Thinking of selling and hoping to beat your competition on Walmart.com? You’re not alone. Walmart has been swiftly growing the number of sellers on its e-commerce marketplace year over year, much of it through acquisitions such as Jet.com. With this level of growth and the breadth of consumer products sold, Walmart Marketplace is proving to be an effective sales channel for all kinds of sellers both big and small in the United States.
In 2020 alone, Walmart.com’s growth rate was 79%. There’s obviously much for sellers to gain here — and also a competitor field that grows wider every day. Here are some tips, then, for beating out the competition on Walmart.com.
1. Maintain Walmart’s high standards for Customer Service
Walmart’s customer service and shipping standards are strictly enforced. If you let yours lapse, you will risk suspension. On the other hand, if your ratings hover around the 5-star level, you’ll stay way ahead of the pack and earn higher rankings from its shopping engine.
As a seller, you’re expected to cover all these bases like a pro:
- 90-day Seller Rating of at least 90%
- timely shipping standard rate of 99% or higher. Slippage will directly affect your organic rankings.
- Products Shipped rate of 99.5%.
- Product cancel rate of < 1.5%.
- Fewer than 3% of products returned due to defects or damage
- Using Partner Tools for immediate updates related to product information
- Customer service escalation rate of no more than 0.5% for all orders.
- Order files confirmed and received by Walmart within 1 hour
- Refunds processed within a day of being requested
- Answer at least 60% of customer calls.
- Answer 90% of e-mails from customers within 1 day.
2. Take full advantage of all their seller tools, like these.
Unpublished Items Dashboard
One of the unique tools in Walmart’s Seller Center is the Unpublished Items Dashboard. It’s there to enable sellers to view and take action on items that have been unpublished from the site. You may not notice that certain products have simply stopped selling, or if you have, this is the place where you’ll get an explanation. The dashboard provides detailed insights into any items that got unpublished, with reason codes and step-by-step instructions for re-publishing. Often, items get unpublished for reasons like “Primary Image Missing” or an incorrect “End Date.” This makes it an easy fix to keep your entire catalog on view for shoppers.
Listing Quality Dashboard
Another seller tool offering opportunities for a competitive edge is the Listing Quality Dashboard, which provides specific recommendations and insights to help drive more sales. After undergoing a recent upgrade, this dashboard has several features to help maximize your catalog’s full potential. You can filter products by priority to see which items have the biggest potential lift in GMV, for example. Or see if there are any price mismatches or product types with incorrect assignments, and read item-level reviews from customers.
3. Take advantage of Walmart.com’s expedited shipping programs and services.
Satisfactory shipping and competitive shipping rates are two key factors in e-commerce success. Walmart Marketplace’s expedited shipping options give you a range of choices for finding the best fit with your sales operation.
The TwoDay program is one of the most popular. Those eye-catching ‘free 2-day delivery’ tags on Walmart.com are intended to mimic the 2-day shipping guarantee on Amazon Prime, Walmart’s biggest competitor. According to Walmart’s own data, sellers who participate in the two-day program will see up to a 50% organic lift in average conversions.
If the Two Day program cuts too far into your profits, there’s also the ThreeDay program. You can opt for the faster shipping on your best sellers, and assign 3-day shipping to the rest of your catalog. Walmart reports that sellers see an average 30% organic lift in conversion for items with 3-day delivery.
Here’s one more, not-so-obvious way to beat the competition on Walmart.com.
Getting your products found on Walmart.com’s search engine depends on a lot of factors like the ones described above. One of the primary factors in surfacing your products in a search is how well they are described, and how well they’re able to match a search query. This is the function of product attribute tags, and your success depends on the quality of the data you put into them. Your competitors are probably creating their own product attribute tags for Walmart.com, and they’re inevitably going to miss the mark on some with incorrect or incomplete data.
You, however, can sync your product listings to Walmart.com with a complete and fully accurate set of product attribute tags, without having to come up with them yourself. Shoppingfeed’s syndication software provides it all for you, automatically. Your feed will be constructed with every type of descriptive tag that might show up in a search query on Walmart.com, without you having to do the mental heavy lifting.
Users of Shoppingfeed’s product syndication service get automatic attribute matching for every type of product. And, there’s real-time inventory syncing, order fulfillment and a single dashboard for managing sales on every channel where you sell, Walmart.com included.
Our machine learning-based ProductGraph technology responds to the way buyers think.
The ProductGraph assigns product tags in every conceivable way a consumer might describe that product. It’s perfect for the growing trend in voice-assisted shopping where queries are often phrased as questions or full sentences.
All of these tips will help you stay top-ranked as a seller on Walmart.com. But only users of Shoppingfeed are able to outsmart the competition on Walmart.com with an app that saves them time, avoids errors, and makes their products more visible to shoppers.
