Walmart Marketplace Being Overlooked by Smaller Sellers?
Walmart.com is making some serious inroads in marketplace sales, but many smaller sellers are not yet taking advantage of this growing marketplace.
In the company’s April announcements of quarterly results, Walmart stated that its assortment of third party products grew from 10 million to 50 million in under one year.
While this may still be way below the claim by Amazon of having hundreds of millions of marketplace listings, it shows tremendous growth in just one year.
LARGER MARKETPLACE SELLERS LEADING THE CHARGE ON WALMART.COM
According to a report by eMarketer.com, marketplace sellers that with sales over $2 million per year are leading the charge of new products on Walmart.com
Of this group, nearly 36% of sellers are now on Amazon and Walmart. A recent survey cited by eMarketer.com show even more promise for Walmart’s marketplace.
“In another telling sign, when asked about other channels they want to expand to this year, Walmart, cited by 29% of Amazon sellers in the Feedvisor survey, garnered the top spot alongside sellers’ own websites, beating all other marketplaces including Shopify, eBay, Walmart’s own Jet.com and Etsy.”
Smaller sellers, those with less than $2 million in annual sales, are lagging behind their larger counterparts. Only 9% of smaller Amazon Marketplace sellers are also on Walmart.com. Yet nearly 65% of the smaller sellers are on eBay.
THE WALMART MARKETPLACE OPPORTUNITY IS NOW
With Walmart growing rapidly in eCommerce, the time is now for smaller eCommerce sellers to catch the bandwagon.
All the investment that Walmart continues to put into promoting and marketing their eCommerce platform, the coming holiday season only months away, why not start selling on Walmart.com?
Apparently, many smaller sellers have not considered the marketplace large enough to be a factor. However, that thinking has to change.
Part of the jump start by larger marketplace sellers can be attributed to ChannelAdvisor. The listing service was the first third party listing tool or service to support Walmart.
There is an availability problem in listing tools. Other popular tools such as Sixbit Software or M2EPro need to get on board as many smaller sellers use them.
However, that should not stop small sellers from at least making some products available on Walmart.com. The opportunity is too big and why cede the marketplace to larger sellers.
What do you have to lose?
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Richard Meldner
Richard is co-founder of eSeller365. He has over 17 years of experience on eBay which includes tens of thousands of sales to buyers in over 100 countries and even has experience with eBay’s VeRO program enforcing intellectual property rights for a former employer. And for about two years Richard sold products on Amazon using Amazon FBA in the US.
To “relax” from the daily business grind, for a few weekends a year, he also works for IMSA as a professional race official.
I know this is an old article, but sellers need to have annual sales of 500k+ to be considered for Walmart.com. There are many small sellers who want to be in this new space but just haven’t reached the threshold for Walmart to let them in. It’s too bad since so many of us have a unique product offering and have done a pretty good business on the other marketplaces.
I am certain that over time the thresholds will change. Walmart Marketplace is a phase in product for them, so they are growing it but since they are also working on a lot of logistics behind the scenes, it may not be a major priority. Eventually I assume they will add some form of fulfillment service such as Amazon has with Amazon FBA and that should reduce any thresholds.
Richard