@dwat0870 Looks like Iām not allowed to send you a personal message. Can you send me a direct message with your email address or you can connect with me on LinkedIn.
Sorry about that, your PMās should work now
Interesting. We are already on Walmart. It is a fairly smooth experience.
What are your guysā experiences with selling on Walmart versus Amazon?
Easier, harder, or ?
Different.
Less stress on a daily basis (no slew of random policy violations, less aggressive poorly implemented bots, etc.)
Harder to get things started.
Fewer complaints from buyers.
Fewer buyers.
And on and onā¦
Harder to get things started as in listingā¦.or as in like getting high into search results?
As in getting the account and listings up and running. On Amazon, if you have all your ducks in a row the process is pretty easy. On Walmart it took me months.
To be fair, this was years ago and the current experience is likely different.
We onboarded in late 2022. Easy to get the account setup, harder to list, especially in our category with listing image hosting being a requirement. The services they recommended didnāt work. Spent months working with our Incubation manager there to get going.
Only listed 4 items. We did 15% of what we did on Amazon last year and it was worth it because all of those sales appear to have been incremental.
We should be listing more there. I may try to see if they fixed the mess for listing supplements. There are a few holes in my walls out of frustration from trying to get the listings up. Just kidding about the holes but it was the most frustrating thing Iāve dealt with in marketplace selling.
I donāt know if they fixed the video / āA+ā enhanced content issues there either but we are currently having Sku Ninja host our enhanced content and videos for a monthly fee.
They have a ways to go to catch up to the ease of setting up as compared to Amazon but it is really very stress free. We just send inventory every couple months and watch the sales. Itās kinda like what you see in Amazon Guru YouTube videos. Very passive. Very unlike Amazon, but there are issues for sure.
simple but fairly accurate description. We are taking some great steps towards making the onboarding process easier. Work with me and itās even easier!
I would like to welcome you as well.
I on-boarded at Walmart I think in 2018/19 somewhere in there and hit a brick wall. Had to hire someone to help me get rolling and then after a year I did feel more comfortable navigating Seller Central.
Iāve been on Amazon too for longer than that.
Iāve seen improvements and Iāve seen backwards slides (IMHO). I donāt do anything fancy with my listings like others do and I donāt do any of the marketing stuff or WFS.
But I can say that there is still room for improvement ā where I like what Amazon does. For example, being allowed to only mark 10 or 15 (I forgot now what the limit is) days per year for vacation days stinks. Iāve opened cases and argued about it because there are 10 federal holidays. Their argument back was that UPS is still open (Um, not on Christmas Day or Thanksgiving), and that the platform is world-wide. Iām thinking āthatās a computer programming lineā which I understand is a simple point of view. But WHY limit at all??? For example, this past week, I was away from my FBM inventory on Thursday and Friday. IF I marked those two days as āoffā a seller would see that I would ship on Monday. So they have to wait, thatās ok too. BUT if Iāve used all my days, then I have to zero out my inventory until Saturday Morningā¦and guess who loses money and sales ā WE both do. AND who knows if Iāll be able to upload an inventory on Saturday morning? (Yes, Iāve been to āno signalā places in this country.) Amazon also lets us put the entire store on vacation with a click of the button. AND lets us set processing days for 4 or 7 or 10, whatever WE chooseā¦(and I use those as opposed to zeroāing out inventory). I still have sales, not as many but some.
An improvement that I have seen is that now the US Holidays are recognized by Walmartā¦so I donāt have to pick them to have the holiday off.
The vacation limits annoy us too. Coupled with that is Walmartās policy of not letting us set our own handling times (which is one of the reasons I have so many fewer items on Walmart than Amazon) which means we can never actually take a vacation, much less shut down the store during an unforeseen event like flooding in the warehouse. That lack of flexibility is definitely a con in Walmartās column.
@WALMART.COM_EXPERT : Same here. It appears that a small business must commit to being a Walmart seller 365 days per year.
That doesnāt work for me. I do take real vacations occasionally. I also take time off for business trips.
If you want me to sell my stuff on Walmart, this has to change. ( Either that, or you have to explain to me how I have misunderstood and how I can sell on Walart yet still take several weeks off during the year )
I was glad to hear there was a GTIN exemption available but as a one person shop, no vacation mode makes it a no go for me as well.
The handling time thing drives me insane! Every two weeks (at least) it defaults to 0 days and we get stuck with a late shipment and having to go back and forth with āsupportā and upload and send new reports-it is such a waste of time.
What he said.
Also chiming Iām about my concern of a lack of vacation time. Thatās just super unrealistic to any business that is owned by a single person.
No shade here! Our Strategic Account Manager has been helpful and responsive the few times weāve needed assistance. And when we were able to work directly with Global Security & Investigations with evidence of triangulation fraud, thatās head and shoulders above the action Amazon has taken regarding fraudulent activity.
I just wish you had more people in the Global Security department, theyāve been great but are very limited in number!