440: Is Selling On Walmart Worth It And How Much Can You Make? With Daniel Solid And Ryan King

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. today I my friend Daniel Solid back on the show with his partner, Ryan King, and both of them run Blue Rise, which is a Walmart agency that helps sellers get on the platform. Now, in this episode, we discuss how to win at Walmart and whether selling on Walmart is worth it in the first place. Now, even though these two guys run an agency, they’re actually very straight up and telling you whether it’s worth your time.

00:28
But before we begin, want to let you know that tickets for the 2023 Seller Summit are now on sale over at SellersSummit.com. It is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And you all probably know me well enough by now to know that my event has zero fluff. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business and not high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people. And we all, and by all, we mean that everyone eats together.

00:58
and everyone parties together at night. I personally love smaller events and tickets always sell out far in advance. Now, if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250K or $1 million per year, we also offer a special mastermind experience where we break into small groups, lock ourselves in a room, cater in food and help each other with our businesses. The Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 23rd to May 25th. Go to SellersSummit.com. Now I also want to thank Postsco for sponsoring this episode.

01:26
Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for ecommerce and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10x bigger. Postscript specializes in text message marketing for ecommerce and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div.

01:56
And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast that I released with my partner Tony. And unlike this one, where I interviewed successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell like how it is in a run entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:24
Welcome to the My Wife Quarter job podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Daniel Solid and Ryan King on the show. Now, Daniel is a long time friend and multiple seven figure seller over at Solid Strategic and he’s spoken at Seller Summit on a couple of equations and he is a seasoned e-commerce entrepreneur. Now, recently I had the opportunity to meet his business partner, Ryan King, and together they started Blue Rise to help sellers diversify to the Walmart marketplace. Now,

02:51
Let’s face it, selling on Amazon gets harder and harder every single year. And it’s actually very dangerous to rely on Amazon for all of your revenue. And in fact, I literally have friends who dread checking their phone every morning because they’re terrified of a suspension. Now, the last time I actually had a Walmart seller on the show over four years ago, Walmart was still in its infancy, but today it’s a lot more mature and Walmart is actually investing a lot of money into the platform. So in this episode, Ryan and Daniel,

03:21
are gonna teach us about Walmart. And with that, welcome to show both of you. How you doing? Doing great Steve, thanks for having us here. Yeah, so let’s just jump right into it. I’ll just be heads up with you guys. I’m not used to having two guests on the show, so I’ll rely on you guys to just kind of arbitrage the question. first off, I guess this is a question for Ryan. How long have you been selling on Walmart and to Daniel also, and what percentage of your revenue is actually from Walmart today?

03:48
think for our brand, and we really started our little, you know, agency team that handles stuff for, for in store brands at Walmart, those are the lingo for that is one P, like the folks that are on the shelf at Walmart, and then the three P brands are the other half, we started an agency to serve them by like realizing we needed help doing it for our own brand. And, and we started, we moved our little shooting sports brand onto the platform and found that there was a lot of customers there who, who

04:18
our in our customer base. And initially, it was right around before competition came in to our little space, we were sitting around 5 % of revenue. that was in Q4 for Walmart. Yeah. And so we’re primarily on Amazon, right? Right. And we moved into the Walmart space saw about 5 % in Q4 of 2021. And as we’ve had others come in, it’s it’s varied between three and 5%. For us,

04:48
And so I didn’t want it to be a focus for our internal Amazon team. And we realized that a lot of people didn’t want that either in their companies. And that’s why we started BlueRisers so people can have someone else that deals with all the Walmart hassles. Ryan, how many would you say like on average, what are you seeing across different brands? What are they seeing? I told I shared about ours, but I mean, what’s the average as a percentage of Amazon?

05:12
Yeah, we as Amazon with Amazon as a benchmark and some qualifiers for that, we’d say, you know, if it’s a mature brand, that is not just emerging on Amazon, but has established itself and it’s kind of in that past that early growth phase. Can you what a mature brand is actually? Sure. Yeah, maybe they’re at a high six figure, seven figures, they’re they’re beyond a single skew as as their main probably 10 skews or more. That might include variations, but they’re seeing six to seven figures on Amazon. We’re gonna

05:41
we’re going conservatively estimate four to 12 % right now on Walmart is what they can achieve within a year’s time. And there’s certainly outliers to that. There’s some that are in the 20 % or others, but, and there’s, we can talk about some factors that may affect it on the downward side as well to make it a little more challenging with Walmart, but in general, I’ll be, it’s a wide range, but four to 12 % is what we typically see. And we’d recommend for brands to expect in these earlier stages still with the Walmart marketplace.

06:10
Okay, and then then Daniel 5 % was that one P that was three P right? That’s creepy for us. We don’t have anything in store at Walmart. That’s all just on the walmart.com website, which if you talk to people at Walmart, they call that the three P Walmart marketplace. And then when you were doing this for the first time, effort wise, what was it like for that 5 % compared to Amazon? At first it was it was it was easier to

06:40
to do some of the things that we were allowed to do back in 2014, 2013 even on Amazon, like having graphics in our banner images. We actually still can do that in many categories on Walmart so we can get more clicks. So we could get away with some additional things. There’s more we can do with reviews that Ryan can talk about here in a minute. So those things were easier. The things that were harder was things just would break all the time from a catalog standpoint.

07:10
where like trying to get the variations to work right and trying to make sure all the backend fields were populated correctly. That was the part that really took some time. we got everything up and running, including we were early on getting into Walmart and WFS, which is their version of FBA back then. And we got all that up and running in about a month. Okay, that’s not too bad at all. Using kind of adapting our Amazon content.

07:39
So if I were to ask both of you, assuming you’re a seasoned seller, why Walmart? Like what are the primary reasons? Well, for us, it started as like diversification and just wanting to to get another partner platform up and running other than Amazon. That whole thing you alluded to, like we don’t want to be a single channel company. And we looked at a lot of places, Facebook, we analyze Facebook and just for our product niche.

08:08
Walmart made sense because it’s a little more sports and outdoors friendly. And, um, and we sell a fairly ubiquitous product in that people know what it is. It’s pretty saturated on Amazon. And, uh, I’ll let Ryan speak now to, to like maybe some of those things that, are factors to consider for Amazon sellers and, and DTC sellers on the platform and selecting the right brand. But those were some reasons we felt like it was a fit for ours.

08:38
Yeah, I’d say from the seller side, some of the things to consider and why Walmart, why now maybe would be like we’ve, we’ve already kind of covered some of the de-risking. So maybe it’s just an additional channel of revenue, whether that’s because you’re fearing that, that message from the Amazon app. mean, I can, I can relate. I’ve been selling on Amazon since 2016 myself as well. And so that, that reality that one hand is on the button.

09:05
potentially to shut your business down. So de-risking just from a personal business operations standpoint or adding incremental sales lift is always a plus if it makes sense for the return on investment in time and priority. But also for some of those brands, this is becoming maybe less of a conversation, but certainly last year and the year before, if brands were preparing for exit and they were maybe 12 to 18 months prior to that exit, for the same reason you as a brand would be considering de-risking or diversifying,

09:35
That was also a potential to increase that multiple if you did it early enough to show profitability in the additional channel. So for those brands that are still maybe looking at that exit play down the road, having multiple channels of revenue is a big plus. Those would be the big ones. The other big one for us was just seeing Walmart as a bit of a blue ocean right now versus a red ocean. So there’s just less sellers on there that know what they’re doing, that have things going at Walmart. The other thing we found with Walmart is that

10:05
They’re high on relationship. And so we can actually talk to people and navigate. They have a lot of challenges, but they would also navigate them with us and solve them with us. And so if you know people at Walmart, it’s really faster to get things done. And you mean like real humans and like not in India? Yeah. It’s so it’s possible to talk to other human beings. It’s getting harder. Amazing. It’s getting harder. But yes, it is still possible, which is amazing. Yeah. The other one.

10:35
Other one I would mention, and this is realistically for a small percentage of brands right now, maybe 1%, but it’s an interesting opportunity that Walmart presents that Amazon doesn’t, is the opportunity to actually get into the pathway to brick and mortar distribution. So if that’s part of the roadmap for a brand wanting retail distribution, Walmart is actively courting brands that are performing well on its website and actively prescribing that even as a

11:02
as a step in the direction of talking to buyers in stores. that’s another reason to consider it. So we’ve already kind of talked about like mature sellers by your definition. Are there certain products that work better than other products? Yeah, great question. I’d say some of the products people talk about Walmart as Amazon of 2000, name your year, you 2009, 2012. in some ways it is because of it’s relatively still a nascent marketplace.

11:30
And in other ways, it still is Amazon of 2022 or Walmart of 2022 because they, the world’s largest retailer, have, there’s some differences there. So I’ll speak to kind of two ways that matters. When you think of Amazon of 2000X, some of those products that were doing really well were more generic. It was price-based and more generic in product and maybe multi-pack those kinds of things.

11:56
And Amazon sellers or other D2C sellers that may have profited back then on those things and those have become more commoditized, more challenging on the Amazon channel or other channels. We’re actually seeing those do well on Walmart’s marketplace and breathe a second life into many products. So if there are sellers that know how to sell in an e-commerce marketplace, but their product mix might’ve just run through a little bit of the top of the curve of the adoption cycle with customers and it’s on the tail end there.

12:23
that might be one thing to investigate for Walmart. Secondly, price point is key. So Walmart shoppers are still more price sensitive than Amazon. One good way to frame it up, I would say, shoppers on Amazon specifically are kind of trained to think whatever I imagine I can search for and probably find and get it in two days. What we find for behavior of shoppers on Walmart is more like shoppers thinking,

12:53
I could go to Walmart to buy blank product, but I wonder if they have it online instead. And so when you think about the type of products that are often shot for in a Walmart store, you can real quickly get a frame of reference of what does well. So mid range price, not the ultra high price, not the ultra niche. So the example I use is if you’re selling a bamboo coffee filter for pour overs, that might do really well on Amazon.

13:23
If you’re more likely to find success with coffee filter on Walmart, and because you’re gonna have to, you’re gonna find the search volume drops significantly one or three or four keywords deep. So the longer tail keywords aren’t generating more of the traffic. It’s the broader keywords. So you can qualify and be seen as relevant and competitive at a price point. Then you can bring all the strategies to bear on the marketplace to really maximize that opportunity, but you’re gonna have to compete on broader keywords.

13:52
So price point, kind of a broader ubiquitous type product, or there’s other products if you’re in a consumable supplements. heard this from, and I asked them to repeat it three times at this latest conference we were at, the sell and scale, was one of the representatives for food and consumables for e-commerce marketplace said 33 % of their revenue on walmart.com is coming from supplements right now. Interesting. Okay, that’s crazy. It’s crazy. So based on what you’re saying that it seems like

14:22
more everyday staples will do better on Walmart. Commonplace products, you know what’s funny though is like when I teach e-commerce, I always talk about emphasizing your value proposition and whatnot. And a lot of times that’s actually harder to do with commonplace products, right? Like everyday products. So let’s say I’m coming from Amazon and Walmart, like how do I, do I just copy my listing over? Like how do I, you know, structure the listing or make my product interesting if it’s kind of like a commonplace staple?

14:50
You know, I think that’s where some of the opportunity lies right now is your differentiation may not be in premium offering or premium product styling. It may be an optimizing for SEO availability on the site or quality at this moment. So that’s kind of one of those dialing back the clock elements is paying attention to how you optimize your listing. So what’s happening right now in Walmart is Walmart it’s been kind of a, it’s largely an afterthought for most brands right now.

15:20
or it’s not even on the radar. And so if your brand has been successful in D2C and is widely known or has been successful on Amazon, it’s probably not whether or not your brand is also on Walmart. It’s are you in control of it? Because there are a lot of resellers and dropshippers taking advantage of that lack of attention there. So what’s happening is a lot of listings on that website are simply content. the title, description, bullets, all those things, imagery are just being syndicated or pushed over.

15:48
and not adapted uniquely for the Walmart marketplace. But the algorithm prioritizes different formatting for all of those elements. And so you can pretty quickly sniff out which products are just kind of thrown up there and not optimized. So much shorter character counts on title, the bullets don’t match up exactly in formatting those kind of things. And there’s an extra kind of paragraph kind of description.

16:11
And the last thing is attributes on the backend are usually not filled out. And that is a key element we could talk, we could get into weeds there if you wanted to, but really the bottom line is there’s less rich media or A plus content that’s available. Enhanced brand content is relatively sparse on Walmart right now. They reset their website last October and they lost a lot of those features, but you have basically videos and what they call feature layout. So it’s the A plus editorial kind of layout that’s

16:40
That one’s coming back on, but right now what you have is basically videos and item 360 view. So if you’re thinking uniquely to the Walmart marketplace, there’s ways to present the product and capture the attention of the shopper, which others just are sleeping on right now. So that’s one of the ways. So this basically sounds like a time machine back when Amazon wasn’t as sophisticated and it’s kind of like a land grab almost right where you can throw stuff up and kind of rank for these.

17:08
hard keywords on Amazon that you wouldn’t be able to rank on Amazon, you can rank on Walmart. Yeah. That’s right. And you’re building a moat, honestly, because other people are going to move into the platform, we believe, as it’s going to continue to grow. And right now you can do things like maybe we could talk about reviews in a minute, but like you can access things that I don’t know that you will be able to in the future to build that defensive as things scale. But at a high level for the business, as we were looking at it,

17:39
you they require a US entity to get in. And so there’s a little bit more of a barrier there. They just opened it up for United for UK companies. Okay. And they’re talking about this well, yes, and Canada as well. But that’s even new. And so you’re not going to head to head with Chinese sellers don’t have a US okay. Yeah, on the platform. So you do need to be in the US. That’s one thing to think about. And you probably need to have around 10 skews because variations are

18:06
are helpful. They just launched a new advertising banner that’s similar to sponsored brands on Amazon, that really is going to, I think, continue to drive more traffic to our listings. We’ve seen it really work well so far, because we’ve had early access through our agency for some of our clients. And you need at least three SKUs to show there with some variations. So maybe at least 10 SKUs, a million in revenue. But then when you’re looking at your product type,

18:35
Your winner on Amazon, like Ryan’s saying, is probably not going to be your winner on Walmart. And it’s hard to know until you put it up there. And we would lean towards prioritizing those products that have gotten too competitive or saturated on Amazon for you and just see how they do. Because you can win on the optimization side because there’s nobody really paying attention on the Walmart platform right now.

19:03
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19:32
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20:01
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20:17
I guess one of my primary concerns about moving to Walmart, and I’m just speaking as a seller here, is that Walmart is traditionally viewed as a discount store. So does that mean that I can’t charge as much as I would on Amazon for the same product? They won’t penalize you for price parity. Price parity would be the main thing you need to focus on. And that’s one thing we encourage brands to evaluate, is if they are a premium price point on Amazon, that may not be the best fit for Walmart right now.

20:47
Okay. What they should do is do a quick search on Walmart, see what the top sellers are and see what the price range is. If you’re over 50 % or really there might be some leeway in some products where if you’re, if you’re over a hundred percent of the highest or the best seller or the highest price point that may be getting out of range of a really seeing some, some real conversion. But if you’re within 50 % or lower for the products on Walmart, then that’s still going to make sense. And price parity is still going to be the name of the game.

21:15
Walmart is looking at Amazon’s listings to see if you’re listing at the same price, Amazon’s doing the same thing. So you definitely want to make sure if you’re trying to offer it lower on Walmart, for some reason, you don’t compromise your buy box eligibility on Amazon. then fees wise, Is it cheaper to sell So fees wise, it’s slightly cheaper, right, Ryan? But not overall. It’s pretty much comparable.

21:42
Walmart in their fulfillment services does not have a small light program yet, but they do have oversized they do have all the others. Their inbound freight is they have negotiated inbound freight rates with FedEx that are good for small parcel or LTL inbound to their their warehouses like what Amazon gets with ups. So those inbound rates are often sometimes better.

22:03
depends and they’ve extended their warehouse network across the US aggressively over the last year or so, those shipment deliveries. They’ve just released kind of the one to many approach where you inbound to one warehouse and they distribute elsewhere for you, but they don’t charge you for that. They’re running so many services that some fees are discounted. So they just did a big push out to all current sellers or prospective sellers, courting them saying, if you get one product inbound into Walmart fulfillment services, they’re waving all

22:33
all peak season storage fees right now for Walmart. So there’s discounts they’re offering to incentivize. And the last thing I’d say was fees go commission rate referral fee is comparable. It’s typically about 15%. Some categories it’s eight and sometimes with price point below $10, it’ll drop to eight as well. And advertising is another element we’ve kind of hinted at, the average CPC is around and Q2, the average CPC by one study was around 80 cents.

23:02
per click versus $1.24 on Amazon. So there’s ways to potentially save and make each sale more profitable. Actually, now is probably a good time to just compare them apples to apples in terms of features. So FBA, there’s an equivalent on Walmart called WFS, right? Correct. On the advertising end, there’s also a PPC platform that Walmart has that’s probably not as feature rich as Amazon at this point, I would imagine. Correct. But the CPCs are significantly cheaper, it seems.

23:32
like a third or whatever you said it was. What else am I missing? Is there like a brand registry and all that stuff as well? There is, there’s a, they have brand registry in, in basically what it is, is IP protection at this point. Okay. Not getting a lot of extra analytics. They just, this, this banner ad that Dana was talking about has been historically only available to the one P products and one P suppliers. They just rolled it out this October.

24:00
for self-service for third-party marketplace. One condition though, they’re calling it sponsored brand and you have to be registered with the brand registry portal in order to have access to that banner ad. So they’re adding in features, but yeah, they do have it. Okay. Here’s another concern, which I don’t know if you’ve encountered yet. Like the other day I was actually at Walmart shopping and I bought Waltusen instead of Robitusen. Are they gonna compete with you for your best sellers or have you seen that happen?

24:28
As far as are they going to invest in private labeling kind of products to go head to head from what they see online? We haven’t seen any cases of that. What they’re doing, because they’re already historically retail first, like a brick and mortar retailer. And so the contracts they’re after right now is focusing more heavily on the retail distribution. And so they’re making asks of manufacturers to create private labels for them in store.

24:54
But online, we’re not seeing that directly compare. And there’s been real no real competition at that point. Now they do have their private label brands in a lot of categories that it would be hard to go head to head with. One thing to note, this would be one difference is a lot of the search volume can be heavily brand driven. And so that’s one thing to look for on Walmart. If you’re going into a space where the majority of search volume is in those branded keywords, conquesting branded keywords is really difficult on Walmart.

25:24
And so you have to get creative there. And in terms of just tools real quick, Helium 10 and Jungle Scout, have Walmart keyword research now? Mm-hmm, they do. And they both would claim about 93 % or higher accuracy on search volumes from their tools. I’m always curious how they get that. Is there, does Walmart advertise that data or like how are these tools getting it? Any ideas? You know, I don’t know exactly how. I do know that there are tools that have what they would call connected content partners.

25:54
connected partners with Walmart that do have access directly into data. Not all of those tools have that direct level of access, but they’re prohibited from revealing the actual numbers as Amazon would do as well with many of those arrangements. They have to put some kind of weighted veil over those. There’s another one called Skew Ninja. It’s a connected content partner that gives weighted averages of keywords, yeah.

26:20
All right, so walk me through the whole process now. Like, let’s say I want to move to Walmart, like how much of a pain is it or like what do I need to go through that’s different than getting started on Amazon? One before we kind of dive into the step by step, just related to the previous conversation is it, I’ve told a couple of brand owners, you might pull some brand off the shelf that you haven’t used. And just, just do a larger pack size at a slightly lower price point.

26:49
and have a different brand for Walmart than you do on Amazon. Use the same product if you’ve got a 3PL with the ability to relabel some stuff. Depending on the product mix, you might be able to do that pretty easily. We’ve seen that work. If you’re concerned about sort of coming in too low to be able to maintain your listings on Amazon or to be competing with yourself. The other thing to remember is that if you’re not on Walmart, someone else is representing your brand.

27:19
that probably is not doing a very good job. And so those are just two things to think about from a branding side. Like you might want to take over your brand so you can at least control it, but then maybe launch something if you’re in a high price point that you can come in slightly lower to move more volume. So, mean, it just sounds to me like at least for this initial part of our conversation here is like you might have some skews where it’s been a race to the bottom on Amazon, but it’s probably not saturated on Walmart and

27:48
it’s worth listing a lot of those products on because they’re probably not saturated on Walmart, right? So it sounds to me like you don’t want to pick like your highest margin, you know, best sellers on Amazon per se, because they might not work on Walmart because of the just the different types of customers. That’s right. Yeah, just I would say that. Yeah. Yeah. I would say that one one case study real quick. I’ll give you kind of vaguely. We helped a large aggregator move 300 of their top performers onto Walmart last year.

28:18
And there was a lot of surprises in that mix. What we saw was a lot of the heroes that were performing the best on Amazon weren’t the heroes on Walmart, but they had new heroes emerge from that catalog on the Walmart side that kind of got a second life and extra boost in sales. But it mirrored what we were saying is some of those insights we’ve drawn from some scales like that saying, okay, these middle tier products somewhat might be doing better and those are worth looking at.

28:46
Right. Because I kind of view Walmart customers as a different type of customer than an Amazon shopper. Right. At least in my mind. don’t know if it’s true. So what I want to get at with the other question was like how much is the process for getting a Walmart a lot smoother now? And I just kind of walk me through you can just walk me through the differences really. That’s all I’m concerned about getting a Walmart versus Amazon. Sure. So the main difference is Walmart is will not likely allow on

29:17
brand new sellers. So Walmart’s looking for sales history somewhere in their realm of, know, it’s a little bit of a black box, but really what we’re seeing is if you have more than six months of history and you ideally are six figures or higher, then you’re a good candidate. You have to have a U S entity or coming from UK or Canada at this point to be applying. The good news is in the last month,

29:43
the application process just got much easier. There’s probably a lot of people that will listen to this that may have tried applying in the past and they got an immediate robo rejection, rejection saying you’re not a fit and there’s no room to appeal. It was just, it was a harsh language, know, harsh language, just quick email with, with kind of stuck in limbo. And the reality is that was just overly sensitive bots.

30:07
What happened in the past was, and I won’t go too far in detail, but what happened in the past was when Amazon started kicking everybody off the platform, they were bad actors. Walmart just didn’t have filters in place necessarily to also filter them out. So they swung the pendulum the other way and said, all right, we’re going to get really heavy on filters. And the result was now a lot of legitimate sellers being just refused access. That bar has come down significantly now. You now can in one step apply to be a seller.

30:35
and you’re applying at the same time for access to the marketplace, for Walmart fulfillment services and for Walmart Connect, which is their advertising arm. And it’s all rolled into one quick step and then they’ll do some backend verification after they grant initial kind of probationary access to the platform. But the difference would be sales history, showing that you have a good history of customer You have to show them financial statements then or? You have to give your EIN, those kinds of things and they can do some research.

31:04
And they’ll ask about number of skews you plan to bring as a percentage of your whole, those kinds of things. Okay. And when you say six figures, do you mean six figures per skew or aggregate? Aggregate. Okay. All right. All right. Yeah. then what’s his brand registry separate Ryan and WFS still, I know it was WFS is rolled into the initial. So WFS Walmart connect and cellular access, cellular center access are rolled into one.

31:34
Brand registry would be a secondary registration. It’s not too difficult to do. You just have to make sure just like you would on Amazon, make sure your paperwork matches your legal seller entity, all those kinds of things. But that would be, those are relatively similar. There is no monthly fee to be a professional seller on Walmart. That’s one difference. You’re likely going to be selling, setting up all your, so you would, the initial step filling out the application and getting online. The main difference is your previous sales history.

32:04
But for most audience, they probably already have some history over six months or any of them. So, likely clear that hurdle. We can talk with somebody if they run into a dead end there. That’s where knowing people behind the process often helps a little bit just to figure out what’s going on. And then from there, once they’re set up, the next stages, you you’ve got to, if you’re going to do seller fulfilled, you’ve got to fill out shipping templates and some of those elements in there.

32:30
But WFS is what we heavily recommend for everybody. But the Seller Setup Process is get access, set up at least one item, and connect at least one unit of inventory to that item, and you finish that onboarding process. And WFS, in your experience, is pretty reliable compared to like FBA? It is, yes. So inbound times are typically faster at this point.

32:56
And there may be some hiccups. do have to make sure one thing that’s a key difference is you have to have a scannable UPC. So a lot of sellers, if they’ve just printed on their packaging, FN SKU or something like that from the Amazon side, that’s obviously Walmart’s not going to scan a unique barcode for Amazon into their system. So you have to have a scannable UPC. so good news is GS1, if people have been, you can get individual UPCs now for like $30 a piece, much cheaper now.

33:25
So that’s not too big of a hill to climb operationally. WFS also now offers labeling just like Amazon would. So you can have them labeled per unit if you want to do it with your old FNS queue and indicate you want them to label for you. Okay. Let’s talk about the juicy stuff now. So we had talked about like the Wild Wild West and I know you kind of alluded to reviews and all that stuff. So is it really like Amazon, the Wild Wild West back when you could do like

33:53
paid reviews and all that good stuff. Let’s talk about what the platform is like today to get rank a listing.

34:00
Yeah, so I’ll say all this under the caveat of, know, there’s where there was a wild wild west in some ways, there’s now the federal government has also gotten involved, dipping their toe in it saying, all right, we’re going to settle the range a bit. so there’s the governmental issues of can you have, you know, friends and family leave reviews, those kinds of things that’s actually regulated by the government now saying that those are not legitimate reviews. And so this we recommend caution there. But with regard to incentivize reviews,

34:28
that’s incentivized is still a bad word for Amazon sellers or by an Amazon standards. Incentivize is not a bad word in Walmart. And so, you you’ve got your program like Bazaar Voice, who has the Spark review program, which would be like Vine Voice on Amazon. So you can send in samples to them and they can send them out and get their initial reviews. But there’s another one called Field Agent. So fieldagent.net, we’re big fans of their company as well.

34:56
They’ll do the basically what they’ve done is aggregated gig workers through an app to do a variety of tasks related to retail or e-commerce. And so you can do the purchase online, Libre Review online, Process Flow. It’s completely white hat, completely, completely partner with. By Walmart. Yeah. Can we walk through it? Sorry. This is like micro workers.com, right? Like literally you’re telling them to go buy something. Like you reimbursed them and then they leave a review. Yep.

35:25
But it’s a fully legitimate company. They do broader things. They’ll do even for retail brands. You can send taskers out to go look at your products on shelf and see is it lined up properly, all sorts of things. But this is one small flow in other things they offer. Plum Marketplace is actually what they sell it through now, offer it through. But yeah, the arrangement is for the templated process flow would be for $15 per review plus the reimbursement cost of the product.

35:53
You direct them to the URL that they’re to go to. And it’s the canonical kind of URL version of the product detail page. They make the purchase. They have questions they’re being asked throughout that process already in a survey standard. Then they’ll be directed to leave review afterwards. They do include the language like Amazon used to direct as well as, as I was compensated for this review. received a free product in exchange for this review, but my thoughts on my own. It’ll be tagged as incentivized.

36:22
But those reviews are still showing up on Walmart and they’re fully endorsed by Walmart because they’re legitimate.

36:31
Does the search engine work the same way as Amazon? So do you have them like do a search for the search term that you want to rank for or buy it? In that flow, working through field agent, it’s already, it’s, you need to give them the actual URL to the listing. But your broader question, does the search engine reward people searching for your product under a keyword and then clicking through converting? Yes. So that, that is a strategy.

37:00
that is recommended in various ways. There’s ways to accomplish that. And that’s what any brand in an e-commerce marketplace is going to direct people to do in some way, shape or form is directing them to find their products and purchase. So there are ways to do that. But being cautious to make sure the goal is not purely manipulation of an algorithm.

37:28
But yes, searching and conversion, even adding to cart really we’ve seen have impact. so- we ran an add to cart campaign on our brand and saw immediate results. all that was happening is people were adding it to cart. And not buying? Nope. Interesting. So how much are reviews in the weighting factor? Is it just for social proof or does it actually affect the rankings?

37:58
So you get a quantifiable score on Walmart. They give you a listing quality score from zero to a hundred is what the algorithm feeds you back. It’s weighted based on three main components. One is that the highest weighted of the three is your offer. So meaning price point and price parity, are you offering at the same price anywhere else? But speed of delivery. So if you’re in that two to three days shipping, that’s what they’re looking for. Have you had any delivery defects in the past rolling seven days, canceled orders or failure to deliver or acknowledge in time, those kinds of things.

38:29
Offer is going to be the heaviest weight of the three. Secondly is reviews and ratings. So really are you at a 4.5 or higher? And for algorithms purposes, often it’s just, you have one review? So it’s not too intricate of a score in that regard, but do you have at least one review 4.5 or higher in that regard? And then the third one is content and discoverability, which is all about your title, your description, your images, and your backend attributes regarding the quality score.

38:58
The impact of that score is around 80 % quality scores when you get a little bit of extra love from the SEO engine. It’s not too significant, but the real reason to push higher than that at 95 % or higher is other algorithms are, we don’t know, it’s still a black box, Walmart is courting a lot of Google traffic. All the optimizations for SEO are optimized for what Google likes as well.

39:25
Walmart will serve your products in Google shopping or Google ads for free. If the algorithm looks at it and says, this is a high quality listing, it is worth serving up, it’ll do that. So it’s worth to get it there. And we know the people behind the process, their metric is 95 % or higher. So if you’re looking to open up extra opportunities in the marketplace, that’s a great metric to have as a baseline. So what’s interesting here is that we didn’t even talk about it. It’s like Walmart actually tells you whether your listing is good.

39:55
Right. That’s not the case on Amazon. So you actually have something to work towards in this store. In terms of the offer, I’m just kind of curious. So presumably Walmart’s crawling all the marketplaces to see whether your offer is good and that increases your score. Right. So would you recommend selling the exact same product, maybe just under a different skew for Walmart so they can’t do that? Do you know how that algorithm works?

40:23
They seem to use a lot of data points. So even if you have a different G 10, if you have a different UPC, EAN, G 10, whichever form, uh, we see incorrect matching sometimes by the algorithm where it’s not the same product, different G 10, and you still are getting temporarily penalized. Uh, so that shows us, uh, we were able to correct those things, but that shows us it’s not just looking at the UPC and maybe not just looking at the skew, but looking at the description or the name.

40:51
and it’s putting a few different identifiers together. Now you can contest that if you have a different somehow different branding, different skewers, something like that, can appeal that. But yeah, it’s not quite clear what all the elements are and the algorithm is crawling to identify that match. But Walmart is rewarding people who have like a good deal essentially, right? Yes. On the review side, real quick, since we’ve got a lot of you to see people listening,

41:21
Ryan might have a couple ideas for D2C people in particular for reviews. Yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah, so there’s generating new reviews, right? We talked about that with field agent doing those things. But the other opportunity right now on Walmart that’s a great opportunity is, and this is where D2C, if you have a strong D2C site and you’ve already been hosting reviews, there’s several options that can give you an instant head start in the review counts. So if you’re using Yotpo,

41:50
or Bazaar Voice as your host, both of them in contracts, if you’re already in contracts with them, with Bazaar Voice, may be an additional fee or whatnot, but they can automatically syndicate and push those over to Walmart for the duration of however long you’re under contract with them. Yotpo is the same. We’ve seen actually Yotpo typically is cheaper and often for those who have some sort of package with Yotpo, often it’s a feature that’s already included in their package and they may just have to ask for it to be turned on. And that’s instant reviews.

42:18
from their website onto the listings. All right, hold on, let me repeat that. So like if your product on your own website has a hundred reviews, you can literally import those exact a hundred reviews to your Walmart listing. So your Walmart listing instantly gets a hundred reviews. Exactly. right. And that will improve your listing quality and your metrics immediately. It’ll improve your listing quality. The biggest feature, the biggest issue is you’re probably in most categories become the review leader with social proof.

42:48
Average review counts are often in the 20s, 30s. So real quick frame of reference, Bluetooth earbuds on Amazon, average review count on page one is probably 40,000 reviews. Average review count on Walmart is about 780. Oh my God. Okay. Yeah. So the huge opportunity there with review counts. So every review counts in that way. yeah, with Bizarre Voice or with Yacht Po,

43:16
you can have them just push them over automatically if they’re already hosting your stuff. The third one gets even better. If you’re not in one of those, but you have organically generated reviews on your own site, you have the option to apply at a brand level with Walmart’s marketplace team to have your reviews uploaded by CSV directly to Walmart site. you can, there’s yes, yeah, big smile there. Yeah, so if they’re organic and those things and you can have them downloaded in CSV, if you.

43:44
They got some filtering questions to make sure these are legitimate, all those things. But if you pass through those tests and there’s some uncontrollables on their timeline, how long it takes them to do all those things. But you upload those and then once they’ve verified all those things, they’ll ingest those into the system and you’ll instantly have those on. Once those are ingested, those don’t come back down. So it’s not about a duration of contract with a syndicator or something like that. Those are just now on Walmart. Can I take my Amazon reviews and import them over to Walmart?

44:13
One of the filtering questions by Walmart is, are these from your own site? And are they not generated from another marketplace? And so, yeah. Okay. The other benefit that I heard from you talking earlier was, if you have a good presence and solid sales on Walmart, will Walmart invite you into their retail stores? And what is the likelihood of that happening? Because that’d be huge also.

44:40
Right, yeah, a single deal, you know, they have 4,200 stores around the country. And so a single deal with them, even if it’s in a smaller subset of their stores could mean, you know, 5 million in revenue annually, pretty easy, pretty quickly for brands. Realistically, we’re talking, probably talking about 1 % of product mix that makes sense there. What you’re having to make a case for is likely either filling a gap in their current retail offering, or you’re going to be displacing someone that they’ve already done a deal with previously.

45:08
And so the good news is Walmart, what’s being talked about all the time in Walmart world is Omnichannel. And what they mean is they have integrated their retail buyer teams and retail teams with their e-commerce teams. There’s no longer really an e-commerce merchant and a retail merchant. They’re all connected to each other. Now they have divisions within that, but what we’ve seen, I’ll try and keep this anecdotally very short, but

45:36
We’ve sat in line reviews with retail brands on one hand, where the questions being asked by the buyer in the first opening minutes of the conversation. is just for an existing brand that’s already in store at Walmart. It’s their annual glance at their product and how it’s doing. And Walmart’s buyer is deciding, do they want the purchase again? Or will they expand or contract all those kinds of things in those deals? And so it’s a very important conversation.

46:04
early in those conversations, we’re hearing the question, can you show us your .com performance? So they’re talking to retail brands saying, we need you to increase your performance in your metrics on .com. So we see it’s a major importance on that side. Conversely, some other signals we’ve seen, Daniel saw it with his own brand when we were in early stages, when we’re optimizing there on Walmart, talking with a category director on the e-commerce side, the question came, do you want to be introduced to a Walmart merchant?

46:33
to talk about your products for in-store fit. And so we’re seeing the invite extended. We’re also seeing another one is Walmart every year. I think it’s June. I think it’s in June every year does what they call open call. It’s basically a nationwide event where they’re basically inviting people to a selection process to see if they can basically shark tank kind of pitch to buyers for their products. The first round of that open call was exclusive to Walmart marketplace sellers.

47:01
And so if you’re on the Walmart marketplace, you had first bite at the Apple to see if you could pass through these interviews and things to get there. So they look at it as a farm system. And the last thing I’ll say to is, cause it makes sense for their merchants. They are de-risking each merchant. It has their own job and they’re being reported, know, they’ve got their own KPIs and they’ve got their P and L they’re reporting to. And so if they can de-risk saying, all right, we can see a heat map of your demand of your product across the country over the past six months.

47:31
And if we’re gonna run a trial in these 200 stores, we know they’re likely gonna perform well because we’ve been seeing you online selling well in this area, then that de-risks that change they’re gonna have to make if they’re gonna have to take a different brand off the shelf to put you on. That makes complete sense. Yes, yeah. All right, so I wanna just, as a seller myself, I’m just trying to run the numbers through my head right now. So it looks like anywhere from five to 12 % lift, which at least in my mind,

48:00
It’s just maybe at the bare minimum for it to be interesting for me to add some effort there. And so you guys both started Blue Rise. Can you just kind of walk me through the economics? So let’s say I’m making a million bucks and potentially I can make, let’s say another $100,000 a year. If I were to, and let’s say don’t even want to learn Walmart right now because I should be focusing my energies on Amazon and my own store. So if I were to hire you guys, what do the economics look like? And what are the margins that are required to make it just

48:32
That’s a great question. And so, yeah, I’d say that’s right on why we built what we built. Basically, the 80-20 for most brands is going to be focusing on their primary channel that they’re already on. Whether they built a large D2C or directly through Amazon or hybrid at both, we recognize that. And so what we saw as an opportunity to basically do the heavy lifting so that they don’t have to invest that time, but also do it with that white glove touch, with the kind of the marketplace expertise.

49:02
What we do is it’s a retainer model and it’s based on number of SKUs under management. As the marketplace grows, we’d love to develop the pricing model more into a percentage of year-over-year growth or those kinds of things. when we’re talking a percent of a percent, what we realize is what it takes for us to do, not just the kind of foundational button pushing dial turning to get some metrics to align with scores, but really to think strategically along with the brand.

49:30
There’s a kind of minimum threshold. our minimum monthly is a thousand a month with a brand. And that would cover up to six SKUs at this point under direct management. From there, there’s a tiered per SKU monthly management fee for doing business with us. Okay. What I tell brands when you’re thinking about Walmart, if we were to walk with them and assess that there’s a fit, we tell a lot of brands now like, this is not a fit for you right now.

50:00
You know, you’re you got a different strategy than it’s going to work for Walmart. But if you fit in some of those categories we’ve been discussing, then it’s like, hey, you need to expect to break even for the first year on the platform because you’re building a moat. By the time you pay us, you pay advertising, you pay for your inventory, and you make some profit, it’s going to break even. But at the end of that first year, I’ve seen it.

50:23
you end up with this really great review count, you end up with this presence for your brand that you didn’t otherwise have, whether they buy in, buy it, maybe they go buy it at Amazon, I don’t care. But it’s out there now. And I’m controlling my brand and someone else isn’t that’s dropshipping me from from from Amazon. And then we’re seeing brands actually accelerate into profitability. And then, but they’re not having to put any personal time and energy aside from giving us their content.

50:52
Right. That’s really the only piece we don’t handle. We’ll say, we need this content, the graphics and video tweaked in this way. Otherwise we handle everything else from advertising to getting that quality score up and they go to handling relationships with Walmart, all the cases that we have to file and things break in their system. We do all that. And in my mind, if I didn’t have that for my brand, this would be a total distraction. Walmart would be a complete distraction. But because Blue Rise is handling it all for us, it makes more sense.

51:22
for Carter, who’s CEO of my brand at five to 12%. Let me ask you this question. What are your projections for Walmart’s growth based on because you guys have reps you’ve Walmart was actually at the event that we were all at a big presence actually almost every other person I talked to you I seem on the floor was working for all Walmart. They like sent like an army of people there. Do you have any idea what the growth projections are?

51:52
It’s changing, know, the whiplash of COVID has made it difficult for everybody to predict real trends. so, you know, they’re seeing quarterly growth around 6 % or so in the e-commerce platform. They have, you know, some quarters where they’re seeing 90 % or years where they’re seeing 97 % during COVID growth of the platform. It’s continued to grow. The growth has slowed a bit in relation to COVID, but it’s probably still at a healthy pace.

52:21
So I’d say it’s growing at a moderate pace. They’re not quite closing the gap yet with Amazon because Amazon’s making other pushes. they’re aggressively pushing in. So a couple of indicators like last year, during Q2 earnings call, this last call, I think it was this last one, they announced they’re earmarking $14 billion for investment in infrastructure for e-commerce fulfillment.

52:51
They’ve quickly actioned on it. They’re starting to, think there was a, just a news article came out that they’re switching over the utility of a major one, a major warehouse in Atlanta to make it used for WFS. And they have in the mix a plan to start utilizing all, this is an interesting one. This is like looking at the horizon, what could be coming is plans to be utilizing a lot of their super centers, adding in capacity to use them almost like many warehouses to some extent.

53:21
for fulfillment. And if you’re in within 10 to 15 minutes of 90 % of the population of the US, that is an interesting development to be positioned for with delivery and those things. So there’s some major trends we see that they’re putting in place. They’re dedicating for the infrastructure and some of the signals that Walmart’s ad platforms growing.

53:46
As I’m seeing articles about them laying off some roles in corporate in some ways, at the same time, heavily investing in hiring advertising personnel, those pieces, they’re making major shifts in investment into the e-commerce platform. So I see it continue to grow. they brought on guys, Seth Delaire was now their CRO, EVP, Walmart US. He was former Instacart, helped Amazon build their global advertising early on.

54:15
And so they’ve got a lot of the right players in the right places to be making some of these moves. So we see it continue to grow. We’ll see at what pace. Yeah. So let me just try to summarize what I got out of this interview. You can correct me where I’m wrong. So here Amazon seller, let’s say you’re doing like seven figures and you want to diversify and you think that Wal-Mart is going to grow. You might want to hire someone like you guys who takes care of everything. It’s going to be five to 12 percent of your revenue.

54:45
And just to set expectations, you’ll break even the first year, but you were establishing this listing that potentially will get a lot of organic traffic and sales over the years as Walmart grows. And it’s just like an investment under diversification right now. And while five to 12 % might not be enough for you to just devote energy, you guys kind of offload that in a, actually it’s pretty reasonably priced. I’m actually wondering how you guys stay profitable personally. That’s a separate question.

55:13
But the goal here is like putting a foothold in this platform that’s While it’s still easy while there’s these crazy incentivized reviews and all this other stuff that you’re talking about Kind of like back when Amazon was easy that accurate That’s a good summary. Okay, and we started this because we were frustrated with the other agencies out there that said they did Amazon and Walmart and We decided just to do Walmart, but we’re really a project management company

55:42
And so we do quarterly sprints. We’re focused on growth. There’s, there’s an active list of things that we’re trying to do for clients every quarter that we hold ourselves accountable to. And, and I think you’ve got Ryan and then Josh, our director of channel management, who are just, they’re hardcore about the backend and they’ve been, haven’t heard about these guys because they’ve been hard at work for the last few years. And now they’re kind of popping up and saying, Hey, you know, we’re here to help if you want. so, uh, I think, I think it’s not, it’s not for everybody.

56:11
but it’s definitely like you said, I think you put it well, it’s a long-term investment in diversification and protecting your brand that might be a fit, especially if you’re DTC and especially if you’ve got an eye towards retail. And Walmart is clearly investing a lot of money in this. And by the way, I just want to mention to everyone listening, I’m not affiliated with BlueRides in any way. I just like these guys. where can people find more about your service?

56:40
Great question. can go to LinkedIn, find me, Ryan King with Blue Rise on LinkedIn. I’m active there. You can email us connect at Blue Rise. That’s B-L-U-E-R-Y-S-E, or you can go to www.bluerise.com. And we have a connect form there if you want to learn more. Feel free to reach out. We’re happy to answer any kind of questions. I’m often on the call with people that are just getting kind of kicking the tires a little bit, just trying to, maybe you have a few more questions after this, after hearing this, happy to talk with someone.

57:09
if they had more questions. And you guys are, we’ll chime in on like if I have like a portfolio of 500 SKUs, you’ll kind of go through and figure out and help figure out which ones are fit and which ones aren’t right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Cool. Yeah. Ron and I were working on a, what is it, a 12 point or a 15 point assessment process that we’re rolling out for brands that are like, okay, you’re saying 20 % of our SKUs we can put on, which 20%. So we’re, we’re working on a process with a couple brands right now to do that.

57:40
Because we don’t want to end up working with brands that we can’t help grow in the long term anyway. We don’t want to waste anybody’s time. We don’t want to waste our time. Cool. I love what you guys are doing. And I’m actually rooting for Walmart big time because I think there needs to be space to keep Amazon in line if you know what I mean. So thank you guys for coming on today. Thank you, Steve. been great. Thanks for having us.

58:06
Hope you enjoyed that episode and have a better understanding of where Walmart fits with your e-commerce business. For more information about this episode, go to mywebquaterjob.com slash episode 440. And once again, I want to remind you that my annual e-commerce conference will be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida on May 23rd to May 25th of 2023. I really want to hang out with you in person next year, so let’s meet up. Go to sellersummit.com. That’s S-E-L-L-E-R-S-S-U-M-M-I-T.com. I also want to thank Postgood.

58:34
which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for eCommerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div. Now we talk about how I these tools on my blog and if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away.

59:04
Thanks for listening.