Implementation of ItemSpec 5.0 in Walmart

Join us for an insightful episode where we chat with David Milstein, co-founder of SellCord, about the strategies that drive success on Walmart. David shares an inspiring success story of a client who saw their sales surge from $2,000 to $200,000 per month within just two months by leveraging strategic account managers and Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS). We also discuss realistic expectations for Walmart sales growth, suggesting sellers aim for 10% to 20% of their Amazon sales, emphasizing the importance of focusing on Walmart to unlock its full potential.

Explore the benefits and intricacies of using virtual multi-packs with Walmart Fulfillment Services in this episode. We discuss how virtual GTINs can create multiple listings for a single unit, like multi-packs of shampoo, without additional physical inventory, reducing storage fees and return orders while lowering WFS fees. David also sheds light on pricing strategies, highlighting the significance of the $10 price point, and the current beta status of virtual packs and their anticipated wider rollout, along with the role of promotions in driving sales on Walmart.

Listen in as we navigate the intricacies of Walmart's promotional campaigns and recent updates to their item specifications. We cover different types of promotional campaigns such as category-specific events and flash deals, and the strategic advantages they offer. Learn about accessing these campaigns through the growth opportunities section and the newly introduced Item Spec 5.0, which shifts from category-based to product-type-based listings. David also shares essential tips for managing Walmart accounts, including consolidating multiple accounts, transferring reviews from Shopify, and utilizing Walmart's Review Accelerator Program.

In episode 577 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Carrie and David discuss:

• 00:00 - Walmart Success Stories and Strategies
• 07:23 - Walmart Virtual Pack and Promotion Strategy
• 11:08 - New Walmart Promotional and Listing Strategies
• 11:38 - Accessing Growth Opportunities and New Promo Campaigns
• 15:55 - Optimizing Attributes for Walmart Ranking
• 20:36 - Walmart Account Management Strategies
• 21:01 - Bringing Reviews to Walmart Restrictions
• 23:58 - Flash Deals for All Sellers
• 29:05 - PPC and Listing Optimization Strategies

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Transcript

Carrie Miller:

Today we're talking with David Milstein from SellCord and he's going to be talking about some Walmart success stories and some strategies to help you to become successful on Walmart. He'll also be talking about the new item, spec 5.0, and Walmart promotions that can help boost sales.

 

Bradley Sutton:

How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. 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 completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies or serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world, and this episode is our monthly live Walmart Wednesday show where we talk about anything and everything Walmart related with different guests, and today's host is going to be Carrie Miller. So, Carrie, take it away.

 

Carrie Miller:

Welcome to another Walmart Wednesday. I'm so excited to have a very special guest today. We have David Milstein here, and so we're going to ask him a lot of questions. He is definitely one of the top experts in Walmart. He definitely has taught me a lot of what I know about Walmart, so definitely a privilege to have him here today. I'm going to go ahead and bring on David. Hi David.

 

David:

Hey, Carrie, it's great to be on. Thank you for having me.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, thanks so much for coming on. So I told them a little bit about you. I mean, you are the co-founder of SellCord and you've been doing Walmart or in the Walmart game for like maybe three or four years now. Definitely an expert in Walmart and very, very knowledgeable about anything. Okay, so let's go ahead. And, David, I don't know if I've done enough justice for you about your background, but can you just tell a little bit about what you do at SellCord and just a little bit about you and your background and anything you want to let us know.

 

David:

Of course. Of course, sure, thank you for the opportunity. So, yeah, so I'm one of the co-founders of SellCord. Uh, we are a Walmart focused agency, so we only work on brands, on their Walmart growth, and we've positioned ourselves to just be exclusively focused in this, in this space, as we understand the future and opportunity that Walmart does have to offer. It's always great to be alongside Carrie, a fellow like-minded individual, who is with us on this Walmart train, so we're excited to chat, as always.

 

Carrie Miller:

Awesome. Okay. So let's go ahead and we're going to just get into the questions, and I think one of my first questions that I wanted to ask you about is because and I'll kind of give you a little bit of background a lot of people say you know, what kind of sales can I do on Walmart? You know if I'm doing, you know millions on Amazon, what can I do on Walmart? But I just wanted to see if you could give us some stories about, like a client who maybe got on Walmart. Maybe they were struggling with Walmart before they came to you and then you helped them to do certain things and they became successful. So, like you know what was the scenario, how did you help them? Any kind of thoughts you can give us about like client success stories would be kind of cool way to start this out.

 

David:

For sure, for sure. Actually, Walmart just did a case study with us on one of our clients. So you go on LinkedIn, you guys could check out like a post on this brand, Simply Magic. Uh, this was a brand you know they have a lot of success just historically, both on Amazon. Actually, they were at Walmart before and they were working with us. They were just trying it out. They were doing about like two thousand dollars a month like really really low business, not really giving it the attention it deserved. They came to us, we met with them and just due to their you know experience, we're able to link them with some really insider people at Walmart to be able to work with like a good Sam, the strategic account manager, and working with like the WFS team, and within two months we're actually able to get their sales to 200k, which is like that's, I don't think that's a normal scenario, like we really did. It went above and beyond with them, but that's just because of the opportunity that they had to offer. Now this is a major, major player the Amazon space. However, we do work with brands of all sizes and we have just general expectations of what you can get from Walmart. We typically like to say you should aim for about 10% to 20% of your Amazon sales. So if you're doing like $2 million, $3 million on Amazon, you should be able to expect $200,000 to $300,000 a year, which is again a very solid opportunity.

 

David:

It's obviously all about the long run, but so many accounts are coming to us. We meet these guys at shows all the time. Hey, I'm not even doing 1%, I'm doing 2% and just talking to them. It'll come down to some of the things we'll speak about in this call like different strategies, but it just often comes down to just focus and really giving Walmart the opportunity it deserves, but getting them up within just a few months the 5%, 10% and then it's about can we grow up more from there? And that's really where the opportunities lie, you know, if there's some more strategies to grow further than 10%, how you can do that and we'll speak, I think, a little bit about that more in this talk, in this podcast.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, Well, what do you think the top things are that they're not doing beforehand? Because I've definitely experienced this where people aren't necessarily doing. You know all the things they could do possibly, but what are some of the top things? People like they're just totally ignoring that they would never ignore any Amazon that you see with clients.

 

David:

So so the same way that you would give the opportunity to, let's see your copy on Walmart compared to, let's say, you know, Amazon, Amazon, you're in there like which keywords do I need where in my title and my description? Specifics, like you're very detailed with it, and then you'll just kind of use the same copy on Walmart. Walmart has a completely different guide. You know like they want to have a very different set of copy. They want to have a shorter title descriptions should be more keyword rich and we've done actually a lot of research also on like the keyword tracking and indexing and we found that if you're lacking your main keywords within your copy, those are the highest scenarios of just not indexing for those keywords. It's so related I could show proof. Like not being not having your keywords in your copy, you're just not gonna index. And indexing is even worse than ranking. That means you just don't show up at all for that keyword. And these are basics. That's just one great example.

 

David:

I think another very common one is being in the correct category or product type. We'll speak more about product types a little bit later. Just with Item Spec 5.0. Just being correctly categorized is so important because that determines which keywords you're able to rank for. Just don't make the mistake that Walmart is just some other random marketplace. It's going to be the next big marketplace. You can even see the trajectory of where things have come up thus far and how it compares to Amazon and just the growth it's seeing. And if you're missing that, you're just missing out on the opportunity. Treat it as if it's Amazon right now, you know. Think of it that this is an opportunity that Amazon was seven years ago, five years ago, whatever, whatever specific timeline. But understand that it is an opportunity. And if you had, the chance to do Amazon again now just think of it. What would you just do on Walmart?

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah, that's all good information. The next thing I wanted to talk about was the virtual packs, because I know I saw you post on LinkedIn about virtual packs that they had just come out. So what, you know what are they? You know how have they been doing? Have you seen a lot of success with them so far?

 

David:

Yeah, for sure I really love the direction Walmart's going with all their beta programs and the new things that they're rolling out. You know I love that they kind of have like Amazon to kind of like go after. You know they don't have to be the pioneer, they can be like hey, this is something that we like about Amazon and they're going all out. You know there's so many new programs coming out and virtual packs is like the latest and greatest. I just want to make a distinction. It's not a virtual bundle, it's specifically a multi-pack on a single unit, and this really what it allows you to do is to create multiple listings for a single unit. So let's say, you're selling a bottle of shampoo. Instead of having to create a second GTIN to list a second bottle of shampoo with it, you can now create a virtual GTIN and you can do up to as many as you want. And where the real benefits come in is actually through using WFS for the fulfillment. So oftentimes you know you might want to list a three-pack or a four-pack or a five-pack and then when you send it to WFS it doesn't actually sell, and then you have to deal with storage fees, you have to do a return order. It's just such a pain.

 

David:

So what this allows you to do is just to have one unit. You just send that into WFS and WFS will just create the virtual packs for you. And what's even nicer is that they will have actually consolidated and lowered WFS fee. Depending on how many units, for two units they reduce it by like a dollar for each one. You can look at the like. There's a great guide about this from Walmart where they give you the specific breakdown of the fees. But it's just a really good opportunity to expand your assortment and offer multi-packs where you might not necessarily have that opportunity. It also works really well when it comes to, let's say, you're in a category where, let's say, if you're under $10, there's an 8% commission break. So you think if you go two pack, if you had a separate two pack listing, you'd be paying that 15% fee because it's above $10. But with with virtual packs, you actually still locked into that eight percent fee as long as, like, the average price is lower. So that's really nice, you know, it's just like an opportunity that people aren't necessarily factoring in I just want to make a really cool point, though, about that is there's also in WFS if your products are under ten dollars. This is something actually people don't really know much about. I'm not sure why if your products are on WFS and your retail is under $10, there's a dollar fee that gets attributed to your product. So if you're selling it under $10, even if it's a multi pack of two and it's selling for $19, you still have to pay that dollar fee twice. So it's very important to factor in your pricing and how that impacts both your WFS and your fee.

 

Carrie Miller:

That might actually be a reason to kind of lower your price if you're just at like the 12 or 13 dollar mark, maybe I don't know. I guess you'd have to do the numbers but.

 

David:

It's kind of. It's kind of a hack. I like, like, I call, I call like the 10 perfect price.

 

Carrie Miller:

Yeah.

 

David:

It's exactly 10, because at 10 you don't have the WFS fee for a dollar, but if you're in certain categories you're still in the eight percent. So it's kind of like if you're at ten dollars on one cent, you're at 15% commission, and if you're $9.99, there's that extra dollar WFS fee.

 

Carrie Miller:

Wow. So interesting.

 

David:

So it's actually if you're around that price. Yeah.

 

Carrie Miller:

Very, very good to know. And those virtual packs are in beta, right? So when do you think they're going to roll out to everybody?

 

David:

Yeah. So from our information, they have like a virtual pack, a virtual bundle, virtual pack beta that we did months ago that only a limited amount of sellers got in, and other rolling it out across the board. The initial release was two weeks ago, I think on the June 13th, and then they're also going to be doing early sometime in July, I believe that should be the rest of the sellers that should be live for everyone and I'm pretty sure that's what. It's not confirmed, but we'll find out next month. You know, if you don't, you don't have it. It's a great opportunity. You know, open a case, reach out to your strategic account manager if you have one. Ask for these programs. You know they're here to help you and they'll try and get you in wherever you can.

 

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so let's move on to another topic, and I want to talk about promotions. So let's go ahead and just talk about, like, what types of promotions does Walmart offer for sellers to participate in?

 

David:

Totally. So, I mean promotions is such a great topic on Walmart. I think, after advertising or even combined with advertising, promotions is going to be the best way to grow your listings. Kind of referencing that previous case study we spoke about, the way we were able to see such insane results so quickly is because we enabled these items to go into promotion, that to really grow. And so just to speak about, like, the different types of promotions on Walmart, there's two main categories that exist. There's promo campaigns, which are like category specific and they happen during a specific set amount of time. For example, there's a July event happening throughout the entirety of the month of July and then you have different events here and there. You have some highlighted special events. You know that we just had like Walmart Plus week this past week and you have like Black Friday like, but there's generally more like you know this is allergy season or like some like some random home and cleaning week, like something that they come up with. You know just where they're trying to get some products in and you could automatically enroll in that. If you go to growth opportunities, you'll see promo campaigns.

 

David:

If you don't have access to that just open a case and you'll be able to get access to that. You have to be an admin on the Solid Center account, which is pretty obvious, and you'll be able to roll your products in there and just be able to participate in that. And then another type of campaign which is called Flash Deals which is kind of similar to Flash Picks on Amazon, the difference being lightning deals on Amazon are Lightning deals are a single day, versus Flash Deals on Walmart run for a whole week and it's every week, I believe Sunday through Saturday, that it runs through a promo for your product and you can get in there with a basic 10% off and you can really roll through your catalog. You have to get approved for it, but you can't do back-to-back for the same product in two weeks, but you can do it every four weeks per product and it's actually a really, really great way to be able to quickly move your products because you get put into a special flash deal page and if you go to Walmart's home page, there's always a little icon for a lightning symbol. You can click it and, depending on how well your product does, it will fluctuate in its rank amongst the deal. So if you push a lot of ads, you'll actually quickly be able to move up the list just because you have a high conversion rate. Even if they're not clicking on the flash deals page, your listing just moves better. So you'll move up on the ranks and actually able to fly through units. Like that it's interesting. We've seen higher conversion rate. I mean it makes sense at a cheaper rate but very like a 30, 40% increase in sales, dollar wise, not even units specifically dollars. So even at the 10% discount, which is not a lot, you're still able to really kill it over there.

 

Carrie Miller:

So do you have to have a strategic account manager for that? I've noticed a lot of accounts don't have access to those Flash Deals or Flash Picks.

 

David:

I would say just open up a case. Yeah, I think with Flash Deals, Flash Picks it used to be called Flash Picks. They changed it to Flash Deals. No, that's Walmart, though wuickly changed things on the fly just to sound better, but open up a case. If you don't have a strategic account manager, just that case should be able to get it for you.

 

Carrie Miller:

Cool, yeah, let's go ahead and talk about something that I just saw roll out recently, and it's the Item Spec 5.0. Can you just tell everyone what, what the Item Spec 5.0 is and how it can help with the visibility of products, or just any information you have on the Item Spec?

 

David:

Yeah. So this is. This is one of the bigger buzzwords you know happening right now in the Walmart space and it's just because of how impactful this is for your listings and really planned forward with Walmart. Uh, Item Spec 4 came out quite a while ago and what they did was they changed the number of categories you were able to list under to like from like 20 something to like 77, and now, with Item Spec 5.0, they're doing it in a different, a different style. It's based on product type. That's how you set up your product, your items, rather than doing it in a general category, you now have to actually select the product type. This is similar to like my experience with Amazon. The minimal experience that I've had in the past with their flat files is you have to select, like, a product type prior to uploading it, so it's not a similar idea on Walmart. So I understand if you have a big assortment and you're trying to come up with how you could quickly list it. It could be a little bit harder now because you can't just generalize it into Home and Kitchen. You have to find your product types. But previously Walmart would automatically select the correct product type for your item and you can change it. But now that it's forced into the product type, as like the initial start, you do have to do a little bit more research on listing. But what's the point, aside from just the change in how you list your product and how you do edits to your product, what's the goal of what they're doing here.

 

David:

So this is actually, I expect, 5.0 was previously first released on actually the 1p side. So if you're doing edits through item 360 or supplier one, you should already have familiarity with this and all that was already done by product type for a while. And what it does is it enables a whole bunch of more attributes by product type. So each category has, like its list of predetermined attributes, but it didn't tell you which ones you should fill out for this. Like it could be in sports and like you're selling, you know weights and it's like what sports team is this? It's not applicable to your weights, you know. But then if you have let's say you're selling now with the new product type if you're selling something related to like a sports, like an actual sports team, it'll ask you for the sports team, but if you're selling something that's not relevant, it won't make it a required category for you. So it's basically they make attributes that are dependent on your product type, which is really cool in the flat files they'll gray out certain areas and it'll actually have like recommended attributes that you should be filling out based on your product type.

 

David:

So it's a lot more dependent. It's a lot more granular, which helps you fill in the correct detail with mine. This is like the number one thing that people are just what attributes do I fill out? There's just so many and some of them are useless, but like what's important. So now that with 5.0, I think it's only going to get better and better, Walmart's going to keep showing even more information on how to utilize it, but with this it enables you to actually see more attributes that were previously only restricted to one fee, which is interesting, as well as which attributes they recommend that you do fill out in order to rank better. So how does it impact your rank? I think this is like leaning into that Walmart's actually trying to not necessarily focus so much on the. You know, obviously, conversion rate is the number one driver of rank right now, but they want to have attributes actually have a bigger impact on your rank, because discoverability to them is something that's so important. So if you have like a very specified search, they want to be able to show your product, not just because of your relevancy from keywords, but also your relevancy due to attributes. So that's why it's so important to fill them out.

 

David:

I want to sort of tip about Amazon Fill out every attribute you can, even if it's just as N/A as long as that's an option, obviously or just type in something basic, even though it's not applicable to your product, just so that you have everything filled out. If anyone ever comes searching for you, you have literally all the information you need there. It might take you some extra time, but it's totally worth it because you're then setting yourself up for future success. It also limits the ability for someone to hijack your listing with content rights issues. Someone could just put your listing in and they could fill out one attribute and now all of a sudden, your listing's content rights restricted for that one thing which could be some miscellaneous attribute. So there is the opportunities for you as a seller and also opportunity for people that might want to try to harm you. Not recommended. But there is so much happening with Item Spec 5.0 and I'm excited to see the great impact because it is it is slowly rolling out for a lot of sellers. It's not fully live for everyone. We're able to see from the UI if there's like an add items or update items feature. You can see from your items page. You'll know if you're like in 4.0 or if you're still in a Harfian 5.0. So a lot of cool stuff there and excited to see what comes.

 

Carrie Miller:

So if you download it and still in the 4.0, do you just write a case to ask to get the Item Spec 5.0? Is that?

 

David:

I don't think they're going to help you with that. I don't think so. I think it's just going to like they'll just tell you like they might not even know what they're talking about, honestly, in that case, but they'll also just say it’s rolling out. You’ll get it when you get it.

 

Carrie Miller:

Okay.

 

David:

Yeah, I wouldn't I wouldn't push for you to ask your Sam If you have a Sam, maybe it's worth off to pick it up to them but oftentimes they'll also just say, you know, you're you'll get it in in September, you know. Hopefully everyone gets this sooner than later.

 

Carrie Miller:

Definitely. Um, somebody in the comments said that the drop downs in spec 5.0 are not working. I don't know if you have any. Have you had any any experience with that, with the drop downs not working or kind of some glitches with this, with the spec sheets?

 

David:

Interesting. So the drop downs are possibly for if it's great, look, if it's grayed out, is that what it is? It's something that's grayed out. But if it's grayed out it's not relevant to that product type. And is this specifically in a flat file? Because you'll notice when you go to edit an item and through, like the item page, it will. It will be a whole new layout. It's going to look a lot cleaner, a lot newer and instead of having three different tabs, it's all going to be on one page going down. Are you experiencing the same issues there? There are definitely issues and actually as of today, if you log into SolidSign, you'll see a line on top that says there's issues with files right now. So they are having some issues right now as a whole Walmart, so don't go crazy on them If it's still not working in a couple of days and once that banner goes away, that's something to definitely want to take a look at. See if it's something with the flat file, see if you're able to manually edit it. In that case, I definitely suggest opening a case. But I was just working on a file earlier this week and it seemed to be working just fine.

 

Carrie Miller:

Okay, so I'm going gonna go in straight to the questions. We've got a lot of questions up here, so I'm excited about this, a lot of good interaction here. So the first one is we have brands A and B already on Walmart but would like to test B without setting up another account. Can we test list these, these products, on existing account that belongs to A? So I guess like testing products on different.

 

David:

Yeah, yeah, I mean there's, there's absolutely no issue with that, the only thing that you might consider is that it's going to say sold on ship by the store name. So if it's brand A, as long as you're okay with saying like brand B product is being sold on the ship by brand A, like that might be something to consider but there's no issue. But another thing you might want to consider is that if you eventually want to have an account added for brand B, it's a bit of a pain to have to transfer the content rights from account one to account B, but it is possible. If you set up brand portal for brand B on account A, I don't recommend that. You're kind of setting yourself up for future failure. But unless you plan to run everything through one account. We've actually worked with a lot of aggregators unless you plan to run everything through one account, we've actually worked with a lot of aggregators and at first a lot of them had one brand, like one account per brand, and they realized it was just such a disaster. Also think of it from like Walmart's perspective like they don't track accounts together, they don't really group them together, so they treat them as like 10 different accounts and it was just too hard for them to deal with Walmart. Too hard for them, like they would have access to beta programs in some accounts but not others, so it actually consolidated all to one account. It can become a little bit of like a billing issue if you have, like, different legal entities, but I would recommend sticking to one account unless you have a fear of really like getting suspended. But I would just recommend staying clear of doing anything that would get you in that in the first place.

 

Carrie Miller:

The next question is about the best way to bring reviews from Shopify or Amazon, if that's allowed.

 

David:

This is a good question. So there's a few options here. So, firstly, you're not allowed to bring in reviews from Amazon. Amazon officially, according to the terms of service, they own their reviews. You're not allowed to bring them to Walmart. Walmart actually won't even allow you to upload them. Back in the day, you'd be able to get away with it even though it wasn't recommended, but these days you cannot do that. You can, however, bring in organic reviews from Shopify and as well as from other sites as well, just not Amazon specifically. So there is a free version through Walmart. You just go to reviewsindicationwalmart.com. You'll be able to sign up for it. You can work with your Sam to get access to. It is through a company called Aspective. I believe Walmart purchase them. There are other tools as well, like there's the Yotpo, which officially does it. There's also Bizarre Voice, which, if you're like a bigger brand, I want to go that route because it's in the case to many, many platforms. But for most of like Amazon sellers, I find this just very expensive for what you're looking for. So I would just check out again that reviews indication the online economy. You can also message them if you have any questions. Just reviewsindication at Walmart.com, we'll go to them.

 

Carrie Miller:

All right. So the next one kind of goes with it, and it's about you know, is there a fine program on Walmart. So what is the similar program on Walmart?

 

David:

Right. So, Walmart does have what they call the review accelerator program. There is a requirement in order to get into it, which is you do have to have a sale. Recently they did change some things up. It used to be limited to five reviews, now it's up to 10 reviews, and if you work with a service provider. I believe it's up to 20. It's available through growth opportunities. They charge $10 per review. They recently changed the specifics of the program so I don't want to misspeak over here, but if you look in you can see the exact details of like. Walmart is great with their guides, like their guides are amazing and they're typically up to date. Just click on the guides you can read through, like the whole program. But growth opportunities reviews indication, I'm sorry review accelerator program that will give you what you're looking for and you can enroll products. There's even something cool which they say is there, but I've never actually seen it’s something called a pre-purchase. So post-purchase is very common, where someone purchases your product. Walmart will accept the buy and then give them a $3 credit to leave a review, you're not guaranteed to get a five-star review. Just keep that in mind. You could get a one-star review through the review accelerator program, but there's something called a pre-purchase, which I'm not sure when it's going to be enabled, but this actually will allow you to discount an item on Walmart in order to get a review up to 100% off. I've never seen it, but it's something that does exist in.

 

Carrie Miller:

Wow.

 

David:

You can see an option for this. You can enroll your items.

 

Carrie Miller:

The next question is is SellCord able to get my Walmart account access to a Sam? Strategic account manager is a Sam. For anyone who doesn't know.

 

David:

Right. For sure, we can definitely help with that. We work directly with Walmart. We have our own like agency level Sam and we work with them to in order to get a Sam through Walmart. Also, depending on what category and we work with a lot of categories we can even just reach out directly to other Sam's to try and get someone approved. They typically expect you to have good sales somewhere. We've seen randomly accounts get assigned to Sam. Walmart's trying to do like as much as they can, even for the lower end accounts, but for like. If you're like a smaller account, Walmart might not necessarily go for it, but if you could prove like sales to them, either from Amazon or from like another website, that's kind of the best way to get it. But we've had a lot of success with that. If you guys, if you want to reach out, we could definitely give that a shot.

 

Carrie Miller:

All right, here's kind of a follow-up with. The other question Is Flash Deals, are Flash Deals offered to brand owners only?

 

David:

No, you know, it's not restricted. Actually, here's a little fun, little fun fact there's sponsored brand ads, which is actually exclusive to brand owners right through advertising. You're not allowed to do if you sell, if you resell. But there's actually something called sponsored product, sponsored brand, like Flash Deals, which you can use, instead of having like the brand logo, to say flash deals and you can list your items that you're reselling. It's exclusively managed through Walmart you have to work with, like your product manager, but you can definitely run Flash Deals on items that you do not own the brand for.

 

Carrie Miller:

Someone asked where do I download or where do you download spec 5.0 from?

 

David:

It will either be on your account or not when you go to your items page to go ahead and make updates so you have like you have like on the top right Like add items or manage items. You'll just see from there it'll be a little bit of a different UI. Things will look a little bit different than they were before. Previous, it was like it would give you by template. You could update it by category or by g10 match now, just as like by g10 match or like by product or product, something like that. And if you click on like, do by g10 match that's my favorite to do it g10 match, just throwing all your g10s in there and just export the file and you'll see the name of the file will say 5.0, or we'll say something like 4.5.

 

Carrie Miller:

Here's another question, should our brand prioritize matching Amazon's prices on Walmart or focus on offering flash deals?

 

David:

Wow, this is, that's a great question. So, uh, I want to touch on this earlier with. I just want to talk about couponing, which I think would be something that also a long conversation, generally speaking, for most of you. Amazon is your main business and you shouldn't jeopardize your main business because of Amazon. If you're listing on Amazon is bringing in so much more than Walmart you don't want to risk losing your business there. We have found that Amazon is a little slow sometimes to catch price differences. We've been able to run a 10% flash deals for a week and actually be cheaper than Amazon, and the price on Amazon will. We won't lose the buy box and Amazon won't catch up. What I would just recommend is if you could get away with it for as long as you could and let's say Amazon does give you problems. Just quickly change your price on Amazon, just you got a monitor you gotta be on top of your game. What's cool is that coupons, which is also a beta program, is the only way, as of today, they able to actually offer a cheaper price on Walmart than on Amazon without having to lower your Amazon price at all. So there's a lot of strategy around that you could. Also, if you have a Sam, you can work with your Sam to be like, let's say, you want to get into a bigger program where they request like a 30% discount. You could do like 10% strike through and then a 20% coupon. They'll work with you and because they understand the Walmart damage on Walmart issue, I think that's the biggest issue Walmart's trying to deal with is how do you get a promo on Walmart without impacting Amazon? That's why Walmart loves Walmart-only sellers. They love these guys. They don't care about their Amazon, they're all invested in Walmart and there is maybe a strategy to having a Walmart-specific catalog. If you have a lot of different products develop bundles or even go back to virtual packs. Play around with things and see what you can do to differentiate your Walmart from your Amazon listings. There's also you could have a different UPC that you use on Walmart versus Amazon. I'm not sure that's going to last forever, but it does. It is a good way to keep Amazon from price matching your items.

 

Carrie Miller:

Let's see the next question here. Once copy is set up, products are properly categories and PPC is running, other than those two and those three tasks, what? What are other daily, weekly, monthly tasks that SellCord would do to make my Walmart business successful? What could a new customer expect to see SellCord to be working on every month in their account?

 

David:

So it's not just the copy on the categorization, there's also attributes. You know it's played a very big role, kind of spoke about, especially with items spec 5.0. And then PPC is really it's not a set end and forget. It's set up with Walmart. You know you want to make sure that you're constantly, you know, revisiting PPC, checking in daily, seeing how things are going, what's doing better, what's doing worse, especially at launch. It's so important to be tweaking things, you know. You see, we didn't really talk PPC strategy much, but learning what's happening, especially if you're new to Walmart, you can't just expect things to be a certain way. Every account, every listing has its own history, which is just so complex. It makes things so much fun just to be able to learn within each account. There's also constant work that you can do just to see like copy as well. It's not a set and I forget it situation. You want to test something out. You want to learn more keywords and implement them into your copy. You want to try out different categories, different product types, to see if you can succeed in different areas as well. There's also just working with brands to discuss promotion strategies, to just continuously work and figure things out. There's also constant audits you have to do on your listings.

 

David:

Walmart is like I'm not going to say notorious. It doesn't sound nice, but your images could just revert back. Your variation could split up your copy. If you have multiple paragraphs, it's squished into one paragraph. These things happen all the time. There's constant audits that you have to do just to make sure your things are, your content is good, and then it's just about primarily utilizing PPC as well as just promotional strategies to grow and grow, and there's also a lot of tracking information you know you have many items you want to be able to see. Let's say, keyword tracking. You know how. Am I ranking for my main keywords? Am I doing well overall? Is there more opportunity? Do I need to go more aggressively? Because even in ads like, are you ROAS focused or are you trying to just grow general sales? There's so much to go, depending on your strategy, Just like we deal with many, many different size accounts. We deal with accounts that are doing literally $5,000,10,000 a month. And then there's also nine figure Walmart sellers. You know that are PPC isn't necessarily their larger thing. It's about like having a strong pricing strategy because they have to win by $1. And then, not even having big margins, they just have to just make units sell. So so many different strategies depending on the count types.

 

Carrie Miller:

All right. Last question what program is best for keywords on Walmart and for optimizing your listing in general?

 

David:

Okay, so I'm a little biased over here, folks. So obviously Helium 10 is a fantastic tool for any keyword research. I live in Cerebro and Magnet. The fact that they're available for Walmart, I love it. It shows you. I mean, the amount of data that's in there is just fascinating. You can learn immediately what your top keywords are for your product. They have a search volume which is so impactful. It shows you historical so you can see, since it's seasonality, you can see one was this product doing well. It gives you the past, like two years or something like that's great. It'll really show you like where and when you can expect to do well. You also have to do the work you can't just like go here's everything. Do the work, make sure you're not hitting branded keywords, make sure they're relevant to your product, obviously. But it is really solid in terms of just keyword research, very, very highly recommended. In terms of optimization auger listings program-wise. I am also biased here, but that's just because this is what we do. We do listing optimization as a company, so obviously I'm going to plug SellCord, Carrie does Helium 10 have some sort of like AI tool to optimize listings for Walmart.

 

Carrie Miller:

So we do. We have a Listing Builder and as you, basically, you put the keywords in a keyword bank and then, as you write them into your listing, they get crossed off, so you make sure that they're fully optimized. So yeah, we have a Listing Builder that will help you to optimize using the keywords you find with Cerebro for Walmart.

 

David:

I'm sure it's fantastic. I mean, obviously we have a self core strategy, but I mean you guys make amazing tools. Definitely give it a shot.

 

Carrie Miller:

All right, that's all we have. Thank you so much, David, for answering all those questions. We had a lot of great questions, and definitely David's the you know the best to ask all these amazing questions too. So thank you so much, David, for being on. And again, if you are interested in SellCord, David, can you say your email address and how they can get in contact with you again?

 

David:

For sure. You can send us an email to david@sellcord.com S-E-L-L-C-O-R-D.com. You can do info@sellcord.com. If you want just more general, hit us up. Visit our website. Sign up over there. There's a lot to talk about.

 

Carrie Miller:

All right, sounds good. Thank you everyone for joining and we hope you have a great rest of the day. Bye, everyone.