Winning the Walmart Buy Box

Recently, the IPSecure team attended the Prosper conference in Las Vegas. Two days of great conversations with smart and committed brands and marketplace sellers - not to mention a little fun and some great food! Many of those conversations shared a clear theme - winning the Walmart Buy Box. While every brand and business is unique, our advice shared a clear theme, too: Visibility is key.

Whether we were speaking with a brand that was just starting out on Walmart or a brand that was getting ready to launch on the platform, there was a lot of excitement and sense of opportunity for this new frontier. Coupled with that outlook was a realization that Walmart holds a hint of the “Wild, Wild West” frontier sensibility as the marketplace firms up their processes to protect brands, intellectual property and the Buy Box.

Before You Launch

Even if you haven’t officially launched yet, your brand may already appear on Walmart. The more desirable the brand, the more likely that sellers have created listings featuring it.

How these sellers initially obtain the products can be a difficult question to answer. Sometimes, these sellers are simply folks with a few extra units that they wish to unload; more commonly, though, they are  connected to the brand’s supply chain, such as a distributor or wholesaler, and they’re obtaining large amounts of inventory at a discounted price.

As Walmart Marketplace continues to grow, it’s less about whether your brand is visible on Walmart and more about how it is being presented and who is representing it. IPSecure can help you understand who is selling your products on Walmart, create profiles for them and prioritize those who are impacting the consumer experience.

Using this analysis, you can also understand how these sellers are presenting your brand and impacting your customers.

Questions to answer include:

• What kind of sellers are attached to those listings?
• What do the reviews say?
• What is the quality of the content on those listings?

Armed with those answers, you can take action against any rogue sellers you uncover and develop a plan to make your actual launch more robust and successful.

After You Launch

If you’ve already launched on Walmart, it’s critical that you stay on top of controlling your channel. We’ve spoken with too many brands who launched on Amazon years ago and allowed rogue resellers to run rampant. The effects of this can take years to undo. Don’t let this happen to you on Walmart.

Rogue sellers are smart, and they know that Walmart is not being monitored as closely by brands as other marketplaces. These sellers sense an opportunity as Walmart ramps up its protective measures. Expect nefarious activities to increase - counterfeits, bait and switches, altered products - to name just a few of the tactics rogue sellers employ.

Just as we recommend to “pre-launch” brands, use IPSecure to monitor your presence on Walmart and prioritize the rogue sellers who are causing the most harm to your business and posing the most risk to your customers. Since IPSecure monitors Walmart and Amazon on an hourly basis, the analysis we provide is highly granular and will uncover trends you may not be able to identify elsewhere.

Remember, like any other major marketplace, expect growing pains. As the Walmart team works on fine-tuning their processes, they will eventually have the necessary tools and programs in place to create efficiencies. Walmart is committed to growing their marketplace, and they know they need to work with brands to create a successful environment. Stay the course, but keep your foot on the gas pedal.