It’s a given that the eCommerce market has become super-saturated. While it is expensive and time-consuming to have your own eCommerce designed and launched, most online shops aren’t going to stop doing business. This is where the need for a marketplace comes in because a marketplace makes the entire process simpler and enables you to emphasize the core part of your business – sales.
Since there are several online marketplaces, if you’re used to selling on Amazon or eBay and want to branch out, sales on Walmart Marketplace can be an excellent option – which allows third-party sellers to list their products on Walmart.com. However, the same rules don’t apply to each marketplace, so you’ll need a separate list of selling strategies.
To maximize the opportunities that the Walmart Marketplace affords, there are four key components to note:
- useful product data
- a competitive offer
- a good customer experience
- product marketing and promotion
In a bid to help sellers optimize their sales performance, Walmart recently released the Listing Quality Dashboard, which can give sellers insights on how to improve their performance.
Walmart’s Listing Quality Dashboard
This gives sellers a measure of how well they are maximizing their potential. Every item in a seller’s catalog is rated by the quality of its content, offer, and customer feedback. By accessing the Listing Quality Dashboard and reviewing Walmart’s suggestions, sellers are able to see additional opportunities for improving the performance of their products.
Source: Walmart
On the Listing Quality page, you will see a dashboard that shows your average listing quality, along with product-by-product breakdowns of how strong your listing is. Clicking on “Details” for a product will take you to the “Item Details” page, where you can see any opportunities for improving your item’s content or pricing.
Source: Walmart
On the Item Details page, you’ll be able to see if your item’s content, pricing, or reviews need the most improvement. Walmart will also provide useful tips for improving your content, and let you know which attributes (like titles, descriptions, images, etc.) need extra attention.
10 Strategies to Grow Sales on Walmart
Using Walmart Marketplace best practices to grow sales on the platform, the following are useful tips:
1. Provide useful product data for shoppers and search engines.
To improve your product’s searchability and visibility, you will need to optimize your product titles, images, descriptions and correctly list your products following Walmart’s product categorization.
Optimized product titles should include your brand, the name of the product, and other pertinent details like size, color, and model number. If you can include common product nouns or an important selling feature like “waterproof” or “100% organic cotton,” you should.
2. Focus on having the lowest and most competitive price
If you’re at all familiar with Amazon’s Buy Box, you know that price is a big factor, but not necessarily the most important one.
That’s totally different with Walmart Marketplace, as having the lowest price puts you in the best position to win a Buy Box. But when you’re setting your pricing rules, remember these two tips:
- Don’t engage in a race to the bottom (your overall profit margin will end up hurting in the long run).
- Consider both the product price and shipping costs when going after the lowest price.
3. Don’t Run Low on Inventory
This selling strategy is closely related to the above one, as it’s integral to winning the Buy Box on Walmart Marketplace (and helps boost your overall sales, too). You might very well have the lowest price among your competitors, but if they have more of the same item in stock, they’ve just upped their chances of taking the Buy Box away from you.
4. Fill Customers’ Needs with Otherwise Unavailable Products
Walmart has a huge variety of products, many of which shoppers can find on other sites as well. But what those other sites and stores can’t always compete with is breadth and depth of inventory.
For example, when regular dealers of a particular product are out of stock, this can represent a good opportunity for you to cash in. Take your time to research what’s unavailable elsewhere and see if it can fit in with your business plan.
5. Maintain Excellent Customer Support
Let’s face it: customer support in-store at a Walmart isn’t always the best. And when compared with Amazon’s adherence to the highest levels of customer support, you’ve got your work cut out for you.
If “excellent customer support” is a bit ambiguous to you, here are the metrics to focus on.
- Shipping standard rate should be 99% or higher to ensure you continue to rank in organic rankings.
- Product shipped rate needs to be at least 99.5%.
- Product cancel rate has to be under 1.5%.
- While returns because of damage or defects may be unavoidable, keep this rate under 3% and process all refund requests within one day of receipt from buyers.
- Your 90-Day Seller Rating metric should be less than or equal to 90%.
- Customer service escalation rate needs to be less than or equal to 0.5% on all
- Answer at least 60% of customer calls (getting below 4% is the bad magic number) and 90% of customer emails within one day.
- Each order file should be confirmed and received by Walmart within one hour of receipt, and an electronic notice of shipment confirmation has a four-hour window.
6. Pay attention to your Order Defect Rate.
To see your seller performance metrics, log in to the Walmart Seller Center. On the left sidebar menu, under Analytics & Reports, select Performance. Here you’ll see your 90-day Order Defect Rate, which takes into account several key drivers, including Cancellation Defects, Return Defects, Delivery Defects, and Customer Complaints.
Source: Walmart
As a seller, it is expected you meet the following performance standards:
- 90-Day Order Defect Rate <2%
- On-Time Shipment Rate >99%
- Valid Tracking Rate >99%
Sellers who fail to meet these standards will have 30 days to improve, or Walmart may suspend their seller privileges.
7. Leverage Walmart Ads to get the word out about your great products and services
Reviews matter a lot online, as they’re one of the top ways to build trust with future buyers in a forum where you can’t do so face-to-face. The more (positive) customer reviews you have, the better chances you have of ranking higher in searches. And because buyers almost never have the patience to scroll through 10 pages of product searches, ranking high vastly increases your chances of a sale.
Make sure to leverage Walmart PPC ads to scale and grow sales on Walmart Marketplace and stay ahead of your competition.
8. Leverage Walmart’s Lack of Fees
On Amazon, it seems like you’re paying fees for just about everything: account subscription, Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), shipping, storage, seller referral fees, and more. But with Walmart, you’re only responsible for paying referral fees, which are based on the product’s category.
Given this, use those savings to boost areas elsewhere, like adding in free shipping (if possible), expanding your inventory, running promotions, or anything else that can help you.
9. Build Reputation & Credibility
Walmart stresses the significance of reputation while selecting its sellers and launching its products on its marketplace. Since Walmart is a renowned name, the firm ensures that it picks the best sellers who can fulfill its customer demands.
In addition, you are supposed to use your fulfillment solution to ensure you have a smooth procedure in place. Once you are on Walmart, it requires every seller to maintain a feedback rating of 99% with a customer rating of 4.5 stars.
10. Run Strategic Promotions
One of the strongest ways you can draw attention to your listings and increase sales is by running promotions. You can choose from one of two banners, depending on your needs.
- Clearance: Choosing this promotion will display a “CLEARANCE” badge above the product, indicating customers are getting a better-than-average deal. Use this promotion when trying to move slow-moving stock, excess inventory, or seasonal items at the end of a season.
Source: Walmart
- Reduced: This promotion shows a “REDUCED PRICE” badge with products that have more than $5 off on items more than $100 or 5% on items under $100. Pick this one when you’re looking for a quick boost.
Final Thoughts
Selling on a marketplace can get complicated quickly. Howbeit, as enumerated, to increase your sales on Walmart Marketplace requires different selling strategies than with Amazon or eBay. Continuous deployment of these highlighted strategies becomes muscle memory in no time whilst yielding the expected results.
