Bigcommerce sellers: List your Amazon & eBay listings to Walmart this festive season

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Amazon and eBay have been the spot for the merchants and independent Bigcommerce sellers to sell their items. However, it is in the past few years that Walmart is all out to gain e-commerce share in the US where listings to Walmart has garnered them substantial revenue.

Though eBay leads Walmart in terms of revenues, visitors, its network, it’s the Walmart, which is strategically more poised to compete with Amazon. The reasons are anyone’s guess:

- Walmart has deep pockets due to retail stores.
- Also, every US citizen lives within avg. 10 miles of Walmart.

Walmart eCommerce growth (Listings to Walmart)

These two reasons have given Walmart a huge advantage edge. Besides this, when Marc Lore became the CEO of Walmart eCommerce after Walmart acquired Jet, one quick thing he did was to convince the Walmart board to shift their focus from books, electronics, and toys to areas which were popular and seemingly generating more traction over a period of time: apparel, fresh food and “everyday essentials” like drugstore items.

As a result, Walmart Marketplace has evolved as a universal marketplace where buyer personas of all types and from all walks of life converge to shop. Besides everyday essentials, Walmart currently allows 3P sellers to offer their products in 35+ categories which also includes health & personal care, jewelry, computers, and sporting goods and more.

Some of the other notable changes are:

A highly user-friendly website design.
$35 AOV threshold for free shipping
Partnership with Deliverr for fast 2-day delivery
BOPIS (Buy Online Pickup In-Store) as a fulfillment method

All of the aforementioned steps enabled Walmart to boost its sales which is evident from its Q3, 2019 report. This year Walmart’s eCommerce recorded 41% Y-o-Y growth rate bettering last year’s 37% growth rate which makes listings to Walmart a great sales channel.

Walmart eCommerce YOY growth | Image Source: Business Insider

Major Buyer Persona’s driving Walmart eCommerce growth:

The majority of buyer persona responsible for Walmart’s eCommerce sales boost are millennials. Currently, millennials make a quarter of the U.S. population [83.1 million] population. Moreover, [88% of them] live in metropolitan areas.
As almost half of them [over 40%] are parents, they end up spending more on everyday essentials.
54% of their spending is online which amounts to $600 billion annually.
Furthermore, millennial’s affinity for generic brands [ 60% of millennials prefer generic brand] works in favor of 3rd party sellers.

Besides all of the changes, its strategy to opening the doors for third-party sellers with excellent products, great customer service and a history of quick delivery made Walmart the third largest online retailer in the U.S. overtaking Apple in 2018 itself.

Walmart starting to outshine to Amazon:

Contrary to Amazon, Walmart doesn’t seem to be replicating the products of those successful on its platform. The company isn’t white labeling; it is acquiring or expanding additional services to third parties. Given the brand’s rise over the last couple of years, now is the best time to begin to create listings to Walmart and invest in getting your products on the Walmart Marketplace.

Walmart still needs a lot of catching up with Amazon, but it has positioned itself as a great alternative for an independent brand
labels to connect with their potential customers through adopting a multichannel strategy.

As per First Insight survey, the consumer’s shift towards Walmart has already started to happen with buyers shopping less from Amazon and preferring Walmart. The frequency of shopping from Amazon six or more times a month in 2017 has dropped by 40% this year. Let’s see all of the reasons why should you choose to sell on Walmart if you already have an eCommerce store:

Constraints to sell on Walmart:

Among all the positive, the only constraint is that Walmart doesn’t allow everyone to list their products on its marketplace. To ensure quality over quantity it carefully scrutinizes products before making them live on their platform, that too if brands meet the following criterion:

1) Business Registration:

Either a business should provide its US registered address and warehouse details or its international headquarter address if the brand is based out of the US. For those outside the US, you need a DUNS number – a worldwide standard that assigns a unique numeric identifier to a single business entity.

2) Category specialist:

Besides this one must be a category specialist i.e. it should cater to a niche or specialized in a particular product category. It is visible from its acquisition of Bonobos, Modcloth, Moosejaw, and others. Your business should specialize in any of the categories Walmart sells.

3) Great ratings:

Furthermore, you should have a great reputation. If you’re already selling on Amazon and eBay, it’s a big advantage. If your business fulfills all of the aforementioned criteria, apply here to Sell on Walmart

“Being an Official Channel Integration Partner, we can make the experience of applying, getting approved, uploading and then succeeding on Walmart a hassle-free experience”.

Reasons to sell on Walmart E-commerce marketplace:

As the merchants already selling on Amazon or eBay are already aware that these marketplaces have established high credibility with their buyers, there are inherent benefits on selling on these marketplaces as well as listings to Walmart such as

Huge Customer Base
Great fulfillment network
M-Commerce presence
Diversified Payment methods
Analytics tools
Campaigns and Promotional Tools

However, Walmart has several distinct USP over the other two – Amazon and eBay which are as follows:

1. No Monthly or Initial Setup Fees:

It gets easier and cost-efficient for sellers at Walmart as it follows the pay-as-you-go model which means there is no monthly fee, initial fee or the listing fee charged by Walmart. Whereas, Amazon and eBay have different types of fees involved with marketplaces monthly account fees, item listing fees (eBay), apart from category wise commission fee, or a combination of all of the fees mentioned.

2. Lower Competition:

It is a huge yes. Since Walmart’s third-party seller program is new and gated, there are fewer online sellers at Walmart. Hence sellers don’t have to face cut-throat competition. The number of sellers at Walmart is nowhere close to Amazon which has 2 million sellers and eBay with more than 25 million merchants.

3. 2-Day Shipping:

Since ship fast or go home is the way in eCommerce, Walmart has also partnered with Deliverr to enable marketplace sellers to ship faster. However, the advantage sellers have here is the fulfillment, pick-pack, and storage fees are lower than Amazon or eBay.

4. Increased traffic on web store

All the benefits aside, some of the sellers have reported a hike in their website traffic by virtue of their brand name appearing along with their listings to Walmart’s e-commerce marketplace.

BigCommerce Sellers: How to sell on Walmart with BigCommerce?

The Walmart Marketplace Integration app by CedCommerce , for Bigcommerce sellers, is awarded the Rising Star 2017 & Great User Experience 2017 Award, by Finance Online synchronizes the BigCommerce seller Store with Walmart. The app earned 97% user satisfaction and was rated 8/10 by the Finance Online review team.

With the help of APIs provided by Walmart, the app creates a channel facilitating the synchronization of product inventory and orders, updating product information and helps the BigCommerce store owner to manage the products from the store itself.

The Integration App Benefits for Bigcommerce sellers:

a) Bulk Upload System:

Merchants have the flexibility to upload any number of products on Walmart using the bulk product upload feature.

b) Automated Shipment Process:

Merchants can automate the shipment process with Shipstation and Ship work if installed, else, the merchant can ship the product manually as usual.

c) Order Acknowledgement:

Merchants receive an acknowledgment of Orders automatically as soon as orders are created.

d) Complete Synchronization:

Establishes an auto-synchronization of the product listing, order, inventory, return and refund, and pricing at regular intervals between BigCommerce and Walmart.

e) BigCommerce Orders Creation:

The app automatically creates the new Walmart orders in the BigCommerce Sellers store with all the required details as it is on Walmart.

f) Product Category Mapping:

Follows many-to-one category mapping philosophy. Admin can map many categories of the BigCommerce Sellers store to the single category of Walmart.

g) Error Notification:

For all the failed product upload, corresponding errors appear. It enables the store owner to view the errors and rectify them to re-upload the products immediately.

h) Easy Return and Refund Process:

The Bigcommerce sellers/store owners can easily fetch the returns generated on Walmart and list it to the BigCommerce app store.

To read the details of how to establish the connection between your BigCommerce store and Walmart, read the user manual

Conclusion

It gains special significance in the era of Multi-channel sales. Where Bigcommerce sellers, increasingly, are realizing that putting all the eggs in the single basket is not a wise thing to do. Instead, they’re looking for more avenues to diversify their sales channels.