Podcast transcript
Introduction
Hi and welcome to another live episode of Marketplace Masters brought to you by MerchantSpring, the leading marketplace analytics platform for Amazon and Walmart agencies. marketplace masters strive to go really deeper into the challenges that agencies face to lift eCommerce performance via practical actions and insights.
Paul Sonneveld
I'm your host Paul Sonneveld and today we're going to talk about Walmart's marketplace and specifically how Amazon brands and service providers should really think about these really exciting opportunities.
I've invited David Milstein to join us and share his particular expertise today. Let me just introduce you to him. David is the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Sellcord, a full-service Walmart agency where he has since built their internal systems allowing them to grow at really an unparalleled rate. He has a strong background in IT and systems implementation and has managed hundreds of accounts and tens of thousands of listings on the Walmart platform. David's really passionate about using his skills to help brands diversify their revenue by taking advantage of this up-and-coming walmart.com marketplace. Thank you so much for being on the show today David.
David Milstein
Thanks, Paul pleasure to be here.
Paul Sonneveld
Absolutely. It's a super exciting opportunity. Walmart is clearly gaining more and more traction and more and more people looking at it and I'm excited to talk to you because there are not many agencies who make it their core business just to do Walmart and you are certainly in self-court doing a wonderful job in that space. So thank you so much for agreeing to join me. I know you've just come off a long flight so I appreciate it.
David Milstein
Correct.
Paul Sonneveld
So David let's just get into it right? Let's talk about Walmart's edge off Amazon. You know this is a question I hear all the time, particularly from kind of other Amazon agencies. Why should I even think about Walmart? Amazon's great I'm doing six figures you know Amazon is a big platform. Why should even bother thinking about Walmart?
David Milstein
It's a great question you know the way I would pose it is what would you tell a regular just DTC seller or brand if you went back seven years ago to let's say Amazon why try to get onto this platform and you can see it? You can see the growth you know the people that took advantage of the platform in its infancy or even at the level or stage that it was years ago, they saw the phenomenal growth that they're able to get through to today and that's where Walmart is.
Walmart's a marketplace that's just growing so quickly. And if you're able to get in now at this opportune time, you're going to see the revenue or just the profits of your labour in a few years or even a few months you know, you can see that today. Just a great way to expand. And at the rate, Walmart's going right now, we say you should be doing, let's say, 10 to 20% of your Amazon revenue down the line, we're thinking that could have hit up to like 40% and we'll see how things go. That could potentially even outperform Amazon at some point. We don't know, but we'll see. Let's put in the opportunity. It's not such a big investment, but it's, it's the opportunity is already there and you could even be profitable today. So a highly recommended platform to go to.
Paul Sonneveld
I'm sure, you know, 10 to 20% even today. I mean, you may like or that doesn't sound much, but think about how long that has taken you to maybe get to that size on Amazon, as you said. And given the challenges with Amazon, particularly this year around driving growth and profit, who wouldn't want to see another 10 or 20% on top of their sales, right? What are the other benefits that Walmart offers that maybe Amazon Sellers don't get?
David Milstein
What does Walmart offer that Amazon doesn't? So what I see is one of the biggest opportunities that Walmart does offer for sellers, particularly like the private label area is Walmart's using their stores as kind of like the opportunity to potentially get in store with Walmart as a great way for sellers to come to the market.
They have a yearly program called Open Call where they allow, they invite brands to pitch their products directly to Walmart for the opportunity to get in-store. Now, firstly, that's a major foot into the retail game, which is huge as its own. But like Walmart itself is such a big player in the retail world, which is something, I mean, yes, Amazon does have like an opportunity to go with the vendor, but like, not the same way that Walmart is solidified in the massive being that is Walmart stores.
Getting a single PO with a Walmart store can be a massive break for your business. You know, so just the ability or the opportunity that Walmart does offer to go in that direction is huge for sellers. Also, Walmart is much less competitive than Amazon. And the fact that that is the case, just a separate note why Walmart is potentially a more opportune marketplace. It's because there's less competition. It's cheaper to get in.
So why not put some focus over there instead of spending your time trying to max your advertising efforts on Amazon or whatever it is, when you could just go for a much easier opportunity that is on Walmart. So many reasons. I think those two really set it apart.
Paul Sonneveld
And just to follow up note on, David, do you have a sense of the size of Walmart's marketplace or e-commerce business compared to their total store sales?
David Milstein
Uh, yeah.
Paul Sonneveld
So what's beyond that horizon picture, you've just joined the marketplace, but the bigger prize, what does it look like in terms of ratios and opportunity?
David Milstein
So in general, the .com space is massive. It's really massive for walmart.com. The brands that have been 1P for a while, I'll just tell you as a whole 1P listings tend to do better than 3P listings. even like you could just move over, just that ability that sold on ship by Walmart label just increases traffic towards those listings. And as a platform though, walmart.com, as big as many sales as it's making, is still fractional compared to that of Walmart as a retailer. You know, Walmart retail, like as a company, brings in 600 billion a year. The highest company, the highest grossing company for the past 20 years. They're the kings. And it's only a fraction of that.
I think .com was somewhere in like the 25 billion. I might be off on these numbers, just as some old data I've seen, but that's a fraction compared to what they're doing in-store. But that number is continuously growing, and I would say the store is potentially pretty much at a plateau, if not, maybe slightly going down just with everyone ordering things these days. Especially with like the pickup and delivery options. So the opportunity for .com and in-stores is massive. Even just getting 1P online is a better opportunity than 3P online. So either way you go, you're, you, when you get into Walmart, you have a major opportunity anytime in 1P.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Right, right. So you already started mentioning 1P a lot. So, it'd be good to just dive a bit deeper, right? 1P versus 3P. Paint a picture for us. What does it look like? On Walmart, probably from the context of being familiar with the Amazon 1P versus 3P, what does it look like on Walmart? What are the differences and how does it work?
David Milstein
Sure. So, Walmart's constantly evolving, like in on all fronts. So about went on 3P or I would say the 3P is evolving much quicker than the 1P. You know, the 1P has been solidified for a while. So some of the benefits 1P let's say, has over 3P is through, firstly it's through a different portal. It's through Retailing versus Walmart's 3P is through seller center. And in seller center, it's more of like a basic portal that you're familiar with. You know, setting up your items through a certain structure versus in retailing, you have this called item 360. And there's actually some attributes as well as the ability to be in multiple category paths, which is not available for the 3P listing. Just kind of gives you a bit of an edge.
If I were you as a seller, if you have access to 1P as retailing. I would actually double, go twice. Put your listings on 3P and 1P. You know, get that 3P account. This way, you could use some of the benefits of the 3P as well as the benefits of the 1P. Some of the benefits of the 3P is it's a lot easier to do things. You just quickly make edits here and there as well as just like how the portal's set up. It's a little bit cleaner and simpler to use. And there's also like I think there's much better and easier reporting over there. So it's kind of like a cool way to kind of like use both platforms to manage your listings even though ideally it would all be in one, but we'll see what Walmart has to test to bring. You know, it's costly evolving. So, excited to see what's in the future.
Paul Sonneveld
And just help me understand, is it when you are a 1P supplier, is it possible just to be a 1P just for e-commerce or does it mean you're in stores as well?
David Milstein
Yeah, so, there's pretty much two set setups for 1P. You get into the weeds if you want to like go for some more, but it's primarily 1P in store and online, which, Walmart handles that for you, the fulfillment. And then you have what's called DSV, which is a Drop Ship Vendor, which you handle the fulfillment.
You get a PO from Walmart every day. You know, these are your orders. You have to ship it the same day if you don't, hey're not going to be happy. But that's a different level of 1P. And that's sold on shipped by Walmart, they'll call it, even though it's technically sold on shipped by you. So there's, there's that DSV section, which is not in store. So, but DSV is a great way to get into store. Because once you have that 1P contract to begin with, that's a much that you have the, you're from the door with your buyer. You prove to them that you can make sales and they'll take you in store. You know that that's what they're looking for.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, no. Fantastic. I was going to ask about the warehousing part as well.
David Milstein
Oh, sure.
Paul Sonneveld
You know, it's obviously very familiar with FBA and how that works or warehousing from a 1P point of view. I know Walmart has WFS. I think most people are aware of that. From a 1P point of view, is it the same warehouse, different warehousing? Give us a sense of how that works.
David Milstein
Sure. So 3P uses WFS, 1P doesn't use WFS. WFS, Walmart Fulfillment Services, their version of FBA, it's exclusive to 3P sellers. So for 1P, that's something you got to handle yourself or there's so many of these, like 3PLs that we'll just handle the drop shipping for you if you just send them inventory. Or if it's in-store by Walmart, they're the ones that will be handling fulfillment over there.
But there's no WFS necessarily for the 1P side. That's not really an option. WFS is currently exclusively a 3P thing. We'll see, we'll see where it's going. WFS is evolving tremendously. It's also throw back to like the edges that Walmart has over Amazon is the warehousing. There's more warehouses for Walmart than any other company in the US like by far. And there's a Walmart store within 50 miles of every American. So like, Or well in the US at least. So like you could have like the ability to get this like 2, 3 hour shipping. Much more of like it makes a lot more sense when you think of it from that perspective than from Amazon, which maybe in big cities, New York, LA you know, they're able to do overnight 4, 5 hour shipping.
But once you start to get to more like the rural areas, like well, what's going on over there? You know, so Walmart has that opportunity that they even have a couple of units in a bunch of different warehouses depending on where they see this product going, that's where they could offer that really fast shipping.
It's going to be interesting to see how this evolves cause it's really new. So, WFS is definitely, definitely in an evolution stage. You know, we still seeing some listings occasionally where it's WFS, but still shows like four-day shipping. It's like, yo, what's going on over here? There's something to look into. Just if, as a seller, you should always be wary to make sure to, even if you're in WFS, don't just, they'll just set it and leave it, you know? You got to make sure to check to make sure you're actually getting there in time. So just, it's, it's an interesting evolution. I'm, I'm curious to see the outcome.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. So before we get into sort of the more practical considerations, getting onto the platform. I want to go back to profitability. You mentioned the word profitability at the start of the call. what do you see in terms of and this is super generic, I suppose there's lots of factors involved here. But profitability levels, Amazon seller versus Walmart seller, you know, same brand. You mentioned less competition, do you see some of that translate into improved profitability?
David Milstein
Um, 100%. So, In terms of fees, you're pretty much going to be on par with Amazon when it comes to FBA versus WFS fees. Definitely commission fees. Commission fees are pretty much 15% universally, and then there's some categories which are less, but pretty much on par, WFS and FBA. WFS is changing fees. FBA just has some slight changes to fees like there are some little differences over here, which depending on your product will matter, but let's put that aside. Primarily where you're going to be saving the most on Walmart is in your PPC. You know, your margins are going to be much greater just from the fact that there's the lack of competition.
If you could get into space, you're typically winning a lot of bids below 40 cents I would say. You know, auto start, 20 manuals at 30. If you're winning most bids below 40, compare that to Amazon, it's just, it's just not the case. You know? On Amazon you have to just bid so much higher because there's so much competition. But at Walmart, It's not there.
So you're able to save so much on the ad front that it could just gives you so much more margin to work with. Generally. I'll just give some general advice. You want to stick to products that aren't too cheap. Anything under $10 is an extra WFS fee for a dollar. I don't understand why they're doing this, but it exists.
And if anything, even the 10 to $20 range, between WFS fees and everything, like it could cut into and not have the greatest, like let's say ACOS or ROAS, whatever you look at. But once you're getting to let's say that 20, 30, $40 range, if that's like where your product sit, like don't be overpriced for the market. But I'm saying if that's where your category is for a standard price, that's great. You know, that's such a great place to be at. You'll be seeing those 5, 8, 10 row asses. You know, you're getting to a really clean, clean spot over there and great, great profitability.
Paul Sonneveld
Excellent. Yeah. You make a really good point about not having to spend all those advertising dollars. I mean, so's taking up such a large portion of spend these days on the Amazon platform. So, hey, let's talk about how to make it happen. Can I just simply take my Amazon content, put it through one of those channel integration platforms, push it out, sit, sit back, and let the cash roll in. I mean, what do I need to think about?
David Milstein
Yeah. Um, so, you know, I'm not, I don't want to not to hear it, to talk badly on any, uh, any services that exist. All these different feature, all these different services have done way of like bringing over attributes. I always say, you know, bring over some content, but you want to make sure to focus on some key points.
Many people are like, hey, this works great on Amazon, it'll work great on Walmart. That's not the case.
Walmart and Amazon are very different when it comes to copy guidelines. Walmart wants a much shorter title, much, much shorter. They say like 75 characters up to 120. Anything more than that, they really don't want and they take away points. They give you what's called a listing quality score. So you want to make sure that you have your copy set up properly. If you don't have that done, like you're just wasting your time because Walmart's purposely not giving you the rank you want because you're not following their guidelines.
You know, they want you to be in a certain place based on their style guides and like, look at your listening quality score. Follow that, get the good point over there. And then focus your efforts. Like why spend so much time and money in advertising when you're not spending the 15, 20 minutes or whatever it is, however long it takes on your, on your listing. Put in that work for your listing. You know, it's a different platform. The same way you put in your efforts with Amazon. Put in those efforts with Walmart. You know, it's so important.
Something as simple as looking into your category paths or your product type, which are automatically determined by Walmart, if you don't set those up properly, oftentimes it'll come through to Walmart as un uncategorized in the category path or the product type of default, you're screwed if that's happening. That determines which key was you able to rank for. It's a total mess.
We've seen where Walmart will randomly switch a category path. I don't think it's on purpose, but something happened. Something triggers something somewhere, and all of a sudden your aluminum foil pans are now categories that categorized as toys and your sales are now zero. What happened? Look into this. Look for these little things that happen constantly check up on it.
The same effort that you're going to put into your Amazon, I don't know. Okay. Maybe not the same, but like, put in a good amount of effort into your Walmart, because these are like you're growing your children over here. Like you were looking into the work of the future over here. It's not necessarily just like, oh, am I making money today? No. Okay. Forget about it. You know? That's, that's a very, very short minded view, you know.
Paul Sonneveld
So certainly not a set and forget. It does require effort, energy, I mean, like anything in life, right? You want to build an asset, you have to invest the time. So, I know we could probably do a completely separate podcast on this, but I'd love to just, you know, what would be your five tips in terms for Amazon seller’s transition or expanding into Walmart? What are your top tips or considerations in order to be successful?
David Milstein
Sure.
Paul Sonneveld
Probably like a big question and a massive topic, but what would be kind of your headlines in this area?
David Milstein
So I believe almost any product could succeed on Walmart. And when I say almost what I'm cutting out is the first thing you got to take a look into. Make sure your product is not too niche and not overpriced for the space. As good as your product is, and as well as it sells on Amazon, Amazon caters to that. To that individuality, cool product that has this feature.
Walmart's not there yet. It's going to get there the same way Amazon evolved into that. Walmart's evolving into that. So make sure, firstly, look up search volume for your product. Is your product even being looked for? And then look at the main keywords and check your pricing compared to them. If you are more expensive, you're going to have to use other strategies, which will speak out in the five. So that's the first thing. Make sure your product is a good fit.
Number two, optimize your listing. We just spoke about this. Look on your copy, work on your images. Your images typically accused from Amazon should be fine. But make sure they're at least good. Don't put up two images and expect the listing to sell. Walmart's going to take away points for that use. Fill in your attributes, make sure your categories are set up.
Next, get your products into WFS. If you're not using WFS, you have to have some sort of inside two-day shipping that you can handle yourself. If it's three-plus day shipping, it's really hard to rank plus, that plays a big role in the listing quality score. It affects your offer score, and if it's not set up correctly, not good. So make sure WFS in general inventory don't go out of stocks, so send it to WFS. It's a great program. Highly recommend it, and it'll definitely help you move units.
Next, kick off PPC, get Ads running. You could expect it to do well. You optimize, it should work organically. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. You could even run PPC for a month, even if it's not profitable for you. But it's worthwhile just to use that to get that initial zero to one. That's the hardest sale. The hardest sale to make is always that first sale, but once you make that first sale, that second sale comes much easier and just moves from there to two, to five, to 10 to 30. You know, it just needs that initial push to get off the ground.
And another great thing to do is to really have reviews. If you get reviews on your products, this is fantastic. Walmart offers a review accelerator program. Highly recommend it to check that out. And additionally, Walmart offers free reviews indication. Free. It's insane. You can take any reviews from your website as long as they do not come from Amazon. You can't put Amazon reviews illegal but bring in your reviews from your DTC website. It's free, and it's such a great way to, to edge out the competition. You know, you come into a marketplace where the top seller has 25 reviews. You come in with 50 reviews, boom. You're killing that space in a month.
And that's also like one of the strategies if you have a bit of a premium price product, is you could use reviews to kind of get there. But even so, that's not necessarily guaranteed success. But again, find the right product, optimize, send in your inventory to WFS, don't go out of stock, get your reviews and run Ads, and you will be successful on Walmart.
Paul Sonneveld
That is an awesome summary. I was scribbling down here very quickly. David, I love the quote, the hardest sale is to get from zero to one. That is so true. And you know, a lot of times we give up before we get to the one right? So, awesome summary. So, hey, let's I mean, right up until now, this all sounds like a theory, right? You run a Walmart agency, obviously you're keen to sort of demonstrate your expertise. So is there a way you can make it real for us? I mean, what examples have you seen? Have you seen clients that you've taken from X to Y? You know, paint a picture for us. Obviously not sharing confidential information for clients, but some, as we would say, can you put some meat on the bones for us?
David Milstein
For sure, of course. So we work with so many different types of sellers from sellers that have been on the platform for a while that used to have great sales now they don't have great sales. Hey, we need help. Or sellers that were never on the platform at all. My favorite are those ones that put their listings up, never put them to work, and they're like, hey, Walmart just doesn't work. And we take them, and we optimize and we run Ads and they grow phenomenally.
We took a brand, it's funny when I was first speaking to Paul about this, I'm like, yeah, we moved them from 2000 a month to 30,000 a month in less than a year. That was like two months ago. They just passed 45 K last month. So like, they're just, the fact that they've grown already that much consistent growth it's insane. It's really I always like to call it like a snowball effect. You see these accounts that go from 2000 a month literally I could like, there's so many accounts we've seen this. Like it starts nothing. You're just getting your first sales, like we just spoke the zero to one, that $2,000, 4,005, like it just grows so exponentially and as long as you're maintaining that 20 to 50% month over month growth, which is insane.
Think of that. If you could maintain that on Amazon, that's crazy. But the fact that it exists on Walmart, we have so many accounts that are seeing that month over month, it compounds at an insane rate to be able to go from just shoot up in a month from 30 to 40, 45K in a month. And then breaking that, getting to 50 eventually crossing that a hundred K barrier a month.
It's really fantastic to be able to see that, to see so many of these brands. And, you know, in MerchantSpring, obviously we see the sales. We like to like go last 12 months and like, just to see that steep incline is, it's so beautiful. Cause it's not just like a plain incline. It's always going to be very steep. Because it's all about getting those sales, like making those small changes. Sales sale, it it just goes really quickly to a very, to a very steep point up.
And I would say, actually one of the things with a lot of clients that we deal with is they get nervous. Like in the first month or two of working together, they're like, Hey, you know, we're my sales, you know, we're growing a bit, but it's not really going crazy. You have to have that patience. Give it like literally up to three months. And at that point you should typically see with correct management and, and work. It'll start to take off. It'll just be like, boom. All of a sudden one month you're like, whoa, how do we get like 75% growth month over month? What happened over here? Because you have to wait it out. You have to wait just to get over that initial hurdle.
Let's, you have a big catalogue, you have to make sure everything is starting to make little sales. And you can see like, oh, this is products not making sales. What do we have to do to work on those? These products are killing it. Great. Keep pushing for them. You know, you have to look to see how do we go from making sales in, let's say two units to making sales across all units? And that's slowly but surely. Each of these listings turns into a real powerful listing, which it can be. Each again, if you follow these tips, you will be able to see that every listing you have should be able to be a success to some degree, at least within its own category.
So, again, many accounts going from literally nothing to something, or even accounts that went from, let's say doing, they used to do six figures a month. They're now doing, let's say, And the low five figures, what happened? They didn't care. They didn't work on it. We came in, we reoptimize the listings and they're back on their way up to that. Some of them actually one just crossed, just crossed at a hundred K a month to get back to where they previously were in sales just from us, like working on their whole catalog. We started with just like 20 listings. They gave us full access and we've seen that crazy growth. So it's really insane opportunity, but you have to put in the work.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. I love that mindset, right? It's definitely not a set to forget, it's take it all and just tune. It's like this accumulation of all these 1% changes that everything will come together, uh, and it'll start to drive. And, can I just say I love your confidence when you say you will see sales. You know, it will, but you got to stick there. And by the way, I think three months is not that long. Years ago, when I used to run our own agency, I used to tell clients like six months, you know, six months. So, uh, I think three months, you're being very confident, uh, you know, and clearly you've seen lots of K’s cases there, so that's fantastic.
Cool. Hey, before we go onto our last topic, I just want to remind viewers that for those that are tuning in live, we do have a small Q and A section coming up in a just two or three minutes from now. So if you want to ask David anything, doesn't matter how tricky it is, how hard it is, I'm confident he can answer. So pop in your question in the LinkedIn comment section and we will bring it up here.
Alright David, I want to go back to kind of the success and actually the opposite of that, which is, when things have not succeeded. We know that being successful usually comes at some painful learnings and I know there is lots of Amazon sellers who have had a go at Walmart in the past and they've not succeeded. And there's reasons for that right? What have you seen, I mean, when things do not go to plan, um, you know, what are the biggest learnings and pitfalls that you've observed over the course of career and focusing on Walmart.
David Milstein
For sure. You know, very important to know like, what's not going to work. So we've done work with, again, hundreds of brands. Tens of thousands of listings, and we've seen across almost all categories that you could sell. And it's really important to not put your efforts for something that's not going to sell. You have to look and make sure that the product is a good fit for Walmart.
This is something we spoke about a little before, like you have to really do that research, see that this product is able to move on the platform and that you're not overpriced. You know, so many people like that, these extraordinarily premium products, again, that just, they don't work right now in Walmart.
I say definitely worthwhile get that listing up and maybe have like a little budget for it, you know, just to like, just see, eventually it'll get there, eventually it'll get there. So like, don't leave it alone, but like, just have it exist. But to spend so much and like you just, we, we've seen brands, like they spend so much on like these really expensive listings. It's getting clicks, but they have like a, a horrible ROAS, like a 0.5 ROAS. You know, it's definitely, important to be wary of that.
And additionally, if you're selling maybe some really cheaper products, be careful with things like if you're under $10, your minimum WFS fee is going to be 3.45. Yeah, I'm sure Walmart's going to figure something out. But if you're under $10, it's going to be an additional dollar 4.45. So, let's say you're selling your product for $9. Pretty much 50% of it's going to WFS off the bat. Then another 15% for commission. You're leaving yourself a really, really thin margin over there.
So start to look into maybe some other strategies into maybe a multi-pack, you know, sell two units. You could literally sell two units for this for a cheaper fulfillment cost than selling one unit because it's over $10. Like, just some like ideas behind that. And just to know like a certain point, I would never say forget it. Like, don't leave it, like leave it alone because, I believe the future of the marketplace will be the same opportunity as exists with Amazon. But sometimes you just have to take a break. Just let it be, you know, some products are just not a good suit for Walmart. Good fit. Look at that search find, that's going to be your biggest indicator. So definitely, I highly recommend it to dive into that before, like, going crazy with, with spend on Walmart.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Great. Really appreciate those practical nuggets and advice there, David. That is great. Um, cool. Well, let's move into, we've got just around two minutes left and let's take a couple of questions.
I've got one sort of written down here that we've received earlier, but I'm going to go straight to questions from Jeff actually. So Jeff actually posted two questions. I'm going to start with his PPC question. Um, because I think it sort of ties back to a little bit of what you're just talking about. So let me just bring it up there. So just saying, I'm running Ads with max bids and I'm still getting really minimal impressions. Why do you think that is? Is that a keyword issue, a category issue or a detailed page issue or something else perhaps?
David Milstein
For sure. So very common. You throw your listing up there and you expect the ads to start working. But, did you do the work? Did you optimize your listing? Did you check your categories? Like it could be a myriad of things. First, check the listing before you start throwing money into the Ads. Check your product type into the category path. I would say that's the best first place to start.
Then look at your listing quality score. Are you fulfilling with WFS or are you expecting the three-plus day shipping to work? Then your main keyword on the landscape of Walmart. How do you price? And also look at the WFS comparatively. If the top 10 products are WFS, you're going to have a hard time selling your three-plus day thing that's going to arrive next week. So it's very important to look at these things. Look at the pricing for competitors, look at the shipping of competitors.
Make sure your keywords are obviously on point. You want to make sure your keywords are keyword on Walmart. You know, it's a whole strategy obviously, but generally you make keyword in your title and throughout the description, like layering all those additional keywords. You don't want to have like a really heavy intensive keyword title. That's just not the way Walmart expects you to do things. So it could be that, but sometimes it's just no search volume.
Look at the search volume for your main keyword. If your product fits in over there and there's enough search volume, great. If there's two or 10 search volume, you're probably not going to make any sales. Because there's very little people, very few people looking for it. So, but anything in the hundreds, even a few hundred, like we've seen products that have 300 search volume that still make good sales monthly. It's just because it's, it's, it's, it's showing growth, you know, and it's going to continue, continue month over month.
Paul Sonneveld
Thank you, David. Another one from Jeff here he's posting quite a few. I might not be able to get it to all of them, Jeff, but thank you so much for contributing. I appreciate it. Great question. Are there categories, products, or price points just won’t sell on Walmart? For example, $350, uh, electronic chess board. I mean, are there no go areas that may be go areas in the future, but right now you'd steer clear of?
David Milstein
Well, I'm not going to say specific areas that are like, oh, definitely don't look into that. Definitely don't look into that. But let's just say $350 for an electronic chess board. First see, does electronic chess board have search volume? If there's 500 people looking for it a month or 1500 people looking for it a month? Big difference. If there's two people looking for it a month, just like we're just saying right now, look at that search volume for it. Then if you see, let's say you go and you look and there's 5,000 searches monthly that's already good and you can probably sell more premium product.
But if it's more of on the lower end, and you look for an electronic chessboard on Walmart and you see the top 15 products are all under a hundred dollars, you're going to have a really hard time selling that one for $350. It's just very hard to get there. You know? You could flash it in the face as much as you want. It's just not.
Walmart is the marketplace right now for generic products. Why are you going to electric? I know that's your product. Sell a regular chess board. I'm telling you could sell a regular chess board at Walmart right now, which you wouldn't even think about selling on Amazon. At a regular price, you sell a $20 game of chess on Walmart, you'll make sales, which is crazy to think about because on Amazon, you know how many hoops you have to go through to get your product all the way up to the top. That’s where the point is on Walmart. Stick to the more generic products. The niche products tend to not to as well because there's less volume for them, but it will come with time. So just there is hope. Just today may not, may not be the day.
Paul Sonneveld
Not now, maybe in the future. That's a great way. Thank you, David. I'm going to throw up a question here from Cem Aral. He’s saying, what are the first things that you check once you hand over the account? What presumably when the client's hands over the account. Are you utilizing any tools? Other than you mentioned already those five things, uh, you know, what are some of the other steps that you take maybe more from an agency point of view as you onboard a new client? What does it look like?
David Milstein
Sure. I’ll spill all our secrets here. No problem. So there is MerchantSpring’s great. I would say that's a great way to just firstly see your listing scores as well. Obviously your sales is like the main thing that's promoted to you, and there's other information there reporting, but, the way we do, honestly, a lot of our stuff is internal systems that we've already built beforehand.
So we have it all prepped to already get the data from Walmart, take a look at these different things. It's not necessarily an existing system that is someone out there selling. The first things you want to look at is pull an item report. That's such an easy way to look at what's going on with your products. Go through your listings. Are they all WFS eligible are some only seller or fulfilled? There you go. You have a list of which products you want to start converting to WFS. Are they all active? You have a non-published listing. Take a look at that. You look at your category paths, just skim through it. Does it look correct? They give you what's called the shelf path, which is just the current, like the lowest level of the category path. And then they have a whole like the whole category path. Make sure you're categorized correctly. If it says unav, like for unavailable, if it says unav, that's a problem immediately.
Next, go to your growth opportunities. Pull a listings report for all your listings. Take a look at that. Your content discoverability low sucks. Your content discoverability score is low, problem. You look at your offer score, problem. Like you want to see them, make sure those are all clean. They also tell you if your price is competitive with that of Amazon.
Walmart tracks your Amazon prices, and if you're more expensive at Walmart, they're going to take away points for that. Sometimes they categorize you, they put you like with an ASIN that's not even yours. You have to open up a case for that. Make sure you make sure you find all these problems. The first thing is identify problems that exist.
Also on that report, it shows a product type. Look at the product type. Does that look like your product that you're selling? Click on the option to edit it. Look at the other three options that they give you. If the other ones make more sense, choose that. If it's completely wrong, you have to open a case. Make sure you're looking at all these things that just stop you from ranking as a whole. The next thing you want to do is really focus on the images and copy and all that. There's other issues as well.
Content rights is a big problem on Walmart. Back in the day, you have these sellers selling millions of units, or not units, millions of products. They just copy and pasted from Amazon. Like the images were all screwed up and the copy was all bad. You have someone thing that says coming soon and like, it's a real product, you know, so you have to win the content, right cases with Walmart. That's the problem you have to deal with definitely before you get going. Because if you have the wrong content on your listing, it's going to be really hard to make sales.
So many different things to look at when you first get an account. I would say focus, focus on the categories. That's one of the big things. Make sure your listening scores are good. That's just like really a simple way to go at it.
Paul Sonneveld
Thank you David. And thank you for all of you submitted questions. Apologies we haven't got around to all of them. David and I might just jump into the LinkedIn comments section after and just answer some of them as well.
David Milstein
Sure.
Paul Sonneveld
We are out of time, so we're going to have to wrap it up. David, thank you for coming on the show today.
David Milstein
Sure.
Paul Sonneveld
You really helped and you were so generous with your expertise. You know, sharing those insider secrets as you said to help us and help the audience better on stand the opportunity that's out there when it comes to Walmart. Thank you so much. For any viewers that are watching live or maybe on demand later and they're interested in having a conversation with you, exploring your services, I mean, how do they get hold of you? What's the best way?
David Milstein
Sure. So you could email me directly if you'd like david@sellcord.co, S-E-L-L-C-O-R-D.co. You can message us info@sellcord.co. Whatever you like or even just visit our website, sellcord.co. You can see anything you want, tells us a little bit about what we do. We have some blogs you can go ahead and sign up for our monthly emails, whatever you'd like. Sign up for services. Why not? You know, give us a shot. We’ll be sure to get your Walmart sales moving.
Paul Sonneveld
Awesome. That's a great wrap, David. Thank you so much for joining us today and I look forward to inviting you again to go deeper on some of these topics. Thank you so much.
David Milstein
Of course. Thanks for having me.
Paul Sonneveld
All right everyone. That is it for today's episode. I hope you've enjoyed this episode. Stay tuned for some of our new episodes coming up. Head to our registration page on our website. You can see all the other episodes that we've got lined up for you over summer and look forward to seeing you very, very soon. Take care.
