Why Growing Brands Are Selling on Walmart Canada

Whether you’re running a local company or looking to expand your product line into the Canadian market, the affluent population of 38 million people presents ample opportunities for growth. With any eCommerce sales strategy, selecting your channels will ultimately dictate your success. 

Walmart Canada’s launch in 2022 presented a new, stand-out option for targeting the country’s top consumers. By implementing exclusive parameters and leveraging a household name, Walmart’s sellers are exposed to 13x more buyers than any other marketplace in Canada. 

If Canadian consumers are part of your target market, the Walmart Marketplace may be your next strategic move. Here’s why some of the top-growing brands are jumping on the opportunity:

Exclusive Exposure 

Although Walmart is the second largest marketplace, it exposes brands to significantly more consumers because of its higher standards. Unlike other marketplaces, Walmart requires a more intensive qualification process to sell. 

The Walmart name comes with over 6 decades of trusted experience throughout the world. Maintaining this reputation comes with a prerogative to provide only the best products for their buyers.

For brands, this equates to less listing competition. Where other marketplaces are flooded with options and top players out-bidding the mid-market, Walmart presents a less crowded option. The selective process does not negate the product offerings consumers hope to find on Walmart’s Marketplace. Their team is strategic in bringing on new sellers that meet market demand. 

A Large, Canadian Audience

Not only do Walmart sellers have less competition, but they’re exposed to nearly half of the Canadian market. With 17 million monthly active users, Walmart Canada brings their large customer base to you. 

Of this large audience, the most significant segment is millennials who are 67% more inclined to shop online due to convenience factors. When considering how to target millennial Canadians, assessing the convenience level of digital channels can dictate which platforms you select. With Walmart’s high-quality standards and seamless digital experience, this digitally savvy audience is likely to return to the marketplace as a repeat buyer of your products.

A few more stats on the Walmart Canada audience: 

• 41% are 18 to 34 years old
• Most are in urban areas
• 55% are 3+ family households
• 54% have a mid-high income
• 78% have achieved higher education 

While other marketplaces capture large audiences in a competitive landscape, Walmart Canada offers a refined audience looking for your product offering. 

Entry Cost & Growth Possibilities with Walmart Canada

Unlike other marketplace options, getting started with Walmart Canada is free and has 0 monthly fees. Other marketplaces have a complex pricing structure that includes monthly, handling, storage and order fees. 

How much does it cost to be on Walmart Marketplace?

As a seller on Walmart Canada, you only receive fees once you’re successfully selling with rates ranging from 6-20%, a competitive rate compared to the standard.

Here’s a cost breakdown:

Walmart’s growth as a market leader is indicative of how far brands can scale as sellers. For the last 3 years, Walmart Marketplace has outpaced competitors with a staggering 200% sales growth. Their consistent success is helping sellers expand their revenue targets with Canadian consumers. 

Walmart Fulfillment Services 

Canadians prioritize convenience and timely delivery. Sellers on Walmart Canada can live up to this expectation with 2-day delivery times using Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS). Shipping with WFS provides end-to-end orders and dedicated customer service. 

Control Over Product Listings

The marketplace UI provides sellers with an intuitive platform to keep product listings updated and competitive. 

Log into Walmart Marketplace to seamlessly add or edit items in bulk or as a single item:

Bulk Editing

Updates listings in one click. This is a great way to keep inventory up-to-date during seasonal changes, when you need to make price adjustments, or just update descriptions and images.

Single Item Editing

For individual product updates, the platform gives you control over each listing. Edit everything from product titles, descriptions, pricing and images directly from the dashboard.

Pricing Strategies can be edited in-app to help you maintain a competitive edge:

• Dynamic Pricing 
  Set automated pricing and adjust your prices based on market conditions.
• Promotional Pricing
  Implement discounts and promotions.

Inventory Management: Report your inventory to ensure you’re never out of stock:

• Low Stock Alerts
  Set up alerts to notify your teams when stock levels are getting too low.

More instructions on how to manage the Walmart catalog can be found here.

Being able to update your listings in Walmart helps provide control over inventory and prevent stock-outs. By keeping consistent product information, you ultimately  enhance brand presence and increase overall conversions. 

Where Businesses Have Trouble With the Walmart Marketplace Catalog

Walmart Canada is designed to help growing businesses sell products to a large audience of Canadian consumers. With successful growth and an increasing audience, it is trusted by sellers and buyers alike.

For growing brands, a diverse marketplace portfolio and eCommerce presence can help target your ideal customers across multiple touchpoints. Managing these, however, can seriously hinder growth. 

Inventory Management Issues

In a multi-vendor marketplace, keeping inventory up-to-date requires meticulous attention to details and is highly susceptible to error. While most scaling businesses will have this data set in their ERP, the Walmart Marketplace does not have native integrations with common solutions such as Netsuite and Spire. 

Without a middleware-enhanced Order Management System, data and inventory are left disjointed. A common workflow for an eCommerce manaer, is logging into ERPs for the most recent inventory and financial records, logging into each marketplace and eCommerce store to check for low inventory levels, cross-referencing what’s available or needs to be re-stocked via the ERP, then manually updating each sales channel. A majority of Walmart sellers are still navigating how to automate this workflow. 

With tools like OrderEase, connections between sales channels and ERPs is completely automated with a no-code connection. When all your systems are harmonized, inventory management is offloaded from your team, allowing them to spend more time on optimizing listings and product strategies. Having a no-code platform for connecting into sales channels, ERP and multiple order management tools such as shipping solutions, WMS systems, means you can deploy on new channels faster without any developers needed.

Catalog Maintenance

Having a tool to control inventory will help ensure items are never out of stock, but there’s still a lot of labor that goes into uploading product information.

While the Walmart Marketplace does provide control over listings including bulk uploads, most successful brands are managing multiple marketplaces and ecommerce stores. In fact, to sell on Walmart you need to have proven success on at least 1 other channel. This means you’re replicating your work at least once and at scale with a growing business, it becomes a massive undertaking. 

With OrderEase, sellers optimizing on Walmart and other channels can update their catalogs from one central hub and deploy in seconds. Whether you have a lighter strategy or a more refined catalog approach, you have complete control over where and when listings are displayed. 

Selling on Walmart Canada with OrderEase

For Walmart sellers, OrderEase is the only option supporting growing businesses with no-code workflows and catalog management. Where traditional solutions enable large, established enterprises, OrderEase steps in to service companies that are ready for the next stage of their evolution. 

OrderEase is leading the no-code revolution in order management, providing complete workflow automation between sales channels, ERP, and API-first integrations. 

Bringing OrderEase into your Walmart marketplace strategy is designed to help you scale sales faster without investing in new teams or antiquated systems. Together, Walmart and OrderEase are helping businesses expand into the Canadian market and gain a competitive advantage in a landscape of multi-channel selling.