Walmart Marketplace is an online shopping platform owned and operated by Walmart that allows third-party sellers to sell their products directly to consumers. The platform reaches more than 100 million unique visitors each month and hosts more than 150,000 third-party sellers. But how do you actually get started and succeed at Walmart?
Read also: Walmart Marketplace – A growing e-commerce platform.
Starting to sell
We’ve previously covered the requirements for opening a Walmart Marketplace seller account, but what about after? How to actually start selling on the platform?
The most important first step is to find out if any of your brand’s products are on the list of banned or restricted products. The seller is always responsible for ensuring that all products in the catalogue comply with Walmart’s rules and applicable laws.
Walmart offers the option to download your existing catalog from other supported e-commerce platforms. Just make sure that the file contains the following information for each product listed:
- GTIN, UPC or ISBN
- Product Name
- Short descriptive text
- Long description text
- Image
- Price
- Total weight of the shipment
- Quantity
Read more about product codes on Amazon
This is a useful feature because you can upload your catalogue from Amazon, for example, and transfer it directly to Walmart Marketplace. When building your catalog, make sure that all products go into the right categories. This is an important first step to optimizing your listings and selling successfully.
Optimize your way to success
Like Amazon, Walmart’s product listings must be search engine optimized. It all starts with the headline, and Walmart’s own guidelines recommend a headline length of 50-75 characters to be fully visible to the desktop user. The headline should be clear and should not contain any claims of premium quality, authenticity or anything of the sort.
Walmart’s recommended headline is very different from the headlines seen on Amazon, where the headline text is long and contains many keywords. Keyword stuffing does not work on Walmart’s platform and at their optimum the headings there are structured as follows:
Brand + Item Name + Model Name (if applicable) + Style (if applicable) + Key Attribute + Pack Count (if applicable) + Size (if applicable)
It’s a good idea to place carefully selected keywords in the product description that will most likely be used by your customers. Describe the key attributes of the product and highlight the value you are creating with the product. Before publishing the text, make sure it does not contain content that does not comply with Walmart’s guidelines. For a comprehensive market analysis, you’ll get a helping hand from our knowledgeable travel guides.
Additionally, sellers have the opportunity to highlight 3-10 key product features with sharp bullet points. Unlike Amazon, the Key Features section comes pretty low down on the listing page, falling below even the long description text. For comparison, below are demonstrative images of listings for the same product on both Walmart (left) and Amazon (right).
The technical requirements for product images are comprehensive and can be found in full from Walmart’s Image Guideline. The main highlights are the requirements that apply on Amazon as well: the background of the main image must be white and must not show anything other than the product being sold. The main image should be of high quality anyway, as it is always the first thing a buyer sees. Other listing images have more relaxed requirements and even recommend the use of text, logos and lifestyle images.
Ads and visibility
Without advertising, it’s easy for your product and your brand to get left in the dust. Walmart supports search engine advertising so you can boost your visibility with PPC advertising. With advertising, you can get your products in front of your customers’ noses when they search for similar products. There are also a wider range of other advertising methods available, but for the purposes of this post, we’ll focus on Sponsored Search ads.
The Sponsored Search advertising package offered by Walmart includes much of the same advertising formats as Amazon. Walmart offers three different forms of search engine advertising:
Read more: PPC advertising on Amazon – key ad formats and metrics
Sponsored products ads: ads appear in highly visible places, such as on listing pages for other products and on results pages for relevant searches.
Sponsored Brands: this is the ad type with the highest visibility on search result pages. A Sponsored Brands ad will put your brand, logo and products right at the top of the relevant results pages. This ad format is only open to brands that are part of the Walmart Brand Portal.
Also read: the Amazon Brand Registry – why is it worth it?
Sponsored Videos: short, keyword-targeted video ads promoting products on search pages, designed to increase visibility and discoverability.
Walmart’s advertising tools offer a unique opportunity to be seen by customers shopping online and in-store. Ad management is fully customizable, allowing you to manage everything manually, take advantage of automation, or something in between. Walmart’s own reporting tools support ad performance tracking, optimization, and planning for future campaigns.
Pricing ads correctly is important, especially in the most competitive categories. When building a new ad, the overall budget and adjusting the bid amount of clicks are key to maximising the competitiveness of ads. The budget should not be left aside once advertising has started, but must be monitored to ensure visibility, clicks and sales.
Continuous optimization, which is important for sales development, requires time and dedication, so don’t hesitate to contact our expert travel guides! We will take your business to international markets and help you grow your sales.
