In 2024, the e-commerce landscape is nothing if not saturated. In a world where even experienced merchants can get washed away by a flood of competition on Amazon, Walmart Marketplace remains a bright spot for sellers.
Last year, Walmart finally surpassed the $100 billion milestone in global e-commerce sales, but it still has a long way to go before it can truly go toe-to-toe with Amazon. To grow your momentum and increase sales on Walmart, you’ll need an active and workable strategy to boost your traffic and conversions.
Walmart Marketplace: The Beginning of a Golden Era for Sellers?
Walmart had what some consider a slow start in the world of e-commerce.
It began selling online in 2000, enabling customers to shop its regular store catalog online. It wasn’t until nearly a decade later, in 2009, that it opened its online marketplace to third-party sellers.
Since its founding, the mega retailer has focused on offering customers the lowest possible prices. But in recent years, it has moved to position itself as a viable Amazon competitor, shifting its focus from dominating rural areas and moving toward a highly digitized omnichannel strategy that might actually be helping small businesses.
This year, we’re beginning to see the impact of this shift in strategy, including new opportunities for third-party sellers.
In 2024, a growing number of high-income shoppers are turning to Walmart for regular purchases. Although the typical in-store shopper is older, middle class and suburban, Walmart has been hard at work attracting new Gen Z and Millennial shoppers.
As Amazon continues to get noisier, there is a gap in the e-commerce playing field that only Walmart can fill. Third-party sellers who take advantage now can capture more sales at a time when referral fees and competition on Walmart are still relatively low.
10 Ways to Increase Your Walmart Sales
Whether you’re already selling on Walmart’s e-commerce platform or are still on the fence, the following strategies will help you plan for maximum traffic and sales.
1. Choose the Right Products to Sell
While other e-commerce disruptors like Temu and Shein only cater to certain categories, Walmart Marketplace has it all. So where do you begin?
To determine what to sell, start by browsing other major marketplaces, like Amazon and Alibaba, to get a sense of what’s trending. You can either browse manually by heading to the Amazon Best Sellers page, or use digital product research tools to streamline and automate the process.
To compare your results to Walmart’s top sellers:
- Go to Walmart.com
- Enter “best sellers” into the search bar
- Click the icon to explore by category (electronics, home, fashion, etc.)
You can also check the “Growth” tab in Walmart Seller Center for inspiration and ideas.
Look for popular products and unique accessories and add-ons to increase last-minute cart additions, while helping Walmart develop a well-rounded product catalog in your category.
2. Open Your Walmart Brand Shop
Walmart Brand Shop is Walmart.com’s answer to Amazon Stores.
Any US trademarked seller can build a free landing page as long as they’re also registered as a Walmart Brand. If you’re already selling on Amazon, you can get help with the trademark process through the Amazon IP accelerator.
A Walmart Brand Shop can help drive more external traffic to your listings. It also comes with a vanity URL which you can link to straight from your website, email campaigns, and social media. Brand Shops are also automatically optimized for Google search to help drive even more traffic to your listings.
Shops are fairly minimal in design. You’ll find less brand storytelling than with Amazon and a larger focus on getting users to click on product listings.
To maximize your success with Brand Shop, focus your Walmart marketing efforts off the platform. For inspiration and to see how other brands are using their pages, check out the Walmart Brand Shop directory.
3. Stock Your Walmart Shelves
Walmart Shelf is a feature within Brand Shop that allows you to showcase products by collection or category. For example, if you sell jewelry, you can have a Shelf each for sub-category: necklaces, earrings, bracelets, etc.
To get started with Shelves, you first need to become a registered Walmart Brand Owner. Once registered, you can use the Shop Builder tool to create your Shelf.
Although you don’t need to have a Walmart Brand Shop in order to create a Shelf, you can get more out of both by linking multiple Shelves to your Brand Shop.
The layout of each Shelf is similar to the layout for your Brand Shop page, giving you another brief opportunity to share your brand story. One effective way to use Shelves is by promoting seasonal collections or top-reviewed items.
4. Optimize Your Listings for Maximum Product Visibility
One of the biggest challenges when selling on Walmart is realizing the search engine optimization (SEO) strategies that brought you success on other marketplaces won’t necessarily work here.
To optimize your listings, head to Walmart Seller Center, click Growth Opportunities, and open your Listing Quality Dashboard. From here, you can check your progress and determine what you need to improve in order to boost your traffic and conversions.
Here are a few more tips to optimize your Walmart listings:
- Publish great content: Use clear titles, detailed, accurate descriptions and high-resolution images. Add relevant keywords organically into the text of your listing.
- Stay competitive: Use a price optimization tool and offer expedited shipping options. Optimize your supply chain and inventory planning process to avoid stocking out.
- Get customer feedback: Earn as many customer reviews as possible. This can either be done organically, or through Walmart’s Review Accelerator.
- Offer a strong customer experience: Make sure your customers are satisfied post-purchase, avoiding delivery defects, order cancellations, and returns.
- Check your product type: Select the right product category. Even a small mistake here could have a negative impact on your rankings, for example Women’s vs. Women’s Plus.
- Choose a strong title: The sweet spot is relevant, specific, and brief.
- Use Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS): No need to rely on it for all your products, but sending at least some inventory through WFS distribution centers is rumored to boost your rankings.
Above all, be sure to check your Listing Quality Dashboard regularly and take extra care to follow Walmart’s listing guidelines as closely as possible. If you can keep your Listing Quality Score in the 90s, you’ll have a much greater chance at growing and sustaining your sales.
5. Get More Product Reviews
If you have fewer than 15 customer reviews on a given product, you may be eligible for the Review Accelerator.
When a product is enrolled in the Accelerator, Walmart will email certain customers one week after they make a purchase. The customer is then offered a promo code for $10 in Marketplace credit in exchange for an Incentivized Review.
That $10 credit is labeled a “service fee” for the seller. It’s capped at a specific target number of reviews, and you will not be charged for any additional reviews above that number.
However, the Review Accelerator isn’t the only way to get positive reviews.
Here are a few tips to help you get more reviews the old-fashioned way:
- Request reviews during customer support interactions
- Answer customers’ questions on your product pages
- Use physical inserts in products and packaging to request reviews
- Send follow-up emails requesting customers review your products
- Reply to negative reviews and take complaints seriously
As with any e-commerce marketplace, the ultimate way to win is to keep product quality and customer experience consistently high.
6. Create Bundles and Kits
In certain categories, like tech for example, creating bundles and kits can help you reach the top of a deals or promotions page on Walmart.com.
Grouping items in a multipack can also add customer appeal, especially in categories like clothing and home essentials. In the mind of the shopper, product bundling helps reduce choice overload (a.k.a. “analysis paralysis”) and boosts the customer’s perception that they’re getting a good deal.
With the right approach, you can also use your bundling strategy to offload slow-moving products, reduce your total shipping costs, and increase your average order value (AOV).
Walmart Marketplace handles bundles as an entirely separate product. To create a bundle, kit, or multipack on Walmart.com, you’ll need to create a new product listing, complete with a new title, price, and other details.
7. Use Strategic Pricing
It’s no secret that shoppers who head to Walmart.com are looking for the best deals.
To grow your sales, you’ll need a more aggressive pricing strategy than you might normally use on your site or other marketplaces.
Walmart Repricer is an automated pricing tool that helps you compete with other brands and websites while staying compliant with Walmart’s Every Day Low Price guidelines.
The Repricer tool lets you choose between three different pricing strategies:
- External Price Strategy: Monitors product prices on other e-commerce sites and sets your prices accordingly.
- Buy Box Strategy: Adjusts your prices to meet or beat the winning Walmart Buy Box price. (Note: this won’t necessarily guarantee you the Buy Box.)
- Competitive Price Strategy: Sets your product price to be the most competitive both on Walmart.com and external sites.
All you have to do is choose a strategy, set a price floor and ceiling, and Repricer will automatically adjust your pricing to be more competitive.
8. Place Ads Effectively
Walmart Onsite Display Ads give your product premium real estate across Walmart.com and the Walmart App. Walmart also offers Offsite Display Ads, which are ads that Walmart places on other websites or social media to promote both their brand and yours.
Then there’s Sponsored Search, which is more or less the same as on Amazon. The key difference is that you’re limited to targeting certain keywords, instead of specific products. This approach can make it challenging to aggressively target competitors since you can’t time your ad to pop up right when a customer searches for their products.
Sponsored Search includes three types of ads:
- Sponsored products: Your products show up in search results, just before checkout, and on related product pages.
- Sponsored brands: Your logo, a custom headline, and a handful of your products appear on a banner at the top of the page. To qualify, you must be registered with the Walmart Brand Portal.
- Sponsored videos: Your keyword-targeted video ads display alongside customer search results
No matter which ad types you choose, keep a close eye on your metrics to improve your conversion rates over time. One way to track your ad performance is through Walmart Connect that gathers all the analytics and customer data for you.
9. Drive Traffic Externally
Though Walmart’s numbers are growing, a majority of product searches still start on Amazon.
To capture more traffic for your Walmart listings, aim a little higher in the sales funnel by using all of the available features to expand traffic both on and off the platform.
Here are some ways to grow your traffic:
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Walmart offers a paid service that makes it easy to set up Google shopping ads directly through the platform. Look under the Growth Opportunities tab for SEM to set up Google ads that link directly to your product listings.
- Social Media: Use paid ads, influencer campaigns, curated content, and multichannel social media posts to drive traffic by linking directly to your Brand Shop or Shelf.
- Owned Media: Build your email list and encourage subscribers to move freely between your Walmart listings and website.
10. Earn Your Pro Seller Badge
Once you start to perform well on Walmart.com, getting a Pro Seller Badge can help drive your conversion rates even higher.
The Pro Seller Badge appears right alongside your seller name across the entire Walmart Marketplace platform — including your storefront, product listing pages, search results, and customer carts.
To earn and keep the Pro Seller Badge, you need to meet a detailed list of requirements, including:
- On-Time Delivery greater than or equal to 95% in the last 90 days
- Cancellation rate less than or equal to 1.5% over the last 90 days
- Seller Response Rate greater than or equal to 95% in the last 30 days
Having a Pro Seller Badge can boost your search rankings and increase your chances of securing the Buy Box. More importantly, it lets shoppers know that even in a noisy e-commerce market, yours is a trustworthy brand to buy from.
Grow Your Sales, Your Way
Despite being the most significant marketplace competitor to Amazon, Walmart still remains relatively untapped, with more ad space, fewer fees, and looser seller requirements.
In the next few years, it’s poised to disrupt the e-commerce landscape, providing limitless opportunities for sellers along the way. To stay ahead of the curve, focus on developing practical strategies to amplify your Walmart presence as the next key step in your multichannel growth journey.
With the right tactics and a clear plan to execute them, you can make Walmart a strong growth lever for your brand.
