How Walmart Protects Brand Owners

In this special Serious Sellers Podcast episode, Carrie Miller and David Milstein of SellCord discuss all things Walmart.com. David shares his expertise and strategies for PPC, seller requirements, launch strategies, customer reviews, and listing optimization.
 
The episode starts with a discussion on the common mistakes sellers make when launching on Walmart and how to avoid them. David also sheds light on the improvements in Walmart’s PPC and how Adtomic is a game-changer for Walmart PPC.
 
You’ll get insights into what new features they should look out for on Walmart, and the requirements to become a Walmart seller, and the common reasons why sellers get denied.
 
David also answers the question of whether gated and un-gated products are the same as in Amazon and whether Walmart’s Brand Portal defends brand owners. He further elaborates on how to get reviews on Walmart and whether supplement selling is competitive on Walmart.
 
So, if you’re looking to expand your Amazon business and sell on Walmart, this is an episode you don’t want to miss!

In episode 447 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and David discuss:

• 02:35 – Common Mistakes Sellers Make When Launching On Walmart
• 06:44 – Improvements On Walmart PPC
• 10:15 – How Adtomic Is A Game-Changer For Walmart PPC
• 11:20 – What New Features Should We Look Out For?
• 18:30 – Requirements To Become A Walmart Seller
• 20:12 – Read Carrie’s Blog On How International Sellers Can Start Selling On Walmart
• 20:35 – Common Reasons Why Sellers Get Denied
• 22:32 – Gated And Ungated Products The Same As In Amazon?
• 24:02 – Does Walmart Brand Portal Defend Brand Owners?
• 26:51 – How Do You Get Reviews On Walmart?
• 31:35 – Is Supplement Selling Competitive In Walmart?
• 33:31 – Can Google Ads Be Used Instead Of PPC In Walmart?
• 35:17 – Should I Launch A New Product In Amazon Or Walmart?
• 37:29 – Watch David Milstein’s Modules Inside Freedom Ticket
• 38:02 – How To Get In Touch With David And SellCord

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got an expert on the show who’s gonna answer all of your top questions about walmart.com, everything from launch strategy to customer reviews, to listing optimization and more. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think

Bradley Sutton:

If you guys would like to network with other Walmart sellers, make sure join our brand new Facebook group called Helium 10 Winning with Walmart. You can actually just search for that on Facebook, or you can actually go to h10.me/walmartgroup, and you can go directly to that page. So make sure to join, you can tag me and carry with questions, and ask questions of other Walmart sellers or even share your own experiences in that Facebook group. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s our Walmart Wednesday show of the month, where we bring on an expert guest each month to talk about all of your questions that you guys are giving live and also through the Facebook groups on Walmart. So this month we are bringing onto the show David, who’s gonna be talking about, you know, product launches and how they’re different listing optimization strategy and migrating reviews over to Walmart. I mean, I think a lot of us who sell on Amazon, we would love to be able to start off an Amazon listing with reviews already, but did you know you could do that actually on Walmart? They’re gonna be talking about that. So as always, we have Carrie as our host of this special show. So Carrie and David, take it away.

Carrie:

Hello everyone, and welcome to Winning with Walmart Wednesday. I’m so glad to see you all here again on this Wednesday to go over some Walmart content with you today. We have a very special guest today. His name is David Milstein. He is from SellCord, and I actually have learned a ton from David. He actually taught me quite a bit of just the technical aspects about Walmart. So he is a wealth of knowledge, so I’m very, very excited to have him on today. So I’m gonna go ahead and bring him on.

David:

Hey, Carrie, great to see you as usual.

Carrie:

Thanks so much for joining us. I know you’ve got a lot of great info to share, so I’m excited. All right, let’s go ahead and get started, David, because I think we have some good questions to ask you. And then I really wanna get into questions that people have. We get a lot of questions in our Walmart groups, so I definitely wanna just answer any questions that people have. Alright, so let’s go ahead and start with my first question. You know, when people are launching, I get a lot of questions about, you know, launching and people, you know, starting off successfully on Walmart. When people launch, what are some common mistakes that they make when they are launching on their Walmart account in general, or just their first products? What do you think are the most common mistakes?

David:

For sure. So it’s definitely a really big topic. You know, these days you’re having more and more Walmart sellers. By the day it’s the fastest growing marketplace. So everyone jumps on the marketplace and then there’s a common, you know, you make the mistakes, then you learn from it. So what are some things that, that I try generally avoid? A very common thing that people do is they’ll use their Amazon content and just expect that to work. You know, there are plenty of tools that will be able to mirror your content over to Amazon, from Amazon to Walmart rather, but unfortunately, Walmart doesn’t want that. And that’s really going to actually give you problems. I’ll give you just a brief example. Copy is a very common thing. You know, Amazon has these long winded titles, you know, a lot of keyword stuffing, a lot of repetition there.

David:

And using those on Walmart are just gonna cause issues. You know, Walmart themselves, they give you a listing quality score, which you guys should all be familiar with, and they give you some general guidelines on how to get there and we’ll discuss a little bit more on about the listing quality score. But they’ll even tell you immediately if your, if your title’s too long, you should cut that down to 75 to 120 characters max. It does depend on the category and they give you some pretty good information in what to do. But in the end of the day, it is very generic and category specific, so you will have to do more research. But just using your Amazon copy is a big issue that a lot of people have because firstly, your titles are way too long. And then your bullet points on Amazon are very concise and bullet pointy.

David:

You want a nice long description that’s well actually broken down instead of having bullet points, which is maybe what you would do in a key feature, which is a little different than what you would have in your descriptions. Additionally, make sure you put in the work, a lot of people assume that Amazon, oh, I do so well on Amazon. It’s crazy, you know, you see with so many of these sellers, even these eight figure sellers that they put in all this effort into Amazon and they just assume that Walmart, oh, it’s the same thing. You know, I don’t really have to like, I just take my Amazon effort and it works on Walmart. That’s so far from what it is. Yes, there’s a lot of research and you understand your product and there’s so much on the product side and maybe on the fulfillment side that you need, that you already understand.

David:

But the same way that Amazon algorithm is so complex and we need to understand how it works. So too with Walmart, this is a whole complex algorithm that you need to make sure that your content on your listing, not just the copy, but also the images, also the attributes, the category, the category path, the product that there’s so many specifics that you need to audit and make sure are correct. And people that don’t do that, you could have a beautifully written listing, but just having an incorrect product type can cause you to not rank at all. A lot of categories, paths don’t even get selected automatically. Walmart, Walmart will put it in an unavailable status, it’ll be missing and your product’s just not ranking and you’re curious as to what’s going on because your copy looks so good. You have to do the same audit and the same level of work that you put into Amazon, into Walmart.

David:

And what some people are kind of adverse to that because, oh, Amazon makes me my money now, but you have to understand Walmart is a marketplace of the future. And having that understanding that also Walmart’s very much in a growth phase. It’s some, it’s a marketplace that it’s gonna only grow with time. And we’re seeing it grow tremendously compared to Amazon. We’re growing exponentially, right? Just in the past three years, Walmart’s had about 100% year-over-year growth continually in the past three years, cu cumulatively for Amazon, it’s been about 30%. That’s a huge, a huge change. And obviously, Amazon is growing, but Walmart’s growing at such a faster speed that if you think the future, you understand that this is a marketplace that you do have to put your time into and God just throw up your listings and be like, oh, I’m not making sales anyways. Cuz that’s a big mistake. Treat it as a marketplace, give it the respect deserves and that’s what’s gonna help you succeed.

Carrie:

I’m glad that you pointed that out and I learned a lot of all that stuff from you. And I’ve, I’ve been preaching that quite a bit. Also, I wanted to talk a little bit about PPC and just like some of the impro improvements that we’ve seen with PPC So what are the improvements that you’ve seen? Just, I don’t know, we’ve been working together probably for a year and a half or so, or you’ve been on Walmart for longer than that. So what have you seen as, you know, some of the improvements for pay-per-click on Walmart?

David:

So it’s very evident that Walmart, Walmart does know that PPC is obviously such a huge factor, and if Amazon had the amount of growth in terms of their changes to PPC as Walmart had, it would be like, it’s just not possible. Walmart has made such incredible changes just over the past years that are so, these huge changes. For example, two big ones I like to focus on are second price auction. That’s such a huge concept that like, is such a constant and obvious thing in Amazon was not there in Walmart, and Walmart recognized that and they implemented it and that’s now something that has been running for something like 8-10 months at this point. And similarly at about the same time they did two placements for your organic and your advertising, your promoted placement, your sponsored placement.

David:

And that’s just so beneficial to sellers because previously, like it was very difficult to track your organic rank and you had to turn off your ads and then you had to like use, let’s say you wanted to use day partying to check when things are going on. There’s so many things it was just not conducive to an easy like to, for a solid to have a good time. So Walmart’s been doing such huge changes. Just those two things are such, so huge just on top of all the changes that they, that all the other smaller changes, if you will. I know they’ve added in, in the past year to the self-service platform being able to do bulk operations, which is another huge thing. You know, that previously things were done a little bit slower. I know it’ll take you more time now I do have some suggestions for how to run your ads better, but just it’s great to see the changes that they’re doing and I would still say there is still a while ahead to get to that point where it does become as intricate as and as complex as Amazon’s.

David:

Like there’s no negative targeting, for example, right now in Walmart. And that’s something that potentially that they’ll add in at some point, which could help with some, with how you do some of your strategies. And there’s a lot of things that will come with time. Now, I will say this, if you are looking to sell on Walmart, you gotta advertise. It’s so basic. I would say even as little as a year and a half ago, you would be able to just rank your products well with just good content, which would get you, you know, get you somewhere. And you can make sales like that organically. Even now in some categories, you rank your product as long as you are in WFS have somewhat even a few reviews is fine. And if you don’t have reviews, that’s okay.

David:

Walmart does have review accelerator program to help things out, but as long as your listing has good shipping and is price matched to Amazon, you follow the listing quality score to get yourself to a good place. You could make some sales organically, but if you really understand the potential that Walmart has, throw some money at some ad spend and learn, succeed and fail. Now you could go a few different avenues here. If you’re just want to go very simple, Walmart does have their advertising ad center, you could apply advertising.walmart.com, go ahead, sign that seller, you could fill out the application and use that portal. It’s very nice, has some decent reporting and you could do some work through there, but there’s definitely limitations in what it does offer. What I would suggest is Helium 10 recently launched Adtomic fantastic. If you kind of have a little bit of an understanding with the PPC even if you do have some questions, but you wanna rely, they have a great AI that figures out, it looks at your campaigns, it tells you how to structure them, it shows you what edits you should make to your campaign and it will do what you need to know.

David:

If you’re not so advanced with PPC and you want to kind of just like, I want to run ppc, I don’t really know how to run PPC, you put your products in there, you have a basic understanding and you’ll be able to optimize from there and make sales and that that’s the goal. But for some of the more advanced users, I would definitely head towards Pacvue. It’s a great tool, extremely robust, like it’s something we’ve been using and been being able to work with and have launched thousands of campaigns. We’re able to do so much more work than just the basic self-service platform. Just from the huge list of automation of rules that you could set up as well as well as any sort of just, just bulk operations. So much more than that of the Walmart self-service portal.

David:

There’s so much you could do with the reporting. You could have multiple accounts in there. And I do wanna mention the reporting is huge. You know, if you wanna be able to really grow your PPC as you would, whether Amazon or Walmart, you gotta be able to look at those reports and the Pacvue reports that able to download really clean, you’re able to see. I was just looking at some basic things I’ll give an example here. I was looking to launch Rich Media for one of our accounts, which for those of you that are unaware, this is a great way to help boost your listings conversion rate, which has ads in right now. Videos and feature sets, which is Walmart’s version of PPC in general Rich Media is Walmart’s version of A+ content.

David:

Unfortunately, unlike Amazon right now, it’s a paid service. You can’t just put it directly on your listing to a regular picture, but it is, it is something that you could get on your listing through third party service providers. Now I was looking into doing this for one of the, one of the council manage, and what I want to see is I want to see my conversion rate between not impressions necessary to clicks because the impression doesn’t show you if it has rich media, but the clicks to orders, that’s gonna be the best place where I can see, oh, the lower conversion rate, obviously there’s something in my listing that’s not working and just downloading your report from Pack View, I could see that information and that helps me now determine, okay, here I have a 2% conversion rate, I wanna be better, I wanna get a close a 15% conversion rate.

David:

Let me see if adding rich media for a month. And I test that out and it’s just, that’s just one example you could see. I just identify from there where the problems lie. Oh, I just see that this has a really little conversion rate. Maybe it’s cuz my WFS it’s out of stock and WFS maybe the reviews, maybe I have two bad reviews on it. Maybe the copy just says some very basic three lines. You know, being able to use the data from all these different sources, the reports Walmart gives you, the reports that you could download from an ad platform. Putting all that data together will show you, here are your problems. And in the end of the day with Walmart, there’s no reason your listing shouldn’t succeed. Aside from a very few points, you’ll notice it’s either out of stock, which is a low stock issue, you have very bad reviews, or your pricing is much, much higher than the standard for your main keywords.

David:

And that’s something you should definitely be taking a look at competitive, look at your competitors and see where you fall in price-wise. One reason where you might see a little bit of issues with succeeding is if you’re in a really niche product. Niche products tend to not do as well on Walmart as they do on Amazon. And more generic products do well on Walmart, which is, it might sound bad if you have let’s say a very niche product than brand, but as a seller, the way I would go about it is this actually means that there’s opportunity to make a more generic product who doesn’t wanna sell more generic product. It’s much easier to source. And I could just put that on there. And if I can make sales on Walmart, that’s crazy. I’ll just give a brief example here. If you go to Walmart right now, look up a garlic press, which on Amazon it’s, it’s known to be like the most generic product that everyone is on.

David:

You could see that Walmart ability for you to be able to sell that product. Like you could look on the front page. How many of those listings are under 10 reviews? How many of them don’t have two day shipping? How many of them are overpriced for the market? Like yeah, there are some really hot, solid listings, but you could be on the front page in, in Walmart within, I would say a month or two if you have a quality listing that you put up over there, which just, it’s crazy to show the opportunity that exists there. And with the proper setup for your listings and the proper structure with your advertising to be able to push sales, get some eyes on your listings, you could really succeed.

Carrie:

Yeah, I think that you guys have actually launched some home products, right? And did pretty well. That’s kind of one of your strategies is finding those opportunities on Walmart and just launching directly on Walmart. So that’s, that’s a really good opportunity. All right, so my last question before we get into the questions. What are some things that you think we have to look forward to on Walmart? Any insights about what Walmart might be coming out with soon?

David:

For sure. As we’ve mentioned a few times already, Walmart’s had such crazy things over just the past year, a year and a half, just from the launch of WFS. That’s even been a relatively newer thing that Walmart has. And from when we started, we were one of the first sellers that were g able to get in with the program and then it launched, it was like one warehouse, two warehouse. Now they’re gonna be launching this year. There’s even been some accounts in beta, they called it previously the ICC program. Now it’s the ITS program, inbound transfer service where because WFS fulfillment centers are located all across the US and it’s an algorithm for how they assign you to the warehouse. Sometimes it’s a very high shipping cost to get it there.

David:

So what Walmart has done now is to have these inbound transfer centers where if you send your inventory to their first, it does have a little bit of an extra fee, but it’s definitely worth it and they’ll then send that to the FCS accordingly. So that’s something that is debuting for all sellers starting May 15th I believe. But you might have already gotten to beta and maybe some emails about that. Some other great things which we have heard some speculation about but don’t necessarily have saw launch dates for, which we’re very excited for firstly is the subscription model. We all love our subscribe and save, you know, that recurring revenue is fantastic. We all love it. So the fact that that is something that Walmart’s been hinting and alluding that it’s coming soon, we are super stoked for that. It’s already live with the Walmart business side of things, which just shows like it’s in testing just to see how they could figure it out in terms of whether it’s fulfillment or just internal system structures.

David:

Some other things we’re looking forward to is, we’ve heard some rumors about virtual bundles. It’s something that will be coming to Walmart, which is another great way for, to boost your catalog, build your catalog. You know, right now the way listings work is you need to have unique UPC for every product. So if you wanna sell a multi-pack or if you wanna sell, let’s say two different listings together, you would have to then send it into WFS bundle together with the same with the new UPC. And this kind of makes forecasting very difficult. You’d have to really figure things out with numbers and you might end up having, being stuck with a two-pack or a three pack, cuz that never sells because the single pack on the four pack itself, it just causes all sorts of issues by having to figure these things out right now.

David:

And the fact that virtual bundles is something that we hear are coming is just, that’s a big relief. You know, it lets us really help. Okay, I can have a bunch of new listings live on the platform that will could succeed now and I can just use my old data to see that. So that’s gonna be very exciting. And the last thing I’m really excited for is stores additionally here. We, we believe this is something that will be coming soon the same way we have our Amazon stores where we get to pretty much have our own website within Amazon that beautifully displays our products and so many different ways. I can’t wait to see what Walmart does with that.  I’m sure it’ll be amazing.

Carrie:

Yeah, those are some really cool updates. I’m really excited. I think a lot of people will be pretty excited about, especially this subscribe and save a lot of people’s selling supplements or just things that you wanna buy on an ongoing basis that’s gonna be really great for them. So, alright, I think that’s a lot of great content and we do have some really great questions in here. This first one here, it says from Jay, he says, I know the questions will be answered later on, but I wanted to see if you can give some insight on the requirements to becoming a Walmart seller.

David:

For sure, for sure. And Walmart used to be a little bit more restrictive of who they allowed as sellers. This is actually, we, we referenced this earlier about having counterfeit sellers that Walmart sees that issue within Amazon and wants to avoid that. Now they did quote unquote open the floodgates last, I believe last August to additional sellers to make things a little bit less restrictive. But there’s still a business verification process. So you could go ahead to Walmart and now previously it would be that you had to apply and they would get back to you. Right Now you could actually create an account and you go into the business verification and as long as you have a legitimate LLC there’s a couple of other things I would suggest is you wanna have a real website. You don’t want to just have your products only on Amazon and have a legitimate website.

David:

And this is actually a great tip over here. Do not have an application with an @gmail.com that, yeah, like that kind of doesn’t show validity to yourself, you know, and okay, it’s $12 a month, just pay the extra money to get that nice @mybusiness.com and that will just to show Walmart that you’re legit, you’re real company and you’ll get there. Yes, star accounts that I’ve gotten approved with at Gmail. It happens. But this is just something that will help you with getting your application approved because you’re proving that you’re a real seller. So make sure you have all your legal docs in order and you do the business verification. If you are like an international seller, there are some restrictions into which countries you’re able to do that. All that information is, is really readily available and Walmart’s actually really good in terms of communication on that front.

Carrie:

I actually wrote a blog about it. So if you go to the Helium 10 blog, you can see each country the exact requirements that you need. So this is a continuation I think of that question. I am currently an Amazon seller, did three 70k last year with an LLC and applied, but was denied and they not give a reason. So do you wanna give any insights about, you know, if you were denied in the past, what to do kind of to reapply?

David:

So I would say if you applied before August of last year when they kind of got a little bit laxer on who they accepted, the first thing is don’t apply. Again, that is a surefire way to get stuck. Walmart system does not allow you to apply twice. If you do an application twice, it gets stuck and it just makes it impossible to ever come back. Not impossible, it’ll make it more difficult and you’re gonna just leave your account rep with, with much more issues. What I would suggest is just a shameless plug, you could reach out to me and I could help you out with that. But there are also resources within Walmart to reach out to them to have them help you out with checking into your application and see if there’s something that could be done there. But definitely don’t apply a second time.

David:

You want to really reach out to Walmart support. They have a lot of great members that will help you, help you get your account approved if you’re an actually a valid seller. Now, if you did apply more recently and you got denied, there’s probably some reasoning behind that. They’re not just a deny, they’re, they’re accepting a lot more sellers. So if you got recently denied, it probably means that possibly some of your legal documents are not an order. Make sure your addresses aligned from what you’re putting into Walmart compared to your LLC documentation, your SS-4, all that good stuff. You wanna make sure that it’s clean. The second Walmart smells something is off, they shut it down. Walmart doesn’t do nonsense. Walmart needs you to be legit and if they smell that something’s off, they’re not gonna allow you. Cuz they realize that’s very common and people are very shady in this, in this, in this industry. We all know it. We’ve all been hit by different things here and there. Whether our listing’s been taken down for the wrong reason, someone tried to try to do something to us, Walmart doesn’t like that and they’re trying to cut it out as much as possible. So this is kind of one of the reasons they’re denying more accounts and are more restrictive about it.

Carrie:

Awesome. And yeah, I mean, and you, you guys have some more insights as a service, right? Like you, you can help people with that kinda stuff at SellCord.co. Alright. The next question is about gated and ungated of products the same as in on Amazon.

David:

I do mostly focus on the private label side of things. That’s really where I would see a lot of success on, on Walmart and that’s generally the direction of a lot of sellers can take. But in terms of like resale and wholesale, there are a lot of brands that are not as restricted. You really have to do the research and just kind of see, I would just say like this, the main difference between Amazon and Walmart when it comes to these types of listings is look, if it’s a 1P listing on Walmart, cuz if it’s a 1P listing on Walmart, I don’t care how cheap you are, you’re not gonna win that buy box. Walmart is taking those sales cuz that’s just how it works. So if you’re looking to sell, let’s say like Dove soap and Walmart has the buy box sold and shipped by walmart.com, don’t bother.

David:

You’re gonna be able to add yourself as an additional seller, but you’re very rarely gonna be making sales over there. You could pretty much see by brand and if a brand’s selling the products themselves, then probably stay away from it. But if a brand is is being sold by some third party that has like 29,000 seller reviews probably means it’s being sold by some other distributor. And you could probably get in on that in general on this front, a lot of brands are very behind in terms of being on top of their brand portal, but it really is it comes down to the product. But in general, I’m not such an expert when it comes to the retail arbitrage or wholesale side of things.

Carrie:

The next question kind of goes into what you were saying is, does Walmart brand portal defend brand owners? Like, I think brand, what you were kinda mentioning is like one P but maybe you could just do a distinction between 1P and 3P there.

David:

Yeah, sure. So the brand portal has to be maintained at another of the day. You know if you just have an account that doesn’t do anything, you can’t, just having an account with Walmart just shows them that you’re registered. It does help you if you’re trying to do stuff with your listings but that’s gonna act as protection for you. There are are a shorter list of brands that actually have the protection from Walmart to restrict other sellers. But as a standard like just private label brand or even even some of the bigger brands, you have to actually do the work to protect your brand. And this is a very common theme. You know, we see so many listings that are hijacked and that could be as an additional seller on a listing or just taking the content, even sometimes they’ll take the pictures and just remove the branding.

David:

All of these things are cases that you need to be on top of as a seller, you need to go on to Walmart, look up your brand, and you very easy to search your brand. You can go into your listing, click the brand, or you can just type in the brand name. There’s branded searches, there’s regular searching for the brand. And just get those, get those item URLs, go into brand portal, make sure your brand’s registered and just start filing claims away. Go to town. You know, it’s, it’s a great way to take down all these listings and they’re, they’re very quick to get down these hijacked listings. Again, Walmart understands there’s a problem in the e-commerce space that there’s a lot of nonsense that happens and they hate that. So anytime any hijacking is a very common, easy to do problem that people will be facing. So Walmart’s trying to be on top of that to help out sellers to remove these these issues.

Carrie:

I yeah and something else I wanna kind of mention, and I have mentioned this before, is that you need to own your UPC codes. I know back in the day on Amazon, a lot of people were just like buying random third party, I guess UPCs where they would just, you know, cuz you would have to buy in bulk, like 500 or a thousand at a times. So people would sell their extras and then, you know, those UPCs are tied to the brand name that actually bought them from GS1. So if you don’t own your UPC code, then you’re gonna have a lot harder time with the brand portal and the ownership of your listings. So make sure that you own your UPC codes and they have your brand connected to them on that.

David:

Great point.

Carrie:

Next question. How do you get your first reviews on Walmart?

David:

Reviews is a huge strategy. You definitely, it’s gonna help you with your conversion rate. I just do wanna point out, unlike Amazon where sales volume is the number one driver of ranking on Walmart, it’s the conversion rate and there’s two conversion rates that reflects, it’s the impression to click and to click the sale. And aside from price and basic content, the best way to get that conversion is through reviews. Now, how do you get reviews on your product? I’m going to suggest two strategies. You have reviews syndication, which is a free program from Walmart that I don’t know why people are not as into finding it. Maybe they should probably run a promo, Hey, sign up for reviews, indication, maybe send emails. If you have reviews on your website, Walmart allows you to bring them to the program. Two platform for free. This is a free program.

David:

Now you have to make sure that it’s legit and you’re not bringing in only some of your five star reviews. You have to bring in all your reviews to the program. Additionally, you cannot have your Amazon reviews on Walmart illegal. Amazon is against terms of service. They technically own their reviews. Technically you shouldn’t even have them on your website in the first place, but that’s none of my business. But Walmart is not gonna let you take those reviews to Walmart. You could try and they’re gonna say, Hey, those are Amazon reviews, you can’t use those. But it’s a great way if you have reviews on your website, sign up for reviews syndication hopefully you’ll get accepted as long as you answer the case correctly. Don’t, don’t try a lie and try to cheat the system. They’re just gonna shut you down and potentially suspend your as a seller.

David:

No one wants that. And go ahead and bring in your reviews. Legitimately A second program, I would su strongly recommend, this is a new launch from Walmart, which is the review accelerator program. It allows, it’s similar to I guess the Amazon Vine, but I think it’s actually cheaper. It’s where you enroll certain listings. There is a bit of a restriction on what is allowed and there’s up to, you’re allowed to get up to five reviews per product and it doesn’t recommend, it’s not necessarily gonna get you a five star review. This is important to note, it’s just gonna get you a review. Walmart does claim that five reviews on a product increases the GMV by 75%, which I think is that’s pretty crazy. So there’s just two restrictions. You have to have a sale in the past x amount of time, I think potentially 30 days.

David:

And you have to have under five reviews and therefore that will make your item eligible for the program. And it costs you $10 per view that you get regardless of the rating. And the incentive to the seller, or to the customer rather the shopper is that they will get $3 credit towards their next purchase. So Walmart sends out an email to them, Hey ’em, hey some li review and you got $3 credit and you will get up to five reviews per product. It’s a great way, the only thing is it’s kind of a bit of a cash 22 cause you’re like, I need to get sales in order to get into the program, but I can’t get sales cause they don’t have reviews. Advertising is key folks. With advertising you’re guaranteed to get at least one sale as long as you’re not extremely priced. That’s as simple as it is.

Carrie:

That kind of, this is something I was I’ve been thinking about is because when you syndicate your reviews it’ll say, you know, it’s been syndicated by, it’ll sometimes put your website, but then it doesn’t have necessarily that verified purchaser, whereas the Review Seller Accelerator program does have the verified purchaser. Do you think people should maybe just do the paper click and do the review accelerator program until they get five reviews and then syndicate reviews so that you’ll have both? Or what are your thoughts on that?

David:

I think, I think that review syndication is the first stream that you should go through. The reason for that being that you could be a brand new seller and immediately have 500 views on your listing, obviously legitimately, right? And that’s huge. You know, it will help you with that initial conversion and it’s free, you know, you’re, I mean it takes you time to fill out the template on whatever. You might have to go back and forth with Walmart until you get it right. But still it’s free compared to having to pay $10 per review, that’s gonna cop out to about $50 per product. It could, it could start to rack up, especially if you have a larger catalog. I would say if you don’t have review syndication, then push for the View accelerator. There’s no currently no evidence backing that if you enroll your products in Review Accelerator, that Walmart’s gonna try get you a sale because they’re gonna make the few $10 off or the $7 difference.

David:

There’s no data to support that. I mean, if you want to come with conspiracy theory, sure, but I don’t believe that, I haven’t seen this happen, I’ve from many accounts that have enrolled this, it doesn’t increase their sales. The thing that increases sale is pushing PPC and actually having their reviews there. So that’s my, yeah, the verified purchase does help, but having three verified purchases compared to 150 unverified purchases is still 155 star reviews that hits different, and yeah, just to note Amazon compared to Walmart, very different to interview numbers. You’ll see, it’s very rare. You’ll find that Walmart something with five figure reviews, like there’s a couple and those are obviously syndicated or a product that’s been on Walmart for 10 years. You know, that’s just been a really old 1P listing. But for the most part, you’re not seeing, you’re not seeing that many. Even having legitimately 10 reviews could get you. I’ll challenge anyone over here if you could find me a keyword that on the front page, there’s no products that have under 10 reviews. I’m just telling you there’s a hundred percent is like that. So 10 reviews is even a great start.

Carrie:

Awesome. Okay. Supplement selling is very competitive on Amazon. How is it on Walmart?

David:

Great, great question. In general, supplements are the hottest thing in, in e-com. You know, it’s obvious because I guess the cost isn’t so high and it’s repetitive. This customer’s coming in monthly. So it’s still, I would say it’s the most competitive category on Walmart as well. But even though that is the case, I will not say, I’m not gonna dissuade you if I’m trying, as I mentioned before, every category can sell. I don’t necessarily recommend that this is the one if you’re gonna start a brand hit supplements on Walmart cuz there is staunch competition. But, and you’re gonna have to spend money to get in there and stay there. It’s gonna cost you, but I believe you’ll win in the, in the end run. So if you have, if you have the the pockets, definitely do it. I’m not saying it’s nowhere near launching a supplement brand on Amazon.

David:

So if you wanna do it, I would hit Walmart. It’s definitely worthwhile. But I would say there’s so many more generic products that you could get into that just sell. Well, there’s plenty of data out there that shows you which are the best selling categories on Walmart and ding ding ding, next Walmart hack, go to Helium 10 and search volume, look up, search volume. It’s, this is such a simple thing. Just look at the search volume, plug it into Walmart, look how many competitors you have. Look at the pricing. That’s how you do your product research. Just look up the search volume and that’s gonna be your biggest metric to see also just look percentage-wise, Amazon to Walmart search volume. You could see which products will do better. So there’s definitely competition there, but everything pales in comparison to that of Amazon. And I think it’s, everything has opportunity for you to be able to grow.

Carrie:

All right. Can Google ads be used instead of PPC on Walmart?

David:

You can use Google Ads in some way to drive your traffic to Walmart. I’m gonna be straight up here. I don’t have the most familiarity with the Google ads side of things, but I believe there’s capabilities over there. But why are you doing that instead of just use Walmart right now. Don’t try be so oh, I’m gonna be super creative and think of these great ways to get sales to Walmart. Gives you opportunity at Walmart itself has so many things. I wouldn’t say right now is the time to go to these outside venues to get your traffic, to come to Walmart. Focus right now on what Walmart gives you because that has opportunity there. If you’re failing there, then there’s probably some other issue, not your ads.

Carrie:

Something I wanna add here too is that they actually do what Walmart, when you start advertising with Walmart, they’ll put your products in Google shopping. So you’ll see your products like available on walmart.com in Google shopping already. So you kind of already have Google Ads provided by a Walmart for you. So I’ve seen my product when I’ve searched the main keyword on Google already without me running ads. And another thing is that I have run ads just to kind of test it out from Google and it did not help with ranking or anything. Cause I know for Amazon right now, it really does help with ranking when you are sending outside traffic. It’s not really the same on Walmart right now. So I would suggest, again, like David said, to focus on the Walmart paper clicks so that you rank much better with that.

Carrie:

I haven’t seen any, you know, direct correlation of, you know, any benefits to utilizing Google ads. And you already have the Google search with Walmart. So just wanted to add a little few tidbits there and now we can take a few more questions cuz we’re running shorter on time. Let’s see here. This next question, new products you wanna launch. How do you decide where to start on Amazon? There’s a lot of sellers on Walmart. No competition, but too many. Okay, I guess basically the question maybe is where do you start when you’re kind of deciding what products move to Walmart first?

David:

So we touched on this earlier, it’s the difference between launching as a new seller on Amazon and Walmart. I would say it’s easier to launch on Walmart because of not only because of the limited competition, but because generic products succeed. I’m gonna, this is, this is, if you get this and you understand this so you could succeed, generic products do better on Walmart because in Amazon they’re so saturated. You look up the main keywords and they are just flooded with listings with thousands, tens of thousands of reviews and sales. And they’ve been there on Amazon, they’ve been at the top for four or five years. Yeah, if you have the ability to win there, you’re gonna be making a lot of money today. But think of Walmart as an investment over here. You have the ability to take a generic keywords, something like we said, as simple as a garlic press go, as simple as anything, any of these basic home items.

David:

You could sell a utensil set. Maybe that’s not the best thing you could sell in the pet products. You could sell in the baby products. So many of these huge categories which on Amazon people are spending millions, hundreds of millions in ads to, to win on Walmart. You spend pennies and you’re able to win and get to the top of that ranking. You wanna know which products to pick. It’s not gonna be the same as the ones that you’re gonna be picking for Amazon. I would say it’s actually gonna be a little bit difficult to find products that would succeed on both Amazon and Walmart, because Amazon, there’s such a pull to be niche because that’s what differentiates you and helps you get those little small keywords and you can win over there versus all Walmart, those small keywords don’t really have that volume behind it. So you could go multiple ways if you’re trying to have a brand that grows on both, you could just go with the bigger with, I would say Walmart has a bigger potential for the future. If you’re trying to make the big dollars today, maybe take a more niche product and hit Amazon with it. But in the long run you’re gonna end up losing out because you just missed out on a huge opportunity of Walmart in two years when you could be the number one seller for a huge keyword.

Carrie:

Awesome. Well as you can all see, David is a wealth of information and if you didn’t know, he actually is a one of the main stars of our Freedom Ticket for Walmart. He goes through in detail a lot of the technical parts of Walmart, so you know, like flat files and WFS and all kinds of great information. So if you haven’t checked that out, you should, and you’re a Helium 10 member. This is free for Helium 10 members. It’s in week 11 on Freedom Ticket 3.0. So make sure you check that out And otherwise thank you so much for joining David, I think we got a lot of great information from you, so thank you so much.

David:

Of course, thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Carrie:

And where can people find you if they wanna find you?

David:

For sure. So I’ll drop my personal email if you’d like over here. You can message me at david@sellcord.co. You could find me on LinkedIn as well, David Milstein look on their SellCord. You can probably find me at some other places as well if you look hard enough. But those two ways would be a sure way to find me and in general find out some more information about us at sellcord.co.

Carrie:

All right, yeah, thank you so much again and hopefully we’ll have you back and, and I’m sure we’ll do some more content with you so you know, make sure you’re all in our Facebook groups and you know, hopefully you’ll have David back and do some more great Q and A sessions cuz he obviously knows so much about Walmart. So thanks again and we’ll see you all later.

David:

Of course. Thanks for having me, Carrie.

Carrie:

Bye.

Bradley Sutton:

All right guys, thank you so much for that and for tuning in and thank you to Carrie and David for that information. Don’t forget guys, you don’t have to wait every month for the answers, just some of your questions, go right into our Winning with Walmart, Facebook group, Winning with Walmart. You can look it up anywhere on Facebook, it’s open to everybody. Hop in there, ask Carrie questions. David’s in there, you can tag him and ask him questions as well. But we really want you guys to have success selling on the Walmart platform. If you’ve got inventory already here in the United States, it’s a no-brainer guys. Make sure to get on Walmart.com and start getting those extra sales. We’ll see you guys next month in the next episode.