Words Of Walmart Wisdom At Prosper Show

LAS VEGAS – For Amazon sellers looking to add Walmart to the mix, Prosper Show 2024 brought a wealth of knowledge to the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas.

Marketing and shipping topics dominated during a panel discussion entitled Unlocking Walmart.com: Navigating The Success Path As An Amazon Seller. Mustafa Kothawala (pictured), COO of Simpli Magic talked about his initial shipping challenges when first expanding to Walmart.

“We started off doing everything seller-fulfilled on Walmart, and that was a big mistake, because our price points are pretty aggressive,” says Kothawala, who eventually found success on Walmart with cleaning products. “The majority of our products on Walmart are below $40.

“When you start shipping larger-size boxes, they are quite heavy—and then you start shipping at a $40 price point,” he continues. “When that happens, you sometimes end up getting a shipping bill from Fed-Ex that is even higher than the product—so you’re basically giving away the product for free.”

An “incredible amount of losses” mounted until Simpli Magic unlocked the power of WFS [Walmart Fulfillment Services]. WFS eased the customer support burden. “When we started doing WFS, they were handling customer support and product returns,” Kothawala says. “Their shipping rates are also better.”

“Everyone wants Walmart to work,” says Matt Snyder, brand advisor at Vari and CEO, Brands Excel. “Everyone is eager to diversify their dependence away from Amazon. We went into this with the mindset that we can take a lot of what we’ve done with Amazon and apply it here to Walmart, and we are going to have success. It didn’t happen.”

One key difference is that Amazon is focused more on sales volume, while Walmart is more focused on conversion rates. “Walmart has something called ad relevancy, so you could be bidding more on a keyword and still not win it just because ad relevancy is lower,” adds Michael Lebhar, CEO of SellCord. “Walmart is a conversion-rate based algorithm. They are very heavily focused on having a good customer experience.”

According to Kothawala, strategies that carried over from Amazon included premium content such as product videos, lifestyle images, and infographics. “When a consumer gets on your product page, you have 15 or 20 seconds to convince them to buy your product,” he says. “Being aggressive with marketing has worked. One of the first things we did was getting connected with the Walmart Connect team. It may have been too aggressive, because we ended up going backward at the start. A lot of people were so used to buying our brand on Amazon that they did not even know that we were on Walmart.”