Walmart’s e-commerce presence has been growing tremendously lately, Walmart.com has over 110 million visitors a month. Walmart and Amazon have the largest marketplaces for third party sellers, but Amazon is more popular. You may be thinking, if Walmart is on the rise, why not sell in both marketplaces? There are differences between selling on Amazon and selling on Walmart, so let’s take a look at both and figure out what’s similar and what’s different between the two.
Before you start selling on Walmart, you need to apply for the program and they have to accept you. Walmart isn’t that easy to apply to because they are more likely to accept sellers who have a past experience with running their own e-commerce site or selling on Amazon. So, if you are new to either of those you might want to build credibility and experience with selling before thinking about expanding to Walmart.
Now let’s talk about each category mentioned in the graphic:
Reviews
According to Inc.com, 91% of customers read reviews and 84% trust online reviews. While viewing Walmart’s marketplace, if a product doesn’t have enough reviews or enough for someone to determine if the product is worth it or not they will most likely turn to Amazon, where the product could have 1000+ reviews. This isn’t true for all categories though. It honestly depends on the product when it comes to reviews. After doing research, looking through household cleaning products on Walmart’s marketplace the products have thousands of reviews while comparing the reviews to kitchen appliances where some products only have 4-20 reviews.
Fees
One thing Walmart has over Amazon is that they don’t have ANY monthly fees. Amazon charges $0.99 for every item you sell if you sign up for the individual plan or $39 per month if you sign up for professional selling. Walmart and Amazon are pretty similar when it comes to taking their cut, though. View detailed fee breakdowns below. Click the images to enlarge them.
Walmart’s Fees
Amazon’s Fees
Amazon’s Fees
Experienced Seller
Amazon allows anyone to become a third party seller. If you are to selling online, then you should consider selling on Walmart. Walmart allows people to sell on their website if they already have experience with e-commerce or working with Amazon.
Best Seller Badge
This category is pretty similar between Amazon and Walmart. Walmart has a ‘rollback’ badge on multiple products while Amazon has ‘Amazon’s Choice’ badge.
Celebrity Idea/Search Results
Walmart offers a ‘Celebrity Idea’ section which is basically Walmart partnering with a celebrity and choosing different products and making a shopping list for customers. This drives traffic to certain products. If a celebrity chooses your product or something similar it could potentially boost your sales, because if the product the celebrity chose is sold out, they will end up looking for something similar.
Amazon on the other hand does not offer this. But they offer hundreds of more search results. This is not always helpful, because that shows you that you have more competition on Amazon then you would selling on Walmart.
Description
Why does it matter where the description is? It matters because it tells you everything you need to know about a product, the closer it is to the top of the page or the product, the better chance you have with keeping that viewer as a customer. On Walmart’s page the description is lower, you have to scroll to see it while on Amazon its centered right next to the product.
Tips, Guying Guides, & Shopping Ideas
Walmart offers sections that people can look at to get inspiration for gifts, especially around the holidays. They do a great job on advertising it on their homepage and having it linked to their side bar. Selling items that fit these categories will give you free advertising because Walmart took it into their own hands and advertized the heck out of it.
Amazon on the other hand, doesn’t do so well with advertising holiday items and gift ideas, so you mainly have to rely on your own advertising.
Shipping
Amazon has loyal Prime customers and Prime customers get free 2-day shipping, and that’s for anything they buy as long as it’s Prime eligible. Selling Prime-eligible products is something that keeps you in the green because the shipping is left up to Amazon. Walmart doesn’t offer any kind of Prime shipping and you have to ship all of the items yourself because they don’t offer a warehouse like Amazon. Walmart does offer deals like free 2-day shipping on $35+ orders, but customers aren’t always willing to spend $35.
Overall, if you have experience selling online and have got it down, you should consider selling on Walmart. The market isn’t oversaturated, there are no monthly fees and they have better shopping guides. But if you don’t want to deal with shipping and are just starting, you should consider Amazon. Amazon does a lot of the work when compared to Walmart, except you have to pay for monthly fees. Either one is a great market, it just depends on how much experience you have along with how much time you’re willing to spend shipping orders.
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