With its robust infrastructure and trust established by the Walmart brand, the Walmart marketplace presents an appealing alternative or complement to other online selling platforms.
However, succeeding on this platform requires more than just listing your products. It demands strategic planning, an understanding of the platform’s nuances, and the implementation of proven best practices.
In this post, we’ll delve into the most effective Walmart selling strategies and share the best practices that can help you thrive in the Walmart Marketplace.
The Significance of Walmart Selling Strategies
Walmart selling strategies are pivotal in the competitive landscape of the Walmart marketplace.
They provide a roadmap to differentiate your products, enhance visibility via the platform’s algorithm, and drive customer retention through excellent service and prompt fulfillment.
Competition Management
The Walmart Marketplace is a bustling platform with a multitude of sellers, each vying for consumer attention.
In this highly competitive environment, well-crafted selling strategies are vital to distinguish your offerings and capture customer interest.
Visibility Enhancement
Walmart employs a specific algorithm to display products to customers.
By utilizing strategies focused on aspects like optimal pricing, relevant keyword usage, and garnering positive reviews, sellers can boost their product visibility and potential sales.
Customer Retention
Repeat customers significantly contribute to a successful e-commerce business.
Implementing strategies that prioritize exceptional customer service, efficient fulfillment, and positive customer review management, can lead to improved customer satisfaction, higher retention rates, and ultimately increased sales.
Inventory Management Best Practices
Inventory management is an essential aspect of running a successful e-commerce business on platforms like Walmart marketplace.
Effective inventory management ensures you have the right products in the right quantity at the right time. It helps prevent stockouts and overstocks, optimizes your storage space and costs, and ultimately enhances customer satisfaction by enabling timely order fulfillment.
The first step to effective inventory management is accurate forecasting. This involves predicting the demand for your products based on factors like sales trends, seasonality, and market changes.
Accurate forecasting helps you to determine how much stock to maintain, preventing both overstocking (which can lead to increased storage costs and potential wastage) and understocking (which can lead to missed sales opportunities).
Leveraging inventory management software like the Ecom Circles automated dropshipping software can be a game-changer for Walmart sellers, especially those with a large product catalog.
This tool provides real-time inventory updates, automates the reordering process, and provides valuable data for demand forecasting. It can also integrate with the Walmart marketplace platform, ensuring your product listings are always accurate.
While inventory management software can do a lot of heavy lifting, regular stock auditing is still crucial. This practice involves periodically checking your physical inventory against your inventory records to identify and rectify discrepancies. It’s a key measure to prevent inventory shrinkage due to errors, theft, or damage.
If you’re selling on multiple platforms, it’s essential to have a central system for managing your multichannel inventory.
This ensures that all your sales channels have accurate, real-time inventory data, preventing issues like double-selling a product that you only have in limited quantity. This multi-channel feature is enabled on the Ecom Circles automated dropshipping software as well.
Finally, consider maintaining a level of safety stock for your best-selling products. Safety stock is extra inventory kept on hand to account for uncertainties like sudden demand spikes or supply chain disruptions.
While maintaining safety stock increases your storage costs, it can be a worthwhile investment for ensuring you never miss a sales opportunity.
Pricing Strategy for Walmart Sellers
A thoughtful pricing strategy is paramount for Walmart sellers because it can influence your sales volume, profit margins, and competitiveness on the marketplace.
Given the competitiveness of the Walmart Marketplace, sellers need to keep an eye on the prices set by other sellers with similar products.
Consider adopting a competitive pricing strategy, which involves setting prices based on what competitors are charging. However, it’s important to ensure that the prices set still allow for a reasonable profit margin.
To keep track of competitor pricing, you can decide to manually monitor your competitors and adjust your prices in real-time. This can be strenuous and frustrating, especially when you have large amounts of concurrently listed items.
Another alternative to this is the use of a Walmart repricer. These tools can track competitor prices, factor in your costs, and automatically adjust your prices to stay competitive without undermining your profit margins.
In addition to the above-mentioned pricing strategies, you can implement other pricing tactics to stand out to your customers. These tactics include psychological and volume pricing.
Psychological Pricing
Implementing psychological pricing strategies can also be beneficial. This involves pricing products in a way that appeals to a consumer’s emotional responses.
For example, setting a price at $19.99 instead of $20 can make the product seem more affordable to the consumer.
Volume Pricing
Volume pricing is a strategy designed to encourage customers to purchase more items by offering a discount on larger quantities. For example, you could offer a lower per-unit price if the customer buys in bulk.
This strategy can boost your sales volume and help move more inventory.
Delivering Top-Notch Customer Service
In the competitive world of e-commerce, top-notch customer service is not just a nice-to-have but a must-have.
Providing excellent customer service can differentiate your business from others, foster customer loyalty, and significantly enhance your reputation on platforms like the Walmart Marketplace.
There are different ways to offer top-notch customer service:
Effective Communication
The foundation of superior customer service is effective communication. Timely, polite, and helpful responses to customer inquiries can make a world of difference in their shopping experience.
This includes proactively informing customers about shipping delays or product issues, and promptly responding to messages or comments.
Clear and Accurate Product Information
Providing clear and accurate product descriptions is part of good customer service. Detailed, truthful descriptions help customers make informed decisions and reduce the likelihood of returns or complaints.
High-quality product images and answering common product questions in the description can also significantly enhance customer satisfaction.
Fast and Reliable Fulfillment
Fulfillment plays a big role in customer satisfaction. Ensure you have a system in place for fast, reliable order fulfillment.
This includes providing accurate delivery estimates, keeping the customer informed about the delivery status, and packaging products securely to prevent damage during transit.
Flexible Return Policies
Having a flexible and clear return policy can significantly enhance customer satisfaction. While returns might be seen as a loss, they’re actually an opportunity to show your commitment to customer satisfaction.
Offering easy returns can increase trust in your business, encouraging customers to shop from you again. Read our guide to Walmart returns for sellers so you know how to properly handle returns when they occur and potentially turn the situation around for your own benefit.
Managing Reviews and Feedback
Reviews and feedback significantly influence your reputation and visibility on the Walmart Marketplace. They not only impact buyers’ purchasing decisions but also contribute to your seller rating, which can affect your search ranking on the platform.
Hence, effective management of reviews and feedback is a crucial best practice for Walmart sellers.
Encouraging your customers to leave reviews is the first step. After a successful transaction, consider sending a follow-up message requesting a review.
Make sure this request is polite and genuine—never force or bribe customers to leave a review. Additionally, providing exceptional service and high-quality products naturally inspires customers to share their positive experiences.
Also, respond to reviews. Responding to reviews, both positive and negative, shows that you value your customers’ feedback.
For positive reviews, a simple “Thank you” can go a long way. Negative reviews, however, should be handled with care. Apologize for the customer’s experience, offer solutions to the issue, and take the conversation offline if necessary to resolve the matter.
This demonstrates your commitment to customer satisfaction and can often turn a negative situation into a positive one.
Read Also: How to Get Walmart Reviews and Boost Your Sales
Utilizing Walmart’s Promotional Tools
Walmart marketplace provides a host of promotional tools for sellers, which can significantly boost product visibility, drive traffic to your listings, and increase sales.
Effectively utilizing these tools can be a powerful way to optimize your performance on the platform. Some of these helpful tools are listed below:
Walmart Sponsored Ads
Sponsored Products is Walmart’s pay-per-click (PPC) advertising service. It allows sellers to promote their products in search results and product detail pages, providing increased visibility and a chance to compete with similar listings.
This tool can be particularly beneficial when launching new products or looking to gain an edge in a competitive category.
If you’re eager to further expand your knowledge and succeed with Walmart ads, we recommend you check out our blog post – Walmart Advertising 101: Understanding Walmart Sponsored Ads.
Price Discounts and Rollbacks
Discounts and rollbacks can attract price-sensitive Walmart shoppers. Offering a discount on your products, or a rollback (a temporary price reduction), can help improve your product’s ranking in search results, increase its visibility, and encourage purchases.
Make sure that your discounted prices still allow you to maintain a profit margin.
Free Shipping
Offering free shipping can greatly enhance the appeal of your products. Walmart provides the “TwoDay Delivery” tag for eligible products, which can significantly increase their visibility in search results.
To qualify for this, you need to be able to fulfill orders within two days in the contiguous US.
Bundle Deals
Walmart gives you the opportunity to provide bundles as an option for your sellers.
Offering bundle deals, where multiple products are sold together at a discounted rate, can help increase your average order value and move more inventory. Bundles can also provide a unique selling proposition if you combine products that are commonly bought together.
Conclusion
While the marketplace may seem competitive and challenging, adopting the best Walmart selling strategies and practices can position your business for success. Consistency is key, and continuously refining your strategies based on market trends, feedback, and business goals is crucial.
We hope this guide has provided valuable insights into navigating the Walmart marketplace and has equipped you with actionable strategies to optimize your Walmart store.
