Walmart Announces Expanded Fulfillment, Brand Tools, at Today’s Seller Summit

Walmart hosted merchants in Last Vegas on Wednesday at its first-ever Let’s Grow! Marketplace Seller Summit where it announced several new tools and services to help them grow on its marketplace.

Like Amazon, Walmart offers fulfillment services (called WFS), and it announced more options so sellers can send “big and bulky” items – think canoes or trampolines – as well as multi-box items like patio sets.

For Walmart, more merchants and more types of inventory mean greater selection. The head of Walmart’s US marketplace and fulfillment service Manish Joneja said items that carry the “Fulfilled by Walmart” tag helps drive conversion – sellers see on average 50% growth in gross merchandise value (GMV) when shifting items to WFS, he told sellers.

Earlier this month, Walmart introduced a new “Pro Seller Badge” for top-performing Marketplace sellers. And today, Walmart said it was continuing to roll out Brand Shops, dedicated digital storefronts that allow brands to create their own curated pages with ease. It also announced a new Virtual Garage where customers can store details about multiple vehicles, helping them more easily shop for automotive goods.

Walmart Marketplace is currently available in Canada and Mexico in addition to the US, and today it announced it will expand to Chile next year.

Walmart’s US ecommerce sales grew 24% in the second quarter, and Joneja told sellers this morning that Walmart’s ecommerce business is thriving, “and we’re just getting started with Marketplace.” See his post on the Walmart newsroom.

Ina Steiner

Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She’s a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of “Turn eBay Data Into Dollars” (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, “Blogging Heroes” (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 – present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 – present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.