Selling on Walmart Marketplace: A Step-by-Step Guide

Updated on February 4, 2023 in Ecommerce by Nishant Shrimali

Is it a retail store or any eCommerce? How to start selling on Walmart Marketplace? And finally, How to grow sales with Walmart Advertising?

Today in this article we are answering all these questions that are rising in the air. But here’s what we have to know before we start selling on Walmart Marketplace or we start exploring the Walmart advertising.

Walmart Marketplace was the third largest online selling and buying place by 2019 following Amazon and eBay in the list.

But with the spike in the growth of eCommerce and closed retail stores, the world is expecting Walmart to surpass eBay soon and become the second-largest eCommerce marketplace.

This has opened up an opportunity for you to write your own success story, by selling on Walmart marketplace. In the following article, we are going to discuss three important parts

• How to Start Selling on Walmart Marketplace
• Growing Sale on Walmart Organically
• Growing Sales with Walmart Advertising

This is an Ultimate guide to help you start selling on Walmart marketplace successfully and then grow your sales with Walmart advertising. But before that, here are the benefits you get when you start selling on Walmart Marketplace.

Benefits of selling on Walmart marketplace

No Monthly Fees

Unlike another marketplace, where you have to pay a monthly fee and also a commission, whenever you make a sale, Walmart has no monthly fees. As a seller, you would only have to pay a commission when you make a sale.

Also, the commission rates differ for each category, which ensures you are securing your profit irrespective of the category or warning you are working in.

Less Competition

Even though selling on Walmart marketplace can be profitable, you will find very little competition here, compared to Amazon with over 2 million sellers. Less competition means, more customers and more sales.

In 2018, there were more than 440 million visitors to the Walmart Marketplace. With the right Walmart advertising, you can ensure a higher growth rate than on any other platform. 

Brand Exposure

With so many visitors, you only get an opportunity to sell your products, but also expose your brand. Walmart being an international marketplace, allows even small sellers to expand their borders and get better brand exposure.

Building Trust

Walmart is a trustworthy brand among the masses. Hence when you are selling on Walmart Marketplace or attracting customers through Walmart advertising, people would trust your brand more compared to your individual brand identity.

Further with time, this will allow you to gain the trust of your brand within your customers base.

Analytical Access

Selling on Walmart Marketplace gives you an insight into your products and now the audience is interacting with them. This comes out to be very helpful as the data provided by Walmart can help you edit or upgrade your listing in order to attract more customers.

Further, you can even use this data in Walmart Advertising, which we will further discuss in this article.

How to start selling on Walmart Marketplace

Before we start discussing growing your sales and using Walmart advertising, here is a 5 step guide for your set-up account. If you already have one, you can skip to the next where we will be discussing Walmart Advertising.

Creating a Seller’s Account

Visit Walmart Sellers Account application page and click on the “Start Application”. Further, you will be asked to fill in your details and your company details. Fill in all the details correctly.

Tax Information

Just below the form, you will be asked to upload your W8 and W9. It is mandatory to upload your tax information.

Product & Integration

In the next step, you would be required to upload your products and fill in the payment information. 

Shipping

Once done with all the above form-fillings and here you would be asked your shipping details. Here select your pricing model or elect Your Shipping Methods and Regions. Review your submission and click submit.

These settings can further be edited if needed. For now, you will take to launch Checklist items. With this, you are set to start selling on Walmart marketplace.

Growing Sales with Walmart Advertising

There are two ways of growing your sales. First is the organic method where you follow all the SEO methods and algorithms that Walmart has to provide better customer satisfaction.

When selling on Walmart marketplace, make sure you follow these important practices to grow your sales organically, i.e., without any Walmart Advertising methods.

Put your Customer First

• Deliver the same product that your customer ordered.
• Ensure safe and proper shipment to have to low return or replacement rate
• Resolve any issue faced by your customer as soon as possible
• Accept your order as soon as possible.
• If a complaint is received make sure you address it and resolve it.

Edit your Product Page for SEO

• Use keywords in the title of the page, in the Alt-tag of the image, in the product description.
• Answer all the question that your customer may have in your product description
• Use High-quality and optimized product images. You can even outsource your product images to the best product image editing service for best results.

Growing Sales with Walmart Advertising

Another method that you can use to generate sales once you start selling on Walmart marketplace is using Walmart Advertising. It is a bidding auction where sellers can bid to increase the visibility of their product.

Higher visibility means a higher chance of increasing sales. In order to get the most benefit out of Walmart Advertising, we will be discussing the best advertising strategies that you can use to start selling on Walmart marketplace using ads.

Steps to get Started With Walmart Advertising

Walmart marketplace allows their sellers to run ads as per their bidding. Here’s how you can start using Walmart advertising,

Become a Walmart Sellers & Upload your products

The very first step is to become a seller on the platform to start selling on Walmart marketplace. Along with this, also Upload your products to your Walmart account, especially the one on which you wish to run ads on.

Apply For Walmart Advertising

In order to be eligible for the advertising, you must have some previous sales and their performance. Further, in order to start using Walmart Advertising, you are required to contact Walmart Media Group.

This will also require your:

• Company name
• Contact information
• Number of SKUs
• Product Category
• Primary campaign objective
• Target Audience
• Desired advertising plan
• Anticipated monthly budget

Learn through Walmart online Training

If and once your application is approved, Walmart Media Group will send you an invitation to join a mandatory training Webinar for running ads.

Walmart hosts a weekly webinar, where the basics of creating and running ads are discussed. In addition, at the end of the webinar, there is also a Q&A session where you can clear any of your doubts.

Launch Your ad Campaigns

Now that you have the approval to run Walmart advertising and you have gone through the training, you are almost ready to run your campaigns.

But first, you will need to decide the budget and duration of the ads that you would run. Also, don’t forget to monitor your campaign and adjust the bidding according to the result that you are getting. 

Types of Ads on Walmart Advertising

There are mainly 4 types of ads that you can run with Walmart advertising.

Sponsoring Products in Search Grid Results

These ads are shown in between the grid of the search result. The position of this bid depends on the combination of the relevancy and the bid that you place.

Also in order to run these ads, your listing must appear within 128 top results organically. The minimum ad campaign for Grid-ads is $100, with a minimum limit of $50 a day.

Sponsoring Products in Carousel

When you are selling on walmart marketplace, you will also find an option to run ads in Carouse. In this option, your product is displayed in the carousel section of Walmart. Here you don’t need to have your product in the top 128 results and this totally depends on the bid that you place.

Search Brand Amplifier

Search brand Amplifier or SBA is a group of branded products that show up at the top of the search result for specific keywords. This can be really helpful for the accounts that are just starting to sell on Walmart marketplace, as it can sell more and traffic at a much quicker rate.

Buy Box Banners

These aren’t exactly the paid ads that you can target but are a great method to drive sales. You can win the buy box banners only through automotive campaigns based on the relevancy and competitive bid.

Type of Bidding Strategies for the ads on Walmart Marketplace

There are two ways of bidding while running Walmart advertising.

First Bid auction

Unlike Amazon where you would have to pay 1 cent more than the highest bid, Walmart runs on the First bid auction. Here if you bid higher, then the price would be fixed and you would have to pay the same.

In Amazon even if you bid the highest, it would cost you a penny more than the second-highest bid. This bidding system makes Walmart a plot hole, where you can end up paying way more than you are required to.

We suggest you start with low bidding and grow it accordingly. This way you will be able to find the perfect spot to get maximum sales at the minimum cost.

Automatic Bid

Walmart says that when you are just Automatic ads would be the best Walmart advertising strategy. Here Walmart allows you to bid for every individual product and group them into a single automatic campaign.

This allows you to group different products in a single group with their individual bid, which would be best for driving new sales at minimal cost in a single campaign.

Best Tips to Strategies your Walmart marketplace Journey

With the above article, we can conclude this Guide to help you start selling on Walmart Marketplace. But as a key takeaway, here are some important points that you should remember from this article.

• Walmart is a customer-centric platform, hence in order to grow organically, make sure you put customer satisfaction first.
• When you start selling on Walmart Marketplace, make sure you follow all the right SEO practices for the targeted keywords for your product.
• Walmart Advertising can cost you more than what is required so make sure you increase your bid gradually to find the perfect balance.
• When starting your Walmart sellers account make sure you have all the information listed ready to make the process seamless.

Obviously, these aren’t the only points that you must remember but are the major ones that you should not forget. In order to eliminate any chance of forgetting a step that we discussed, make sure you bookmark this article.

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