How can a vendor optimize his presence on Walmart Marketplace?

Joe Parker

7 years ago

Walmart is one of the largest retail corporations. Numbers don’t lie and the statistical figures with this marketplace definitely offer a positive vibe to the e-vendors. The online retailer has delved into almost all the segments under the sun. Being one of the biggest and the highest grossing-retailer, the platform provides an opportunity to even the small vendors and sellers to expand their business reach.

Walmart has 11,000+ stores worldwide. So, if you are looking to expand your business internationally, then, this is one-stop-destination for you. In the year 2017, the company’s global net sales amassed approximately $ 481.32 billion. While for the fiscal year 2018, the revenue has shot up to $500.3 billion.

These figures are expected to get even bigger in the coming years. Hence, integrating the eCommerce stores with Walmart.com is a must for the online vendors. Are you looking to integrate your online store with the marketplace? Are you intimated by the technicalities involved in the same? You need not worry anymore. Walmart integration extension can help the eCommerce owners integrate their web store with Walmart.com.

Although, Walmart Marketplace offers an easy opportunity for the e-sellers to expand their business reach, getting a shelf on Walmart is not an easy goal to achieve. While there are many advantages of becoming a seller on Walmart, it comes with some drawbacks as well. The tough competition might take a toll on your nerve in the quest of standing out. Boosting your presence on the popular marketplace is the most difficult task to be achieved So, the question arises, how to stay ahead of the competition at Walmart marketplace?

How can the Third-party Sellers Optimise their Presence at Walmart.com?

No one is aware of Walmart’s search algorithm, but still, there are some points a seller could consider to optimize their presence on the same. Here are some of the ways by which you can optimize your presence at the jam-packed marketplace. Read on to know more.

An image is a worth a thousand word

Since the entire process of buying online does not provide any look and feel of the product to the customer, it makes sense to work on the visual graphics. The whole purpose of standing out is to motivate the customers to choose your product over the competitors’. This is when visual merchandising comes into play. Product images are crucial as buyers can see the product and can satisfy themselves. Sellers can provide multiple images with different angles of the product as it creates Customer’s trust and they can go for instant purchase.

Organize your products to maximize their visibility. Make it easy for your customers to access them. The white backgrounds of the Walmart marketplace provide a very neat and professional interface for the sellers to optimize the display.

Walmart Marketplace integrator provides high-resolution images and a 3-dimensional view of the products.

Detailed Description

The best way to stand apart from the crowd when it comes to shopping online is to provide the customers with the right information. One of the ways to achieve it through detailed product descriptions. Detailed description lets customers know about the product in detail so that they can clear their doubts or queries regarding the same. This helps in increasing the trust of consumers resulting in good leads.

The customers tend to search for the product name. Hence, it is advisable for the sellers to curate the product title smartly. Walmart marketplace allows you to use up to 200 characters in a product title, so, make the most of it. The key attributes of the title include Brand, Item Name, Style, Colour, Material, and others.

The product specification is a must. Include every information that the customers are looking for.

Include the keywords, long-tail keywords and search queries in the product page. This will make it easier for the products to rank higher in Google’s SERP.

Focus on building customer relationship

This is something that the e-merchant needs to learn from the brick-and-mortar store. Engage your customers and adds value by developing an emotional connection. Just like any other company or brand, the customer relationship is the key aspect to ensure customer loyalty. Whether they’re one-time shoppers or longtime buyers, maintaining relationships with clients can help you survive in the competitive scenario. Providing customers with a seamless online transaction is the key. Offer transparent return/refund policies. Solve their issues and the problems effectively. Take their feedback and working on negative reviews can make them feel valued.

Perfect categorization

Create a good buying experience for your customers. Product categorization can help them find the desired product. Keep similar products on the same listing, so that, the buyers can view all the possible products without navigating much. This eases out the buying process and leads to a higher conversion rate. Walmart Marketplace integrator provides over 24 different categories. Place your products in the right category to describe the product attributes. Try to avoid selecting the ‘Other category’. The more attributes you supply, the higher your product will be ranked on a product search page.

This sounds a tricky affair since the categories of the online store and the marketplace might differ. However, manual integration is not that tricky. Additionally, for the CMS-based eCommerce site like Prestashop, Magento, OpenCart and others, there are plugins available that can just automate the entire process. The category mapping is done just by clicking a few buttons from the back-end of the extension which makes it easier to list the products in the relevant category.

Experiment with the inventory

Do not stick to the conventional means of selling. Keep experimenting with the product mix that you are offering in the Walmart marketplace. The key to success in a crowded marketplace like Walmart is high volume and low prices. Attractively packaged low-cost items can help you grab the attention of the target audience. Keep introducing new items every now and then. Track the customer behavior to see how quickly they sell. Manage the stack of the old ones efficiently. Walmart Seller Center offers easy tracking options. Try and find out the pain area of the customers. The occasion based inventory can help you provide the apt solution that they are looking for.

With the change in demand for customers on a regular basis, it’s very difficult to invest in inventories at a high scale. Instead, sellers can switch to the dropshipping business in which sellers own a virtual inventory without investing even a single penny.

BuyBox

Walmart provided an option of Buy Box where the sellers can easily compete for their product price with another seller. The products competing with one another should be listed in the same category. The product that wins the Buy Box will be listed at the top of the searched item list. This boosts the visibility of the products and ultimately increases the chances of conversion.

With Walmart Integration Extensions, winning the BuyBox is now a cake-walk for the eCommerce store owners. The plugin offers a complete BuyBox report to the sellers which enable easy tracking and is available for CMS platforms like PrestaShop, Magento, Magento 2, OpenCart and Shopify. They can compare the prices and reprice the product from the admin interface itself.

Seller’s scoreboard

The Seller Scorecard in the Walmart Seller Center tracks the account performance of a particular vendor. This score is based on the fulfillment method and the capabilities of the vendors. Maintain your scoreboard and adjust the services you offer as per the score.

Walmart Advertisements

Walmart marketplace even offers a medium to the third party sellers to sell their products on Walmart without even listing them. The brand owners have an option to work directly with Walmart for advertising. The Walmart marketplace is another means to enhance the visibility of the product. The Sponsored Products section is featured on the left-hand side of the search results pages. Whenever the user enters a keyword in the search bar, ads triggered by those same keywords become eligible to appear in the designated “Sponsored products” section. Clicking on these ads will redirect the store visitors away from Walmart.com to a third party site.

Final words

Even if you leave aside the eCommerce giants like Amazon, eBay and others, marketplaces like Walmart and Jet.com offer many attributes that make it a must for the e-merchants. All you need to do is to check out the customer behavior and curate the merchandising in order to find a competitive advantage. In order to stay abreast to the developments and pitfalls, you need to keep a check on the Walmart Seller Center.

The work of marketplace integration has become effortless, now that Knowband is offering the various intuitive marketplace integrators like eBay integrator, Etsy integrator, and others along with the Walmart integrator. Find a suitable solution for your eCommerce business and make full use of the global reach of any of these popular online marketplaces.