large customer base and different demographics of TikTok would present a unique opportunity for Walmart to pair TikTok user data with Walmart shopper data.
She also has a lot of questions about how this would work: Would Walmart open the ad space on TikTok to third party sellers? How would TikTok users perceive that? In what other ways could Walmart expand its ecommerce reach using TikTok?
Walmart has been very innovative in the ecommerce space. If you want to explore expanding your business to the Walmart marketplace, download our free ebook to learn what you need to know to get started on Walmart.com.
Privacy Changes From Apple With iOS 14
Apple is making privacy changes with iOS 14 this fall, and Facebook not too pleased, but we don’t really know how much this will impact advertisers.
Laura Pattison, Manager, Ecommerce Strategy, says it’s great that Apple’s new policy will mean an opt-in approach to handling data privacy, but for advertisers it could limit targeting capacity. However, she cautions us not to be too worried about those limitations.
*Update: It turns out after pushback from Facebook, Apple is delaying the new privacy changes until early next year. So we can definitely push this off the list of things to deal with now.
