Ep. 2 - Marketplace Success: What Top Walmart Sellers Do Differently

Suppliers big in stores often leave money and leverage on the table online. We break down how established 1P brands can use Walmart Marketplace to control pricing, run fast promotions, send external traffic, and unlock data that transforms both ecommerce results and in-store conversations. The goal isn’t just incremental revenue; it’s a stronger, more defensible Walmart business across channels.

We start by mapping the real differences between 1P and 3P: owning retail and margin, planning a promo calendar around Flash Deals and seasonality, and choosing fulfillment that boosts conversion, especially through WFS. Then we dig into the marketplace levers that move the needle, strike-throughs, category takeovers, Google SEM routed into your PDPs, and Creator Boost for performance-driven influencer reach. Each lever feeds rank signals and share of voice, creating compounding impact when layered with Walmart Connect.

Data is the unlock most suppliers miss. Listing Quality Score ties your ship speed and in-stock rate to discoverability and badges, while sales rank and funnel metrics spotlight where traffic drops off. With that insight, you can decide whether to variate onto your winning 1P page for instant velocity or publish standalone listings to capture more search real estate. We also cover how to reclaim brand control from resellers, fill pickup-and-delivery shipping gaps, and when DSV suppliers should shift to 3P for speed.

Our award-winning case study shows the playbook in action: Walmart-exclusive SKUs, Walmart-specific content, disciplined investment in ads and promos, and expansion into Canada and Mexico. The result was 250 percent year-over-year growth and $10M in year two, plus better line reviews and stronger merchant trust. 

If you’re ready to scale smarter, subscribe, share this with your team, and leave a review with the lever you’ll test first.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Welcome back everybody to the Marketplace Code, the podcast where you'll be learning everything you need to know about Walmart and how to grow on the beautiful Walmart.com. Today we have myself, David Milstein, and Michael Lebhar co-hosting this. We're both co-hosting it, right?

SPEAKER_00 0:22

I guess so.

Award-Winning Case: 250 Percent Growth

Holistic Walmart Strategy Across Channels

SPEAKER_01 0:22

I guess so. Why not? Yeah. How does it work? Um, so we're very excited today to discuss a little bit about how you might be a wumpy supplier, you have a strong presence in store. You heard about Walmart Marketplace. I'm sure you've gotten calls, you've gotten emails, they're all bugging you to get there. What does that mean? What are they, what do they want from you? How can you actually leverage this to grow your business? So, lucky for you, we uh we had a great, great experience with this. We have actually won uh an award from this from Walmart themselves, a marketplace acceleration award for a major supplier. This is a nine-figure supplier who came to Marketplace. They saw some potential over there in their first year. They saw this as an opportunity. They partnered with us and we're able to drive a massive, a massive increase in the following year, a 250% increase year over year, uh, topping 10 million in just their second year of doing marketplace. So it really been a great experience, really, to be able to see how they could grow sales through another channel that they weren't for necessarily capturing in store. So we'll talk a little bit about the benefits of what of how of what does this bring by going to marketplace? What benefits does marketplace have, let's say, over the traditional 1P method of selling, as well as you know, some strategies that you could leverage through Marketplace to even improve your 1P dot or in-store.com business.

SPEAKER_00 1:42

And I think the biggest advantage the suppliers could have in general is when you start looking at your Walmart business holistically. And looking at your business holistically, you know, encompasses a lot of things. It's for your store business, it's you're going to want to look at your module items, your feature items, and tying a strategy together. But as it expands to.com, it's what's your onep.com strategy. And it used to be like, what are your 1P owned items? What are your dropship items? Now that's expanding to what's your marketplace strategy. And the suppliers that are we really winning are leveraging marketplace as a way to support their be a good partner and support Walmart. That's one reason, obviously. Number two is as a way to just expand their assortment and start giving customers more of what they want at Walmart, right? They, if you don't have your full assortment on Walmart, because Walmart's not buying your full assortment, your customers are still on Walmart.com and they want your other items. So that's another reason. Third reason is a lot of just growing your share of voice, right? There's going share in the category online is in your control. In store, it's a little bit less in your control. Online, it's in your control. So it's really about how do you leverage marketplace to grow your share. And then how do you build another successful sales channel, right? And I think by tying those together is when suppliers really win. And the suppliers that have been leaning in with marketplace understand that value and don't look at it as just like, oh, this is another channel I'll do, I'll drive some sales. They really look at it, how does holistically help my business? And we have countless suppliers that use this as a way to not only generate a lot of revenue, but also to get items in store. So we could talk through some examples, but I think in this conversation, we're gonna really try to talk through how to think about marketplace in the realm of your omnichannel business. And then what are things you could do as a one piece supplier expanding to marketplace that are going to be key for your success. So maybe David, you could walk us through like what are some things that when you're just starting off being a one piece supplier, moving on to marketplace that are important?

3P Fundamentals: Pricing, Fees, Fulfillment

SPEAKER_01 3:25

Yeah, most definitely. So this is really, I mean, this is a major topic. We'll probably have a few, a few sessions on this. But when you're a one-piece supplier looking to expand, you have to first understand it is a different platform. It is a different method of doing sales. You're used to traditionally getting POs, you know, going through more traditional one P methods, especially you're a large retailer, you don't really know the e-commerce space so well. So it is important to really wrap your head around what e-commerce is, right? It's gonna be very different than your traditional uh 1P sales channels. Even for one P.com, it's different than that. They're still not making POs from you. You're getting order at a time, you have to handle the fulfillment of that. So you have to just understand the, you have to lay the groundwork. You have to just understand what is Walmart Marketplace, how it could even operate on this platform. So for those of you who have been DSV suppliers, dropship vendors, you know, you you do know of this concept where orders are coming in daily. It's still a little bit different than the way it's done, uh, obviously through uh through DSVan through Marketplace, but that would be maybe the closest thing historically to Marketplace today. So for those of you who are familiar with Amazon Marketplace is essentially a very similar model to Walmart. You're gonna have your products listed yourselves, obviously on your platform. Same thing as supplier one. You have a different version of seller center on the three-piece side. And then here you're going to have your customers go ahead, they're gonna find your products, and you're gonna have to handle fulfillment. This can be done through your own channels if you have a warehouse, a 3PL, or some sort of integration. Let's say you have a Shopify through your D2C, you could use integrations to there, or you could leverage Walmart's fulfillment network. So Walmart has a service called WFS, Walmart Fulfillment Services, where you're able to send in pallets in advance to Walmart and they'll handle all the fulfillment for you. So it's really hands-off. You just send in a pallet every every now and again, and they'll be handling that for you. So that's just some of the technical pieces. There are obviously numerous other pieces that are different. For example, pricing. Unlike with 1P, you know you're you're used to getting a cost. No matter what, Walmart sets the price of your product, and maybe they have map, maybe they have some different things that they've worked out with you, but there's a cost, there's a cost feature to it, right? They pay, no matter what, every unit that gets sold, they pay you your$6. Doesn't matter if they sold it for$12, for$6, or for$300, they're paying you that cost. Whereas on 3P, you're always getting the price. You're getting the price of the product however you set it. So, and on that, Walmart takes how how does Walmart make their money here? So there's obviously a few different methods. They're gonna take the commission, and that's going to be their standard, their standard fee. That varies from about 8%, typically 15% is a standard. It does vary depending on the category. You could just Google Walmart referral fees and you'll get a full, a full list by category of how that's supposed to be. And then they take their money if you're going to use their them for fulfillment through WFS. And then obviously your Walmart Connect, if you know you're going to be advertising and really marketing these products to the broader audience. So that's just a standard just overview of what are some of the basics to get going. Right? When you set up your listings over there, you need to factor these things, these things as well. You need to factor in the price, very important. You need to factor in what your logistics are going to be in order to get your product to the customer. You obviously don't want your products to be slow, but a lot of the fundamentals that you're familiar with on the One Piece side, on the content quality and all those things, those are all the same. It's the same listing at the end of the day. So you do have all those standard things that you know, but 3P has these different ideas. And the the cool thing about these is we call them like the different levers that 3P has. And let's let's deep dive a little bit of what are those levers on 3P that let you utilize that that you can utilize on your through Walmart marketplace that you don't necessarily get through supplier one or for your 1P products.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

And I think that's actually really critical is when you think about if somebody comes to me like, what's the reason why some 3P um suppliers that leverage 3P do really well and the ones they don't, it's really comes down to the ones that leverage the levers, right? And when they leverage those, they're able to actually really grow a lot. Now, I think what's really cool is when you leverage all those tools that Walmart gives you, it doesn't only grow your 3P business, it also grows your 1P business. And you're now enabling a lot of tools, functions that you wouldn't have had to grow your 1P business. Because a lot of times for suppliers, you'll have some variations be 1P, some 3P, and you're using the levers to grow the 3P items, but in turn, that's actually growing the 1P items as well. Or it's even if they're not on the same listing, it's growing the brand, it's growing the items, it's growing the traffic to your brand store, things of that nature. So I think that's what's really interesting about being able to use those levers to grow.

SPEAKER_01 7:49

Yeah, so let's let's go through some of those. What are those key levers that you do have with 3P that you don't necessarily have on 1P? Want to talk through a few of them?

The Key Levers You Control

SPEAKER_00 7:58

Yeah. So uh there's really a wide range, but we're gonna kind of cover the main one. So the first one is promotions, right? On as a one Piece supplier, you don't control your retail. So in turn, you don't really control your promotions. There's ways to partner with merchants on it, but they have to take retail action. It takes time and coordination, and it's not guaranteed. Um, on marketplace, you control your retail. So you're able to run promotions. Now there's all types of promotions you could run. You could just run a strike through on your pricing, but you could also, Walmart has a whole program called Flash Deals, which is a whole segment within Walmart that's specifically catered to marketplace item or marketplace deals. Um, and every week they have different items that are in there. You're able to go into your seller account and submit your items to those flash deals. You get added exposure. Sometimes it actually will offer you a commission discount if you offer the deal. So sometimes you're not even funding that much of it. Um and now they actually created it as a way where it's in seller center, it will actually show you if they're offering you a discounted commission rate. So that's another um, that's one key avenue and key lever that you could pull to actually increase your sales. Another area is really when it comes to external traffic. Walmart marketplace team has built a lot of external traffic capabilities that actually allow you to drive external sales. So one of those being Google SEM. So you're able to actually put in advertising dollars that Walmart will spend on your behalf on Google shopping ads, which will drive Google ads into your listing. So that's another area. And then Walmart also launched something called Creator Boost, which allows you to input commission rates you're willing to pay creators to promote your items. Creators will then promote your items and you'll pay commission rates on that. Silkware launched our own prior program similar to that called Dash Naboost. And the same idea we just leverage different creators, where you'll come into our platform, you could offer commission rates, and then we'll then distribute that to our massive network of creators that we have, and they'll promote the items. We'll get back to reporting how many sales you drove. And what's great is you only that's a performance play. So you only pay on the sales that you've driven. Um, so not only is driving sales, but it's also driving brand awareness, exposure, and obviously a lot of um traction with that. Walmart also loves when they see that you're sending external traffic to your listing, it's gonna help your organic rank and your searchability. So that's a great other lever that we use.

Promotions, Flash Deals, And Calendars

External Traffic: Google SEM And Creators

SPEAKER_01 10:03

Yeah, for sure. I mean, the price one I would say is really gonna be your home run. You know, just just like Michael mentioned, you have, if you go to Walmart.com right now, you are going to see Flash Deals as one of the key tiles over there. And that's dedicated for marketplace sellers to be able to bring their products there and and showcase them. Um, something to know a little bit more about it. There's within each flash deals, there's typically what's called a tile takeover where there will be one category that's being highlighted. But every week you could be submitting your products. There is, there are some technical pieces to it. You have to wait X amount of weeks between flash deals that you could submit different items, you could rotate through your catalog. But again, it's just a great way to help build some more of that brand equity. Let's say you have a product that is in store already and you have it online and it's doing its thing. You want to really expand and bring more products to your catalog, really get more products in store. You could take a 3P product and you can run some really great promotions on it. Now, maybe your profit margins are very slim, or maybe it's even not making money. But, you know, this is an another channel to use as to use to build marketing over here, right? You're building a better brand through getting more sales through this product, and through that, you're able to now push towards your One Pie listing and get more eyes on that, and just building an overall better picture and story that you could go to your merchant with and say, hey, check out how our brand is performing online, check out our sales. We just we got a great placement in this in this deal, and things are going great. Uh, in addition to flash deals, there's promo campaigns, which are seasonal, and it you could see this all through uh through your seller center. Uh, there's obviously different sizes. They're gonna have Walmart's always looking to have the next the next type of promo that they're going to add, but there have been ones that have been there for years. Obviously, Black Fridays are major ones, but you also have new year, new you, like all things around that. We're going to have recurring promotions that they have some historical uh performance behind that you could ask if you have an account manager with Walmart. You ask them, hey, um, maybe you could add you could share a little bit more details how our category has performed historically, and you could then see what direction you want to go with your products, right? You can see, okay, this would be a great promo for me. And it in an ideal world, you really want to have a full calendar already set up from the beginning of the year. Walmart will share this detail you here. Here is when I want to have my pricing at different points for different products, and it just gives you a lot more of that flexibility to say, okay, now's going to be a strong season for me because I'm going to have these items in this specific campaign, which is being pushed by Walmart, and now things are working really well. Let's say, again, you know when your law interviews are in advance, you're going to be planning in advance and that, hey, let's make sure we have a strong promo before that so I could come to my meeting with some really good data. You know, just some key levers that you could that you could utilize. It's actually pretty fascinating that Walmart's really given so much, so many of these different toolkits to three P sellers while they don't necessarily exist on the one Piece side. And it does make sense because it's really more of a scrappy process over there, right? You have to really like figure things out and say, okay, how can I take this full toolkit here and utilize it to make my brand improve, to make my my products really move, and then potentially, you know, let's say you're not even in store, you just want to get in store, right? Obviously, using those levers as a purely 3P player, but how can you use this full toolkit to succeed on the platform? So uh I think that I think there's a couple other areas that Walmart has done on 3P, which are quite interesting, which is some different reporting reporting methods that they have over there, which they don't necessarily have on the one P side. So, firstly, is there you're going to have a lot more details around your overall listing quality score. You might hear it as an OLQ, you'll hear it as an LQS listing quality quality score. Why am I why am I highlighting this over here? So you're familiar as a supplier with your CQS, your content quality score, which is purely uh derived from the product itself, how are how is your copy, your images, your attributes, all of those different features. But what listing quality score is beyond that. Listing quality score is actually unique to an individual seller, not unique to an item. For what do I mean by that? Let's say you're selling a product, if two people are selling it, they're both gonna have the same content quality score because it's identical listing. Versus a listing quality score has to actually do with how the seller interacts with the listing. And what I mean by that is how are their ship speeds? If you have two people selling the same product, one guy's a five-day ship speed, one guy's a two-day ship speed, they're gonna have differing listing quality scores. And through this, you're able to get different benefits. You have strong listing quality score, you could become what's called a pro seller with Walmart, you could even get further commission breaks by having these different statuses. But this is just a great way that Walmart's helping you as a seller really understand a little bit more about your product and or about your your gives you another lever over there to say, hey, here's different methods that you could use to make yourself have a better product. You know, you want to make sure that your shipping speed is better, you want to make sure that you're not out of stock at all, you want to make sure that your reviews are good, you don't have any canceled orders, all these different pieces just to show, hey, here are your good products, here are products that are selling well. Furthermore, there is really fascinating details in reporting on sales rank. So the way I like to view it is Walmart Marketplace is obviously a competitor to Amazon's marketplace. And on Amazon, there is a lot of data, like an extreme amount of data when it comes to, let's say, how items are performing. And as a seller, you could go in and really, let's say you're just you're just spectating, you want to see and you want to identify what's an opportunity for you. You're able to use all these data points to see, okay, hey, here's my top competitor, here's who's growing in the marketplace. This guy just grew. And you could even, as a seller yourself, you're able to see what's called there's the BSR bestseller rank, where you could see how well your product is doing overall within a category and all these different points. Walmart's trying to counter that with their own version called sales rank. Now, it's not publicly available as you can find on Amazon, but within each seller account, you're able to see for your own listings what your sales rank is. Now, this is not at all available on the one P side, which is which is quite interesting, but on the three P side, just using something like the sales rank, which they've enriched far beyond that to include impression rank, click click rank, at the cart rank, and even giving you the details on item queue level. Something we'll speak about in a different episode because I could talk for hours on this. But just that data alone is just so insightful and just interesting and fascinating that this is where Walmart decides to put this because they understand that as a 3P seller, there are all these things that you could do to tweak, right? Whereas on the one piece side, obviously there's there's what to do. But on the 3P, there's just a full, a full assortment. So let's let's talk about some strategies, right? How can you improve? Like, what is a a fine way to say you're a one-piece supplier, how can I just simply leverage 3P to improve, to improve my my store sales? Let's let's talk through some of those strategies over there.

Data Advantages: LQS And Sales Rank

SPEAKER_00 16:49

Yeah, so I think some of the things you could do as when you're a three-piece supplier, really looking like what could I do to improve my sales, my overall sales and my in-store sales, leveraging your three P business. I think some ways to look at it is you have a you have a certain category that you're you're losing some share to a competitor, right? And that competitor is slowly digging away at your at your sales. So your key one item, you're gonna continuously promote that, right? So let's say you're selling resistance bands, right? And you're the you have one guy resistance bands in store and that's um doing really well. But now there's this competitor that has different types of resistance bands and slowly gaining share. What happens is when they're gaining share, is slowly your main resistance band listing is starting to lose a little bit of the sales. And customers, when they're searching resistance bands, are starting to resonate more with the brand that has more share. That's what happens oftentimes. So the way you could counter that leveraging 3P is okay, you have your 1P item. Now you launch different variations on 3P and different listings, actually, on 3P. And by doing that, you're now addressing the customer that isn't exactly, let's say it was a three-pack that isn't looking for a three-pack, it's looking for, or that wasn't looking for three-pack fabric, is looking for rubber. Now you're addressing that customer without losing that customer, that same customer that came that wanted rubber once, losing it to competitor. And through now they're, you know, you're building more recognition, you're taking up more share of the page. So that's a one key way of how brands are looking at it. A second way our brands are looking at it is like, I really want to get an item into store. Merchant's not biting on it. So what do you do? And the mod review with the line reviews are in six months. What do you do? You get the item in, you launch it online, you're able to prove success to it, and then you go to your merchant, you're like, okay, not only do I know this item is good, Walmart customers are telling me it's good, and I've already done the done the work and been a good partner of taking this item. It also lowers their risk because let's say they're gonna buy their initial fail is let's say they're gonna buy 20,000 units of it and you're gonna and you're selling online of that item already, a few thousand units, they know guaranteed they're gonna still sell those, they're gonna sell those units online. They're probably selling them quicker because it's quicker shipping than what you had. They can store. So it also reduces the risk level. But practically, it also shows that if the if dot com is moving that amount, it's the same customers for the most part, then in-store customers will likely also resonate with the item. So I think it really allows you on items that you're confident should be in store and have a really good position to be in store. And vice versa, you might try to pitch an item to a merchant and the merchant might take it, but it might not be a great item for stores. And now it doesn't sell well, it ruins your relationship, you have issues, you have to deal with markdowns and all that. So it's also a way to get great validation on an item that you're not sure of with limited risk. So that's kind of one key way I've seen brands really leverage it.

SPEAKER_01 19:25

So something interesting about that, which I find people don't really talk about, but you have all the order data on 3P. And if you're selling a product and you're really pitching it to your merchant and they're you know hesitant of store count and location, you could just pull an export of all your orders. You have buy, you can go to the address if you're crazy, but you could go by zip code, you could go by by state and really see hey, here's a heat map, here's what my products are selling. These are going to be the best stores that are gonna fit my products.

SPEAKER_00 19:52

We actually had a line review yesterday was with a merchant, and the merchant was asking us like, once we roll out a test, like which demos could be good, and we're actually pulling. Reports from different marketplaces, sales of all of marketplace sales, and be like, hey, these are the states that actually work well for us. And they they trust that data because it's accurate.

Tactics To Grow Share And Win Store Space

Variations, Brand Shop, And Shipping Gaps

SPEAKER_01 20:08

And it's Walmart. And they could, you know, data. Yep. Yeah, that that that's great. So let's talk a little bit about, you know, some of those initial strategies you mentioned, like the share of voice, how you could increase, increase uh your product expansion to really take that over. There's you, I I tell this to everyone, to everyone that sells products that you know your customer hopefully better than I know it. You know your products better than I know it. And you should really understand what your customers are wanting. And when you have your products in store, generally speaking, it's gonna be a limited assortment, right? Unless you have a obviously extensive relationship with Walmart and you have a massive catalog in store, even if maybe wonp.com, you definitely have products that are just not being sold through through stores. It just makes sense. There's just too many variations, too many lines you have. So, how can you how can you with this data, right? With with your information, knowing what products sell, you can then go ahead and exactly like Michael was saying, right? Let's you have different size counts of a certain product. You could do a couple of ways. You can variate it with the current 1P listing. Let's you have a strong selling 1P product right now, right? A single pack of uh, I don't know, of lemonade, right? And you want to sell your 12 pack as well. You could variate it on that same listing and immediately bringing start bringing a sales tomorrow because people are already clicking on that one P listing, people are already going there and you're you're just able to quickly boost your 3P traffic. Now, let's say the inverse of that is if you have a 1P product that's not succeeding as well, if you're varying it with a 3P product that you throw on a deal and you put it and you get a really good placement for one of these promo campaigns, boom, you just have a lot of traffic down to your 1P product through your 3P. So really each one could benefit each other. There's also other ways that you can use and you can utilize this to um to boost each other. There's you could use rich media to get um uh comparison charts and share, share things. You could obviously a very simple one, which actually Walmart did a great job of job of this, is through brand shop, you could have 1P and 3P within the same brand shop. So it's really great that they have that they have that you that you could just give that opportunity for customers to just be able to see, hey, where do they want to purchase your product? And even more so, especially this is a no-brainer. If you're a supplier and you don't currently have a shipping option on your listings, you only have a pickup and delivery option immediately. That's an immediate opportunity that you should leverage marketplace to reach that. Now, reach those customers. Now, something that might be interesting, you might think, hey, I do have a shipping option. What if you're in a small test test assortment, right? You're not in that many stores. So maybe for you, you live in a region where there's a store near you, so you have shipping. What about the guy all the way across the country who doesn't have that? So leveraging marketplace allows you to be able to service those gaps that your OnePie doesn't necessarily cover today. That's one method. Again, you're just you're jumping on as a variation. Now, the second idea is to be able to come in as a completely separate listing. And what this helps you do is it's it enables a couple of things. It does give you more share of voice, which is a very key component when somebody's searching for a certain keyword. If they see that you're dominating and they have four or five of your listings that are showing up, and none of your competitors, even if you're paying for that, they immediately resonate that okay, this is the brand that that is the winner here, and this is the product that I'm going to buy. Whereas if you only have that one product in store, you're gonna have some difficulties there. Now, something that Walmart uh marketplace is actually doing to help brands expand to these other marketplaces, is there's another case here where maybe your products actually are selling, but it's not you who's selling them. How often time, how often or commonplaces is that you go ahead and you search your brand and you see thousands, hundreds, uh even tens of other people selling your listings. They have poor reviews, maybe their images are all messed up, and all these different issues that they're facing, but they're making sales, right? They could actually be doing well from there. You might even have authorized resellers, which you know that's definitely a method to go. But if you see that they're actually making money on your products and you have the infrastructure to go ahead and fulfill and build these orders, what a great way to help just expand your assortment to some to a listing that is already succeeding. You don't even have to do the legwork to get the listing up and running. It exists. All you have to do is just create your account. As a brand owner, you should be able to win all the content rights on it. You just take over those all those existing sales and you're making money immediately. You don't have to go through the work of really building up these products. And especially for larger suppliers, most of you, if you work directly with someone at Marketplace, they will love to speak to you and they'll help you and they'll show you, hey, here are the products today that are selling well. Jump into these and they and they'll just say, hey, here's there's immediately immediate sales on the table today that you that you could be making if you just were the person that was supplying these products. So again, just another a number of cool ways that you as a supplier 3p could really could really move things together. A topic that is that is quite interesting is for it's a little bit more niche, but for those of you who come from dropship as as history, right? If you're a DSV supplier, so one of the issues with DSV, one of the primary issues is shipping speed, right? As a dropship vendor, you probably know this. You might have if you're shipping out of let's say California, your customers in New York are not getting your product in time. And you'll notice that maybe your sales aren't as strong because of that, right? So that's just another great opportunity to really shift towards marketplace. Now you have to obviously run the numbers and make sure that it makes sense for you. But if you come up with a proper with a proper math and you can say maybe you even have to increase your price by a couple of dollars, but if it offsets that slow shipping speed, that oftentimes could just be the thing that gets you over the edge to win those customers and to and to get uh and to make those sales. So that's just another cool way that if you're a DSV supplier, especially if Halmart's pushing you out, you're not really sure where to go, marketplace is a great solution for you. So let's take this home. Michael's gonna talk about our award that we won for Sumi. He's gonna share hands-on experience as to what we did with this account. Again, a major one piece supplier, nine figures in store, and they were able to jump on marketplace and within their second year, top 10 million in sales. Let's talk through it, Michael. How do you do it?

SPEAKER_00 26:07

Sumi is a great example of a supplier that really leans in with Walmart. They're a true Walmart partner, and that means that throughout their evolution with Walmart, they really partner with them. Walmart, when Walmart started rolling out dot com and dot com one piece started being a big thing, they evolved quickly with it. They invested heavily with Walmart's ad business, Walmart Connect, and they've constantly evolved with it. So when Marketplace came along, they invested in Marketplace, they saw some early success and they're they realized that there's a lot of opportunity here and we really want to lean in with it. So they partnered with Cellcord and we really became their strategic arm to help build and grow the marketplace business. They understood to manage a marketplace business is very different than a wholesale retail, a wholesale business. Um, but if you have the commitment to do it and willing to make the investment, then you could be really successful and it'll help them stand out as a supplier. So what we did is we build a strategy where we have Walmart exclusive SKUs, right? SKUs that are gonna, number one, we're gonna bring a lot of volume that are gonna complement our total catalog and complement our total business and items that we could potentially get in store. And we build that out. Um we've had some really good early success. We, we, and the keys was really partnering with Walmart, understanding which items were good opportunities, making sure we we we customize everything for Walmart. So that means optimizing titles, keywords, descriptions, content very specific to Walmart, and then making sure once we have that, we properly invest in making those items the top sellers and just layering on that momentum. So we've been able to really grow that business to uh eight figure business, and it's gonna continue to go through there. Uh from there, we actually expanded into Walmart Canada and Walmart Mexico and really expanding the total Walmart business there. And what we've seen is just a lot of synergies in the categories. We have multiple brands, but in the categories that we have one P business, our One Pie business is stronger because we have more assortment. We're getting more items into store and more conversations with merchants because of the work that we're doing on the on the extended assortment items. And then on the marketplace side, they've just been a close partner because they see how much we lean in on it. So I think, you know, there's a lot of other success stories we have like that. I think Sumi's a great example, and it's cool because we won the award for that. But there's really a lot of other success stories that are like that. And I think it's really an example for any supplier that really wants to enhance their overall business. And I think it's with everything. It's like you could either be ahead of the party and get a lot of the advantages that come with that, or you could be late to the party and pay the price, right? And for some brands, it makes sense to be late to the party and they can't move quick enough. But there's a lot of value when you could come early. You don't want to be too early. And I think marketplaces with this a really interesting spot where like you can make enough money from running it as a strong business and you be you're still ahead of the curve technically. Um, as opposed to two, three years ago, there wasn't so much meat on the bones doing that. Now it's a lot more. So um, yeah, I just think there's so much opportunity with suppliers. And if you think about how do I become a good partner in Walmart, leverage the right levers that they give me, and then really use it as a way to holistically round out my omnichannel business with Walmart. Marketplace is really the solution for that. And that's the suppliers that have been leaning in with it. I've seen that success from it. Replicate that success today, folks. Reach out. We're here.

unknown 29:04

All right.

SPEAKER_00 29:05

See you on the next episode, everybody. Thank you. Bye.