eComm Weekly – EP25

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Carrie, welcome. How are you? I’m doing great today. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to talk about Walmart today. Yeah. Yeah, I am too, because you just launched a training program too didn’t you Yes. Free on YouTube project. W yeah. Www.heliumten.com/or forward slash project. W and we basically with Tim Jordan have done a whole kind of case study walkthrough to show people how to start selling on Walmart. And this is what we’re going to tease people a little bit. I’m going to go through because we can’t talk about what you’re talking about.

And project w just take too much time, but we’ll just get to the meat and potatoes, let’s talk about the buzz. Why all of a sudden is there this huge buzz [00:01:00] around. Walmart has they’ve been trying to get people on their platform, I think for quite a few years, but they’ve made it so that it’s a lot more user-friendly and there’s just a lot of opportunity right now in Walmart.

Not only is the platform easier to navigate, but when you get on there, you can start making sales immediately. And there’s not a whole lot of competition, which I think is pretty exciting. The competition part is probably the most exciting part about selling on Walmart right now is that, there’s only a hundred thousand sellers as opposed to, I think 1.9 million sellers on Amazon.

And they have about 120 million unique visitors every month to Walmart. And if you want to compare that to Amazon, Amazon has about 200 million unique visitors. You definitely get a lot of eyes on your listings when you get onto them. And I think it’s just a matter of time before people are going to transition over, especially.

So for those of you who don’t know this Walmart created something, I don’t know, it was probably six or seven months ago called project glass. [00:02:00] And it was the way that their omni-channel was going to work. It was their new. Look at how people were going to buy and you could be either go out to their store and buy.

You could have them ship from the store within what is it? An hour I think. And yeah. And then you can shop online like you would on Amazon plus this is really cool. So Amazon’s got 110 warehouses around the U S. Has they’re building out their big meal, mega structure warehouses, but they’ve got 5,500 superstores around that basically are their distribution centers as well.

So they can take this in a second, Kathy. Yeah, it’s pretty amazing. It’s their distribution is definitely the best. Yeah. So it’s pretty amazing what we can do. And especially with the brick and mortar stores, just, having the ability eventually to be able to have people pick up your product in stores and, or even just, eventually get your product [00:03:00] in the actual stores themselves, if you do well on their site.

So there’s a lot of opportunity on Walmart, the seller, I think this is a little bit different than if you’re, and this is really important. People think that just a lot of people think that they could just go on Walmart and start selling. It’s a little bit different. It’s not an Amazon play. You want to just talk about who should be selling online?

Yeah. So a Walmart wants established brands to start selling on their platform and they also want products that are more unique that are gonna enhance their catalog. That doesn’t mean you have to sell millions and millions of dollars, but they want to see that you are an established e-commerce seller that you have a good.

Track record of high levels of customer service. That’s really, the main thing is, really good customer service. And that’ll be shown through your views on Amazon and other platforms and also just your ability to ship quickly. That you can fulfill orders quickly on your own.

And so yeah they really are looking for more established sellers. So that doesn’t, [00:04:00] again, that doesn’t mean you have to be a multi-million dollar brand or seller, but just established. And again, with the with the product itself, they don’t want copies, a hundred copies of the same exact product.

Yeah. So they’re looking for enhancements to their catalog. So that’s something to think about too is, there’s a million of the same. It wouldn’t spoons or whatever. How can you make them different? What can you do to stand out and, catch the eye of the customers?

That’s what they’re looking for. Yeah. You also mentioned something you said you have to be able to ship out fast, quickly. Does that mean that they don’t do like an FBA fulfillment or fulfillment service? They have a fulfillment. That’s a good point. Yeah. They do have Walmart fulfillment services, so you can apply to that pretty much, when you get your first listing up. And it’s just pretty similar to FBA. You ship your products in, at a low rate. And then they distribute your products and they actually also Kendall returns and customer service for that. But they want you to be able to also fulfill. Items if [00:05:00] necessary. That’s like maybe their backup plan, but yeah, it’s one of the requirements that you have the ability to do that.

And you can do, you can fulfill that by partnering with deliver, deliver is one of their partners. So you can actually Establish yourself with the fulfillment. If you utilize deliver from maybe your Shopify site or something like that. So there are ways to make sure to get around it if you don’t have your own warehouse and maybe if you’re using three PLC, that should be fine as well.

So going back around six months ago, I think it was around six months ago. Kim Jordan, who’s your partner on project w and McKell Chapnick we came up with a few videos on how to apply. Because there are some snakes and this is the golden nugget. If you’re on listening now you’ve probably, if you’ve applied to Walmart, you’ve either got, wow, this is really great.

I’m on right away. Or you’ve been waiting for months. And so we put together this video, you’ll see it on project w as well, but why don’t we go through some of [00:06:00] the points that how you can streamline it by using one of their partners? Yeah. So if you go through deliver, they basically help you with the setup process and do it all for you.

And you have a lot higher chance of getting accepted. I didn’t ever apply through deliver. Have you ever applied through to deliver norm? No. I’ve not used deliver. We, the way that we got set up is through Shopify and hey pal delivered, they’re all partners. And I can tell you the experience through Shopify because because we’re already approved, but if you go to Shopify, go to their app store and look for Walmart marketplace, just click and then you’ll be able to start the process.

But one of the things that you need to know when you’re doing this is that you have to have an EIN number and your w nine is going to ask if you have a w eight. I don’t know if this has changed much since the last six months, but they were looking for you as based companies. And so if you are a [00:07:00] w eight instead of a w nine chances of getting approved, aren’t as good, you can still get approved, but if you have a w nine and an EIN number, another trip up, don’t like, just take a look at your.

Two forms and make sure your address is the same. I’ve heard a lot of people come back. And one of the reasons I have a client that one of the reasons why is because the EIN address and their their w nine address were different. So that’s, one, one I don’t like I’ve got about four or five things I could talk about on the application process, but do you want to talk a bit more about.

Yeah. You definitely have to have, it is interesting because they actually don’t tell you also why you got rejected. So if you don’t have those addresses matching, you won’t know it. That’s the reason why you got rejected or, maybe they didn’t see that your star ratings were high enough for you, but they don’t tell you that.

So that is one of the challenges with the actual application process. So what [00:08:00] I recommend. Before you apply to make sure that, you look at all of the requirements and they’re written down, you have the videos and also we go through it and project w make sure you have every single requirement down.

And we go through how to actually also on project w and on your video, how to actually apply. And you’re going to increase your chances of getting accepted. If have all of your ducks in a row before you apply. And get that all squared away, but yeah they’re not going to tell you what the, I think that’s one of the most challenging things is that you don’t know the actual thing that you did wrong, going through and making sure you’re really well aware of all the requirements is I think key to the whole process.

When people have reached out to us and said, that they’re having problems, all I’ve done is I say, go over watching an application video on YouTube and it’ll walk you through each step. And usually these are some of the crazy things that they’re going to be asking, oh, do you have a warehouse?

Let’s say that you’re in Canada. Do you have a warehouse outside of the U S answer? Yes. Chances go [00:09:00] down. So sometimes you got to do a little white lie and say, no, I hate saying. But you say no, us based and it’s just the interpretation says, oh they’re not just selling in the U S could have a problem.

The other one that drives me bananas is, when they ask you for the Amazon store, what’s your Amazon Starlink. Yeah. It has to be a specific form of. Yes. Yes. It’s a little bit glitchy, but I, I’m glad you brought up the thing though, about the warehouse too, because I had that thought in my mind, the last time I was going through the application is, maybe everyone should just say no out, no is outside of the unit.

I really, I, yeah, definitely. That’s something to take note for everyone in the audience, if you’re, if you have warehouses in the U S and other countries just ignore the fact that you have, international warehouses and just focus on the U S based one. That’s really good. But yeah, the format.

There’s a, the website itself is a little bit glitchy with formats. So sometimes I’ll put, I’ll actually go to an [00:10:00] incognito window and that seems to help the situation. So that might be a solution for that, but yeah it’s weird. How different formats or different things doesn’t it doesn’t work.

I don’t know how to, yeah it’s a little bit frustrating. And if you do get rejected, it’s not like Amazon or it’s a lot easier than Amazon. If you get rejected, there is an appeals process. And like I mentioned before, if you watch a video, either project w a go and check out selling on Walmart, I private label Legion, you’ll see an appeals process or the application video, just watch it like 10 points.

And I guarantee you. It’s probably because something simple was overlooked and there are a few things to trip you up as stupid as the warehouse sounds, but let’s move on to something else. Okay. And this is another one that if you don’t understand and it’s there, there [00:11:00] are apps out there. That will bring in your Amazon listing into Walmart, just like it would for eBay, like in Krog, just apps that, do that.

However, you don’t do that with Walmart. Do you cut out for me? Sorry. It’s got to, you cannot just put up your Amazon listing. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people do that. I, you definitely want to format it the way that they suggest in their guides and their guides are, I just want to shout out to Walmart for their guides, because if go to the seller, help their guides are excellent.

They tell you exactly what they want and it’s really helpful. So if you ever get lost, go to the seller, help articles and you can help, it’ll help you with that. But, yeah, sorry, I just lost my train of thought. Went over into the.

So basically the Amazon listings, a lot of people you can actually tell when you look at the format that it’s an Amazon listing because they’ll have the all caps and then the description after. And that is definitely not [00:12:00] good for the format. So what Amazon, or what Walmart wants is really a description.

They say it’s 150 characters. For the actual description, it’s like a paragraph. You can actually use some HTML to segment out the paragraphs there, but they also have bullet points that are called key features, and those ha are 80 characters. And you can definitely see which listings are following the guidelines and which ones aren’t.

And they actually ding you on your listing quality score and your ranking overall, if you don’t have the format down correctly now, for people who, have a lot of listings and they want to get their stuff over on Walmart. Quickly and get it up, it’s not going to. Be the end of the world, if they do that.

And then they slowly one by one go back and fit, fix and optimize them, over time. But it’s definitely a good thing to just do it, the right, the, the first time that you do it. And really all you have to do is reorganize your content into the format that they want. You don’t have to rewrite everything from.

I basically just rearrange it. So it’s, it looks like the format that Walmart [00:13:00] wants. They also will tell you to add in certain attributes in the, in your title, especially they’ll want it to format it a certain way. So you need to make sure your title is formatted the way that they want you to TA to format it.

There is one thing though that I. Kind of go in, break the rules on, and that’s the length of the actual title itself. You get dinged a little bit, if you go over the characters, but I think sometimes, you can’t fit everything in to the character limit. They give you an, our brand names.

Some of them are very long, so they take up the majority of the title characters. So some of those I go over, but for the most part, you want to stay in the guidelines of what they what they record. Yeah. One of the other things that we should be looking at you touch it about touching it a little bit on optimizing.

Walmart has this really cool tool. They want you to succeed. So when you go into the dashboard, you’ll see an area for growth. They have an app that’s called a, I think it’s product listing optimizer. Is that. [00:14:00] On the actual, on seller center itself? Yes. It’s a listing it’s listing quality. If I’m looking at my, I can pull up, I’m trying to pull it while you’re looking at up the optimizer that they have.

It’ll go give your overall score. Of your product listing and you’ll see that, oh, it’s 31 and don’t freak out if he sees 31, it’s out of a hundred. Usually it takes a day or so for Amazon to arrive for Walmart, to pick up on it. And then it’ll show you exactly what you need. Oh, you need more images.

Oh, you need to add here. Add over here and it, by the time you’re done with the product, optimize it. You could easily get your listing up to a 75 plus percent. And it’s so easy. It’s just, I wish Amazon’s starting to do that, but if you know about the tools to use, you could just be a much better seller right out of the gates.[00:15:00] 

Why is my ranking taking so long? Yeah. It’s under growth opportunities. If anyone is actually following along, it’s a growth opportunities tab, but yes, it’s, that’s huge on just like being able to understand what they want. Because I remember when I started on Amazon, I had no idea it was your, years ago and I was just.

Just going with it. And I wasn’t really sure all the time that I was doing things right, but with Walmart, they just guide you along the process and tell you, Hey, you’re not even you didn’t fill in these attributes. And if you fill the attributes and they can help you with your ranking, you can start to index for even those keywords.

When you get into WFS, which is their Walmart fulfillment services, that is a huge part of the listing quality breakdown. The actually the biggest part of it. So fulfillment is extremely important along with the actual price of the item. So you can see your rank, just jump when you get into those things.

It’ll it’s amazing. [00:16:00] Yeah. You’re trying to get, when you look at the freight, let’s talk about that. So if you go with the standard freight that they have, and then you can go with deliver, have the two day badge, which is what you’re trying to strive for, or WFS. If you keep it at that, the first out of the three, it’s a tougher, it’s really tough to rank.

Once you post, like you were saying that two day badge, now you’re getting a boost. And the other thing ha have you been playing around with the pro seller? I haven’t yet, but that’s actually the next thing I’m going to be playing around with because that is definitely another thing that will help with your ranking.

And it’s, you can see it a lot more visibly on your listings, the pro seller badge, and I think shoppers actually look for it. That’s definitely something. What are you, what are your thoughts in it? I agree. For me. And from what I’ve heard, it’s like the prime badge. There’s more trust put into there because you to achieve it, you have to meet, I think it’s [00:17:00] five pieces of criteria.

So people trust you more. And then when you, they see the two day service or WFS, then that’s just another way of doing it. Another way of building trust. It’s no different than Amazon or Shopify, once you build authority. And that’s the problem. That equals trust and that’ll equal sales and it’s not simple.

It’s yeah, it’s definitely something to strive for. I have the qualifications here. It’s, you delivery defects are below 10%, less than 2% cancellations, more than a hundred orders in the past 90 days, 70% of your trending catalog has a listing score above 60%. So that listing quality score is a huge part of it too.

So yeah. Qualifications for the pro seller. And that’s, those are really good, important things for people. They want to know that the items aren’t defective and that pro seller badge gives them consumer confidence that it’ll be a good product. Now, one thing I found to be [00:18:00] disappointing there’s two things, but one thing PPC, it’s just not there, but it’s.

It’s really interesting too, because I’ve for the application, you actually have to go to Walmart connect, which is another site that gets connected to seller center. And so some of my accounts I’ve been able to just get accepted right away and it was just no problem. And then on one of my biggest accounts where we’re spending hundreds of thousands on ads on Amazon and we’re moving over there, they keep, Not really denying us, but they’re like asking us more questions and it’s been weeks, so it’s interesting that process. Why am I take my money? I want to advertise, but yeah. So be, persevere, even if you have those, because it’ll get sorted out, but yeah, it’s a lot cheaper. I love that part. And it’s, they are definitely improving it all the time, but there’s no negative targeting right now.

I get that question a lot, no negative targeting. And also it’s a. First price auction. So it’s, if you were to bid $5 on a keyword, [00:19:00] you’re going to pay $5. Whereas on Amazon, if you bid $5, you’re just bidding high so that you can win, the auction. So say it goes for a dollar 50, you’ll pay a dollar 50 on Amazon.

So that’s a big thing on. Yeah. Cause you, you could get really suckered if you’re trying to bid high and then, all of a sudden you’re being paid or you’re paying out $5 per click. Yeah. That could kill you. Yeah. One of the other areas I wanted to talk about was the oh, not the, not PPC.

What was it? Deals. How do you get. And how do you know about the different types of deals that are available? If you’re new. So usually the deals they give to more established sellers, like there were some, like a lot of deals during Christmas time. And some people had them in some people don’t.

And so the people that I know that had them they’re selling quite a bit, like large volumes. So it just depends any, and that’s [00:20:00] on the growth opportunities tab is where you’ll find. Underwear, same where the listing quality score is and stuff like that. But you can do things like put the clearance badge on there, and that will help with, your visibility because I noticed too, even myself, w whenever I’ve searched on Walmart maybe it’s cause I was doing retail arbitrage, but I always like filter for clearance.

And I think a lot of people will filter for clearance on Walmart. So if you have the clearance badge on there that actually helps you with even more visibility, that doesn’t necessarily mean your product needs to be on clearance. I live. Like the main price as a higher price, but then I put it on sale clearance for the price.

I actually want to sell it. I don’t know if you’ve ever done that norm. Have you tried that? Yeah. Yeah. That’s one of the things for if you want to get some deals, but yeah, I haven’t had as much experience with the deals because they, usually the people who. At this point are getting access to deals, have account managers.

I could be wrong about that, but I was I was questioning how to get into the deals [00:21:00] at Christmas time, because I wanted to get into some of the, those deals on the main page. But they’re like lightning deals. They look like lightning deals on Walmart. Are those the kinds of deals you were mentioning?

I was thinking about one of the things. And I thought this was really cool. People ask, can I get into Walmart? And there’s actually one or two times a year that if you’re moving product and you’re doing a great job, Walmart could ask you to come down and pitch them. Is that right? Yeah. So I actually know a guy who’s who’s been asked twice for two different brands to, to go into Walmart.

So that is pretty amazing that, once. Your products selling on Walmart, that you can have the opportunity to be in their stores nationwide. And I also know that cause I was trying to actually just do some retail as well with some of our products and called Walmart. And they basically told me you have to go on walmart.com first.

Yeah. You get into our stores. So I thought that was interesting and a really great opportunity because especially, I don’t know [00:22:00] if you think about back in the day with, if you had products, you’d have to figure out how you can get in a meeting with a buyer. And there, there was just all these hurdles I had to go through if you wanted to sell a product, but the opportunity is just wide open now with the ability to get your products out there and just, list them on Walmart and then get in their stores.

That’s pretty incredible. Yeah, I agree. A hundred percent now we have saved probably the best nugget to last. So how do you find out, what’s out there, what’s the easiest market to get into, at least give you that edge. And there is a tool up there. I have nothing to do with the app. I have nothing to do with the company.

Carrie you work over at helium 10, but. I use it all the time. It’s one of my favorite apps out there for Amazon, but for Walmart, they came out with tools that will allow you to. See the product opportunities. So let’s say that you’re looking for garlic presses, you can type it in and you can go in and search [00:23:00] that out.

You can see the keyword research and you could check it out. They have something called a Seabrook where you can take the information, put the skews in and it’ll sort, but I use x-ray quite a bit and one of the times, so this is, I love it. You and I w w. We were on a call once and we were just talking, I was doing a presentation about Walmart and he said, oh, let’s go over to x-ray.

And then we typed in a keyword, and then you said, oh, let’s look at this one, just as an example. So they had a brand, a was doing like $75,000 a month. Then Brant B was doing about $6,000 a month, 60. I think it was 65, but the top one was that a known brand. Okay. You just kick that one out and then you look at what can we do to take this person’s market share from all the rest?

And it was a horrible listing. [00:24:00] You could easily take if you know how to sell on Amazon. I had one, there was only one image. It was crappy. All the, there was spelling mistakes. It was horrible. Yeah, Amazon. But using that tool, you could go through and find items like this and just take those on.

And there might not be home runs, but if you could do $10,000 a month on one product or five or 25 and all that. Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. And Walmart’s only growing. They just said that they have one 11.5 million Walmart plus members now. So that is key because they’re basically the same as a prime member.

So they get that free shipping and they’re coming back to Walmart to shop more and more. So one more it’s continually growing. There’s only more and more opportunity, something else we noticed when I think we’re on that call. Those same products that are selling, high, pretty [00:25:00] high levels on Walmart.

You can actually click on the ACEs on the x-ray extension and it’ll take you to the Amazon listing. And they’re not selling anything on Amazon, which is an interesting phenomenon that, people who couldn’t sell on Amazon, they, they couldn’t cut it with the competition are killing it on Walmart.

So that just goes to show you that. There’s a lot of opportunity. If you know what you’re doing, if you’ve been selling on Amazon, if you’ve been selling on Shopify, you’ve got skills to help, with that conversion and, just photos themselves, that top portion we saw that, that product you’re looking at how just the packaging and the photo, and it was just ugly.

It was so ridiculous. But if, you put your nice infographics in there and put all the benefits of the of the product in the photos. You just. Own that market. And you can definitely see that through x-ray x-ray helps you to really sort through all the opportunities much quicker.

Before we had it, it was definitely a more manual process for me and is free. X-ray. X-rays [00:26:00] there’s you can get some uses for free. Every, I think two, two a day. I’m not sure, but for the, actually, if you wanted unlimited then there, that is part of the, one of the paid. Okay. So yeah let’s just finish off, with.

With anything else? Is there anything else that you can talk about Walmart, any nuggets, any, anything? Before we end the call I just wanted to talk about my own experience, which I didn’t want to sell on Walmart at first. I was like, eh, maybe, we’ve, we were approached five years ago and I was like, no, I don’t want to put my products on Walmart.

But now when I’ve seen the opportunity, and the. Products that are on walmart.com. There’s a lot higher quality products than, maybe in the past. And there’s just a ton of opportunity to get your products to a whole new audience of people who are loyal, Walmart shoppers. So I just wanted to encourage everyone to think, differently and change your mindset.

That Walmart is a really good opportunity right now. And even if something isn’t selling [00:27:00] like hotcakes right now, Walmart. On a mission to grow this platform and you can see it by their numbers and you can even see the Walmart plus going up. So you’re going to see massive growth. And I know a lot of people talk about, oh, I wish I started selling on Amazon 10 years ago.

This is that, Amazon 10 years ago is Walmart right now. You have the opportunity to get on there and get positioned. Spots for some of these really competitive products that you would never be able to sell on Amazon and start making money. It’s like how people are becoming tick-tock famous because it’s just, that’s the opportunity on social media, but it’s the same for e-commerce.

Walmart is the opportunity right now, in my opinion, that’s like the, the equivalent there. So it’s just a really good time to get on. And I just highly recommend, putting in. Thing aside that maybe has hindered you from even trying in the past and going for it. And there are going to be hurdles too.

Like we were talking about, there are some different things, with the application. It might be a little bit challenging, but the rewards are definitely much greater if you persevere. We all, as [00:28:00] entrepreneurs have things that are in our ways that ha can be, can either, break us or make us.

And if you just keep persevering through these, it’s going to be worth it in the end. I’ve seen it and in my own stuff. And then also just people I work with and I’ve seen the growth on Walmart. So I just wanted to encourage everyone to, to just, go for it. So I do see that my, my brother from another mother Abe, but anyway, I think that there’s a couple of things that we have to look at.

So anybody who’s here who has not been on Walmart, or just wants to get a bit more out of Walmart. You want to go and take a look at this project? W or a course on Walmart, you’re going to find they’re very limited. Project w is much more expensive. It’s free. It’s on YouTube. Check it out. You want to install or checkout helium 10 because they have the tools that can help you out.[00:29:00] 

And I have nothing to do with that. And the last thing. It’s not like Amazon’s getting better at this, but Walmart is, has done a great job with those help brochures or help information. So if you are stuck, just go to the help center, the resource center, and you’ll see a ton of information from whatever you need.

Anyway, I w I was really impressed with anybody. I, everybody that I know who’s been stuck, hasn’t been, has been impressed with it. So all that I have carried, do you have anything else? I know you have, I think you have a Walmart group and I have a Walmart group too on Facebook, and I basically just go and just try to support everybody in answer questions whenever possible.

And that’s the purpose of our group. And so I don’t know if you want to talk about the Facebook groups, but getting involved in the Walmart Facebook. It’s really helpful because there’s a lot of other sellers in there and you can just answer questions. And on my group, I do demos of our tools when they come out, like we just came out with a new keyword tracker.[00:30:00] 

So I always try to go live in that group first to talk about our tools that, but I think you should, that people should join both. Both groups if possible to get cause I’m McKell and your other group is very knowledgeable about Walmart as well. She does some live Q and A’s. So join the Facebook groups out there for Walmart and get connected with the community and check out.

Yeah, the guides are amazing too. So if your Facebook group okay. So our Facebook group is called winning with Walmart is helium 10 winning with Walmart. And it’s starting to grow and I try to go live every Wednesday and answer questions, but I’m in the chats as well, answering questions, but that’ll be where you find out about our tools when they come out.

So we’ve got some more tools coming out. I always go there first. So if you want to be first to know, join that group. Alright. And if you want to check out the second group, our group that’s with McCarthy. Tim Jordan and myself, that’s selling on Walmart marketplace. Okay. That’s it. [00:31:00] Yeah, so hook. Awesome.

Thank you so much. That was fun coming on here. All right. Thank you for joining and we will be back next Thursday at 1:00 PM. Thanks again for everybody. That’s that’s joining our room today. It’s great community. We really couldn’t bring you this information. If there was no community, we love it.

And just, if you are interested in more e-commerce and F selling on Amazon information, check out my podcast, lunch with norm every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Eastern at noon Eastern standard time. Thank you everybody. And we will see you next week.