Walmart has long been a popular brick-and-mortar name in the US, if not the world. The launch of Walmart Marketplace in 2009 greatly contributed to its omnichannel strategy by offering a selling platform for third-party merchants. With a 79% ecommerce growth in 2020, Walmart.com continued to drive more collaboration opportunities with potential sellers and other prominent ecommerce apps such as Shopify.
With 4.1+ million stores and $590 billion sales to date, Shopify has gained global recognition as a convenient platform for business owners to set up their online stores. Regarding its expansion plan, Walmart has partnered with Shopify to alleviate barriers of entry for online stores that do not have their Walmart presence. Now that the US retail conglomerate has rolled out their global expansion initiative, Shopify is among the top-of-mind options for non-US enterprises to quickly start an online business and penetrate into the Walmart space.
To learn everything you need to know about how to start selling on Walmart marketplace with Shopify, look no further than this blog post.
Outline
- Shopify & Walmart Marketplace integration
- Step by Step tutorial to sell on Walmart Marketplace from your Shopify store
- Selling on Walmart with Shopify: Best Practices
I. Shopify & Walmart Marketplace integration
01. Overview of the e-Walmart
Founded in 1962, Walmart is one of the world’s leading multinational retail corporations with more than 10,500 retail stores in 24+ countries. Walmart delivers quality merchandise for the lowest prices possible, adorned by strong logistics, supply chain management, and efficiency.
Launched in the year 2009, Walmart marketplace, Walmart.com, permits third-party sellers to list their products on its website – Walmart.com. Walmart also designates its Walmart Innovative Program to participating sellers, including branding support (Pro Seller Badge, Walmart Sponsored Products), logistics (Walmart Fulfillment Services) to financial aid (Goldman Sachs funding). To date, Walmart Marketplace has helped put more than 150,000 sellers in front of its 120 million monthly visitors.
Recommended: Start Selling On Pinterest with Shopify
02. Why should you integrate Shopify into Walmart?
In March 2020, Walmart announced a new partnership with Shopify, exposing international Shopify’s small business sellers to the promising Walmart Marketplace. The partnership arrived at a time when the coronavirus pandemic sent record numbers of consumers to shop online. This integration not only benefits Shopify-based foreign sellers but also accelerates Walmart towards scalability by capturing possibly higher non-US market share.
Launched in 2006, Shopify has solidified its mark as one of the leading commerce platforms for online stores and retail point-of-sale (POS) systems. With a dynamic portfolio of a million businesses looking to expand their sales, Shopify was a perfect choice to become Walmart’s commerce platform partner.
II. Step by Step tutorial to sell on Walmart Marketplace from your Shopify store
Step 1: Set up your Shopify store
Can you operate on Walmart without a Shopify store? Yes, but for sure you’ll miss out on a lot of things.
Shopify is an all-in-one solution, requiring you no tech background to set up a fully functional store. The platform makes it easy for merchants of all sizes to sell their products online, providing them not just with an online storefront but payments, fulfillment, and customer engagement tools as well.
Click here to learn in detail why Shopify is the best place to start for your small & medium sized business.
In case you don’t know, Shopify hosts a variety of apps to support your eCommerce business. PageFly, for example, is the best Shopify page builder app that helps you establish your online store effortlessly on a comfortable drag-and-drop.
Here are our suggestions about 10 Best Shopify Online Stores built with PageFly - one of the top Landing Page Builders on Shopify.
Check out this article to know how to set up an online store with Shopify 90-day free trial.
Step 2: Set up your store on the Walmart Marketplace
Access https://marketplace-apply.walmart.com
Click ‘Request to Sell Application’ to start the 5-step registration process.
For the company registration, please bear in mind that there are certain requirements for international sellers, for example:
- Having a US entity (including a US W9 tax ID and mailing address)
- The ability to ship from a US warehouse (excluding FBA)
- Product identifiers (if the barcode is missing, invalid, or a duplicate, the product won’t be accepted)
- An international returns address.
Once you have provided the above details, proceed towards the Product and Integration.
Finish the ‘Shipping and Operations’ and you’re almost good to go!
Review and complete the process. Once you have completed the seller registration process, wait for one week to approve the registration from Walmart Marketplace.
Step 3: Add the Walmart Marketplace App (AWM) as a sales channel on Shopify
Go to the Shopify App store and search for Walmart Integration -> Add app -> Enter your Shop’s URL and log in.
Click the Install app button.
After installing the app, you can begin the configuration process.
The registration process is pretty straightforward with Client ID and Client Secret.
After that, you can proceed to import products to Walmart.
In the Import Product Options, you can select one out of the following three alternatives:
All items: Import all the Shopify store items.
Published Products: import just those items which are accessible at the Shopify retail end.
Filter Products: Import the products based on Product Type, Product Vendor, Smart Collection or Collection
Here is your Walmart dashboard in the Shopify backend.
Step 4: Complete your Walmart dashboard components
Setting up a dashboard is easy, yet it’s all the more important to fit it into your business management process.
Fill out the form in the ‘Profiling’ section to ensure legitimacy for your business
Look into Product and Order management
For the product section you can perform these following tasks:
- Edit Product Information
- View Product
- Add Swatch Images
- Preview Product on Walmart:
- Filter Products
- Bulk Uploads of Products
- Update Product Status
- Retire Products
- Update Price
- Update Inventory
From Walmart Integration App, you can perform the following actions for your orders:
- Fetch new orders from Walmart
- Synchronize all orders with your Shopify Store
- Update shipment information
- Update order status
- Cancel orders
- Create order Refunds
- View Failed orders
III. Selling on Walmart with Shopify: Best Practices
01. Build a good online store presence
First off, do check out the following stores
01. Dropps
02. Urban skin
Walmart: Walmart
Shopify: https://urbanskin.myshopify.com/
Given that Walmart is a mass marketplace for all, competitive businesses such as Dropps and Urban Skin Rx rely on Shopify to push their competitive edge.
For the look, The Shopify Theme Store includes more than 100 free and premium themes that are professionally predefined for your online store.
The designs can fit a variety of stores from different industries
As a theme itself, a Shopify free theme comes with irreplaceable core values, forming the backbone of an online store.
With a page builder, you can do a lot more! The best page builder PageFly offers solutions of both visual and functional values that cater to every kind of business need online.
Belows are screenshots of a product page made with PageFly.
Building with PageFly, all designed pages will be optimized and responsive on mobile and tablet devices.
Click here for the inspiration to craft a wonderful website with Shopify and PageFly.
02. Win the Walmart Buy Box
For higher sales or conversions, it is crucial to win the buy box. The buy box of Walmart is highly controlled by price. The lower the price, the more likely it is for sellers to win this powerful display opportunity.
You should employ Walmart Repricer Tool to win Buy Box and remain on top while selling. Automated repricing software is technology that helps sellers automatically update prices on their listings by looking into certain aspects such as buy box ownership, selling a certain number of units during a specified time, or mirroring prices across multiple sales channels.
Recommended: Make Purchase Process quicker and easier with Shopify Buy Button
03. Provide A Customer-Centric Approach
Walmart works on a customer-centric approach and thus, you should work more on your customer service to yield more positive reviews. There are a few metrics that need to be closely monitored, including product shipment rate (below 99.5%) or product cancel rate (less than 1.5%). Go ahead and explore the Shipping Exception feature and apply more than one shipping method such as Standard, Freight, Express, 2-Day Shipping, Free Shipping, etc., on one product. Also, you should make sure that your team timely answers customer calls and resolves 90% of emails within 1 day.
Putting up a promotional price is an evergreen strategy to attract more customers for your business. From the Walmart Integration app, go to the navigation menu on the left and click on ‘ Promotional Price,’ Here you can choose to ‘Upload Promotional Price’ or ‘Remove Promotional Price’ for bulk products or individual products based on your promotional strategy.
Suggested reading: If you want to sell your online Shopify Store. Here's the detailed guide on how to prepare your business for sale, and how to sell your Shopify store.
Conclusion
Walmart and Shopify are an ideal combo for you to widen the reach of your business. While the former owns an astronomical number of millions of existing consumers, the latter allows you to establish an online presence easily and then quickly tap into many different sales channels.
From LA to Tokyo, or basically anywhere else in the world, it is a high time that you explore the Shopify ecosystem and enhance your online store with its affiliated tools such as the best Shopify page builder PageFly. With a high-performing online business ready in hand, any opportunity like the Walmart global expansion can be adopted in a blink of an eye.
