Third-Party Selling on Walmart Marketplace vs Amazon
In this article 6 sections
Walmart Is Stepping Up Its Game and Getting Serious About Third-Party Sellers
Many retailers have tried integrating third-party sellers into their platforms (Sears did this, among many others, and it just wasn’t great).
Walmart has allowed third-party sellers for a while, but it is really trying to take on Amazon, and it’s one of the few retailers with enough market share to do so. Billed as the world’s largest omnichannel retailer, Walmart wants a big piece of the internet retail pie.
How Does Selling on Walmart Marketplace Work?
It’s called Walmart Marketplace, but that’s just a fancy way of saying, “Come sell your products on Walmart.com.”
But selling on the website of one of the world’s biggest retailers is no small potatoes.
Setup is fairly straightforward. Starting at Walmart’s Marketplace registration page, you go through a 5-step process to get selling.
Is Selling on Walmart Marketplace Better Than Selling on Amazon?
Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) really gives Amazon an edge, with free, fast shipping for Amazon Prime members and a big share of buyers’ attention. Need to buy something online? Amazon is usually the go-to, and it has existing customer reviews for products.
However, Walmart has introduced WFS (Walmart Fulfillment Services), its version of FBA.
Why Sell on Walmart?
Many sellers are growing frustrated with Amazon as the site matures and introduces more restrictions (many are meant to help sellers and stay compliant with regulations, but mistakes happen that can make things difficult like bots designating your product as a pesticide even when it’s not). Although sellers in general don’t want to leave, they’d like to avoid having all their eggs in one basket.
Selling on Walmart is a way to reach more customers as they’re shopping on Walmart, and to diversify your sales channels.
Because the Walmart third-party marketplace is “relatively” new, there are fewer sellers on the platform, and due to some tighter registration qualifications, it means that there could be less competition in the search results for your product/category vs Amazon.
Why You Might Skip Walmart and Stick with Amazon
Walmart requires something for its marketplace that it also requires for in-store sales: the UPC (the number that gets turned into a scannable barcode) needs to be registered to your company. BuyABarcode and similar services likely won’t work for selling in the Walmart Marketplace.
Unless they change this, you’ll need a GS1 barcode registered to your company. They give you a prefix (the first part of the number) that is the same for all your barcodes and links them to your company. If you already have that, you’ll be ahead of many sellers wanting to sell on Walmart.
When this was first written, Amazon still accepted UPCs from resellers like BuyABarcode. That has changed: Amazon now checks UPCs against the GS1 database, so you’ll want GS1 barcodes for Amazon too. See How to Fix a GS1 UPC Barcode Error.
Which Should You Choose?
If you can sell on Walmart and have the resources and qualifications to be accepted, it would be a shame to miss out on the opportunity while there aren’t as many sellers (compared to Amazon).
Selling on Amazon can help you reach millions of potential customers, and getting started is easy. If you haven’t started with either, setting up shop on Amazon would be a good place to get started to learn the ropes and then explore Walmart Marketplace as an additional opportunity.