Should You Sell at Walmart.com? How To Study The Walmart Marketplace with DataSpark – feat. Justin Maner

Walmart vs Amazon – Similarities and Differences

Walmart.com is second to Amazon at eCommerce selling in the USA. Hence it is common for sellers to look at Walmart’s online platform as their next online business frontier. But how does selling at Walmart compare to Amazon? Here are some points to consider:

• Like Amazon (Amazon Basics), Walmart has its own line of brands sold at Walmart.com
• Unlike Amazon, Walmart does not automatically categorize your product listings. To categorize your listings, you will have to include them in your listing title keywords.
• Walmart rankings are less dependent on the algorithm than Amazon rankings
• Expedited shipping may help you win the Buy Box at Walmart
• Listing optimization may have slight differences in Walmart vs Amazon
• Walmart’s equivalent of Amazon FBA is called WFS (Walmart Fulfillment Service)

Explore Walmart.com with Dataspark

In many ways, Walmart.com is not like Amazon. What does that mean? Whilst Walmart has dominated physical selling in retail stores for the longest time, they’ve only started to explore eCommerce. We’re all still learning the ropes at Walmart, so to speak.

That said, if expanding your Amazon business into another eCommerce platform is in your plans – then Walmart.com is the obvious next target. Walmart’s eCom marketplace is the second largest in the USA. It is a trusted platform catering to a wide scope of demographics – and rivals Amazon’s status as a reputable brand.

Our guest, Justin, has used Dataspark to comb the grounds of Walmart. He has since come back with useful information for your potential Walmart expansion. What can Dataspark do for your business? Below are some of the features that Justin demonstrated for us in the video:

• Keyword research – reverse keyword lookup, competitor keyword analysis, etc.
• 30-day rankings – sales, keywords, price trends, Buy Box percentage
• Niche-down categories within categories
• Historical rank
• Review count and new review updates with 30 to 180-day intervals
• More!

The fact is, it doesn’t always follow that Amazon businesses must expand to Walmart. That’s why data needs to be studied before making your move. Remember that it is dangerous to enter uncharted territory without scoping the grounds prior. For that purpose, Dataspark is at your service. Within a day (or maybe less), Dataspark will point to the right direction for your Walmart expansion. As always, let the data be your guide.

Transcription

Amy Wees: I’m here for another awesome tool review cool tool review Tuesday, and I’m here with my friend, Justin Maner. From data spark. And, Justin, thank you so much for being here, because this is something we’re going to talk about Walmart today, and Walmart is one of those channels that people have been wanting to get into, because Amazon is just a hot mess right now. I mean, Amazon is still the leader in E commerce, right. But in terms of second place, Walmart’s creeping up on them. And they have the ability to really give Amazon fulfillment a run for their money, because because Walmart literally could transform their stores into fulfillment centers and pivot very quickly, even quicker than Amazon can, in terms of into E commerce. So I think that it’s an incredible opportunity for all of us to get on the ground floor of it’s like, in 2007, when I started doing Amazon, that back then it was all merchant fulfilled. And it was, you know, it was like nothing but look at what it’s grown into. And so I think people have an incredible opportunity to get into the ground floor of Walmart. And you’re going to talk to us today about some of the things that you’ve learned and some of the things that you can do. Right. So first, let’s start off with just getting to know you. Tell us a little bit about you and your background.

Justin Maner: Yeah, thanks so much for having me here. Amy, I’m really excited to chat with you and your audience. So I, I have an Amazon background, I was at Amazon for 10 years and did a bunch of different stuff in the E commerce space, I managed the third party marketplace for tools and home improvement. And this was all the way back in 2009. And it was really awesome. You know, home improvement was, you know, this is like $60 million a year that it was doing, growing at about 30% and was able to figure out what are all the places that the levers in the marketplace? Like how do we grow FBA? You know, how do we work with the top sellers there to really help them double triple their business. And we got this thing on an 80% growth rate, and just just humming along, and it’s been it’s huge today. I don’t know how big but it’s large. And then and then I did the one piece side with pets. And so work with all the big vendors, how do we grow this and again, it was kind of the small category that we made huge as a $30 billion industry and had a lot of fun there. And then I went more to the in stock management side for amazon.ca. Still working in the Heartlines categories. And then I did things like baby registry, where I had kind of business and product and tech all reporting to me and how do we make Amazon baby registry number one, which we did, surpassing Babies R Us and target. So lots of fun there. And then did some stuff with devices where we were building marketing technology for some of our internal teams and, and some of the customer facing stuff. So did that left a couple of years ago to kind of jump into the startup world. And just yeah, as you mentioned, saw Walmart is this up and coming. You know, I’ve been watching them for years, and they’ve really kind of been fumbling with their e commerce strategy. And starting to notice that, you know, they’re up over 100 million skews. If you do a bunch of pricing. If you look at pricing, we’ve done a bunch of analysis on this. They they beat Amazon on pricing consistently. And that’s of course driving traffic and getting people there. They’re going to be $75 billion this year. And yet the competition still is not that strong. They’re you know, about 100,000 sellers. So really interesting place and that, you know, people want to be able to make a living here on Walmart just like they do on Amazon. It’s happening all day, every day on Amazon. Why not Walmart. And so we thought, let’s go and see if we can help practice not help them help people figure out how to navigate this unique space. Amy, I can’t hear you. You’re on mute still.

Amy: Yeah. Thank you. I mean basics here. Amy’s messing it up today, you guys. I have no idea that you had so much experience with Amazon before even pivoting to the software. And in Walmart side. I mean, just an incredible amount of experience bringing that traffic and making things work and growing Amazon’s presence. It really must help you on the data spark side to kind of know what metrics are important and what kind of things that that people can do. So I know the second part of this conversation today before we hit the Live button. We said we would talk about you know some of those struggles that people are having selling on Walmart and how we can kind of get over that with like some search terms like those kinds of things that people should be looking at. So definitely you guys stay tuned. If you’re already on Walmart. This is going to be the cool tool. Have you for you, all of us have data for Amazon. And we know you know how to get more traffic. I know when I first started on Walmart, I we just started I think last year is when we first listed on Walmart. And I didn’t understand I was searching for my products. And I didn’t understand how to make sure that my products were on the top of the page on Amazon. I’m an expert at that. I’ve written hundreds of page one listings, I know exactly how the algorithm looks at relevancy and all that Walmer. I’m clueless. I’m like, why can I find my product, even when I searched for this specific search term? You know, all of that. So I’ve yet I know, people who are doing six figures, seven figures, even eight figures like Fernando on Walmer. So I know there’s an incredible amount of opportunity there. But it’s like, how can we get after that. And clearly, the same techniques that I’m using on Amazon are not working over on the Walmart side. So I’m excited to talk to you today about data, and how we can really crack that nut because so many of us have wanted to play around, or we’ve gotten into WalMart, like we just got approved for Walmart fulfillment system yesterday, and a Walmart fulfillment services. And it’s like, I don’t even I don’t know what to do with it. I gotta fix the foundation first. So, so excited to get into this. So tell us about your tool and what you’re going to be showing us today.

Justin: Yeah, and Amy, let me let me caveat. One thing, too, is like, we’re still there’s so much, so much we don’t understand about Walmart. And I love it when people actually tee up problems to us like that of hey, why am I not showing up and I give it to my data team and they go find such interesting stuff. I’ll I’ll share just right here one example that we’d kind of talked about, at the end, I think it’s appropriate here. We had one lady come to us and say I can’t figure out why I’m not winning the buy box like I have a lower price than the Buy Box winner, why am I doing this? And so I had somebody on my team go and say investigate this, what’s going on here? And of course, we know there’s more to the buy box than just price. So he started digging in saying, Okay, what’s driving the buy box? Is there something we can tease out of this? And, and so we started working with her to experiment. We said, Okay, if she has standard shipping, the person winning the buy box has expedited shipping, so it makes sense, they might have it. But she’s like $1, lower, why wouldn’t she win, like if you’re $1 lower than somebody with expedited shipping. So she started, we started having to lower the price to $2 to 50 to 75, to 99. And we had this theory that as soon as we hit $3, and sure enough, as soon as we hit $3, boom, she wanted the buy box. So we found out Walmart puts gives you a $3 boost, if this is for above $35. If you have expedited shipping. So now that you have WFS, like my recommendation would be, you need to go find all the listings that don’t have wfs and just start listing on them or don’t have expedited shipping, and boom, you have a $3 boost that you’ll have on margin that you can play with on there to win the buy box on there. So pretty interesting stuff. If you’re a reseller, you know, there’s a lot of different flavors of sellers, and what to do. But

Amy: yeah, and most of most of our audience is private label. We do have some resellers, we do have some wholesalers, and that is in the reseller and wholesale categories that is seems to be where the most opportunity exists for Walmart, or those private label sellers with quite a large range of products, right. But are more common products that we’re selling. Because we have we have a unique pet product. And then we’ve got some more common kind of household products. And our private label common household products sell very well on Walmart. Now. It’s a tiny percentage of our Amazon sales, I’m just being real. But we’re and we’re using merchant fulfilled for Walmart. So you know, that could be a reason, as you were saying, like with the shipping and the expedited boost and all of that. That could be the reason why we’re we’re not doing as good as we could be. We could now that we have WFS, maybe we could send some of those products in and that will give us that extra shipping boost. But the problem with wfs I heard is that they’re a little bit backed up and it’s not exactly all that reliable right now. So I kind of feel like I should mix it like do some wfs but then also continue merchant fulfilling.

Justin: Yeah. And what you want to do is if your merchant fulfilling you still wants to try to offer expedited shipping to the locales where you can give that two day shipping promise. I’ll tell you there’s one other little bug in the system today, which is I’ll tell you you’re out of office days, your vacation days don’t impact your performance at all or your ability to win the buy box or show up in search results. So a little bit of a hack that I think they’re gonna they’ve got to fix at some point but that’s how it works today. vacation days have no waiting anywhere and yet they they extend your delivery promise so you don’t have late shipments and And that’s how you’re seeing some people will have really long delivery times, but they’re still winning the buy box against union like what the heck is going on? That’s how they do it. But yeah, there is a boost as well in search. And so having expedited shipping is going to help you in the search results as well from from everything we can tell. So yeah, whether it’s WFS, whether it’s delivered that you’re using, or it’s merchant fulfilled, but doing that, so.

Amy: So Simon is asking, Hi, Amy and Justin WFS, Walmart fulfillment service, I guess, does this work like the same as FBA? So that’s the idea of Simon, the idea is that Walmart fulfillment services is going to work similar to Fulfilled by Amazon. I haven’t really done that far into it. Maybe Justin has a better answer here.

Justin: No, that’s that’s how I mean, it is it is their competitive product to FBA. It’s the same intention that they’re trying to do. But you’ve got to just realize that, you know, Walmart is like the Amazon of like, seven or 10 years ago, and you think about Amazon a seven to 10 years ago. Was it a little crazy? It was a little clunky? Of course, it was, you know, but was it the right thing to jump in 17 years ago and embrace the Wild West? That was Amazon? Absolutely. And so Walmart is kind of this new Wild West, and you’ve got what well, Walmart fulfillment services, it’s a little clunky, there’s a rough around the edges. But should you be jumping in and embracing it? Absolutely. You know, are you going to regret that in 10 years from now? I don’t think so. I think this is where the puck is going. And that’s why we’re here.

Amy: Awesome. And we also have another question. Mauricio wants to know, are they planning to come to Canada? Walmart has a presence in Canada, don’t they?

Justin: Yeah. Yeah, they they’re in Canada already. Okay, we get requests all the time before covering Canada, we don’t right now. We’re dot com only. We’re not looking at.ca. But it’s on our radar. We’re constantly looking at the opportunity big enough to cover dossier as well. So

Amy: and it sounds like it sounds like resale that you are, you know, wanting you or maybe wanting to get on walmart.com and Canada, which you’re saying that you are a seller here. So that’s, that’s awesome. So hopefully, Justin’s tool will make it to you soon. But also listening for tips today, because I’m sure some of these tips that we’re going to give are also going to help you with your sales on walmart.ca. Yeah. All right. Well, what do we think, Justin? Should we move on to a demo?

Justin: Yeah, let’s do it.

Amy: Okay, sweet. Okay. All right. Whenever you’re ready, I will click the Show on stream button. And we have you on the stream. So go for it.

Justin: Okay, so this is data spark. And so we, we launched, we started gathering data about Walmart at the end of last year. So we tried to get in last q4. So this q4, we start giving you your your interview information we launched about February. And we’ve made a ton of progress, a lot of cool stuff really trying to help people find those pockets of opportunity on Walmart. And I think the big question we’re able to answer for people, especially private label audience, is, is the opportunity big enough for me to even be paying attention to. And I think that’s what people don’t even know today, everybody hears about Walmart, they’re number two, and you’re asking yourself, should I be on there? Should I not? Is it going to be worth my time? Is it not? And there’s some categories on Walmart that are really small, not doing a lot, some are really big. And I think that’s one of the things we do best is help you size up? How big is this opportunity or not? So, so let’s just jump in. First of all, I’ll just kind of show you our Chrome extension, which I think is the easiest way and a no brainer to kind of install and start using. And Amy, I saw one of your stories on crate toys. And like the research that you did, I thought it was so awesome. Like finding out that, you know, anxiety in pets, one of the best things you could do is, is with the crate and having toys. And you know, I used to run pets. And so I love kind of these pet stories. So I just kind of took that example of you’re wanting to come out here and understand like, how big is the opportunity in create toys is an example or how even how big is the opportunity and pets in general. So if you pull up crate toys, you know, you can come in here. And we’ll just open up a bunch of these guys and just take a look at them. And what you’ll see is we’ve we have in our Chrome plug in here, a bunch of information that you can get. The first is just our 30 Day sales estimate on this. And what we’ve done is Walmart works quite differently than what Amazon does. And so we’ve been able to go in there and find some pretty strong signals that tell us hey, a sale happened and we think it was about this this amount. So you know, notice sales estimate is perfect. But we’ve had many, many examples of even at trade shows pulling this up and saying like, hey, we think you’re selling 500 And they’re like that’s more like 540 And we’re like oh that’s pretty good. You know, we think you’re selling 22 of this one that I got was 26 so pretty, pretty good. What we’ve seen and we are constantly working on getting this better and better. But we can tell you right here this item is selling roughly 101 units about 2300 in sales, and it was the first one that came up under a crate toys. Now, again, some people might look at that and say, Yeah, you know, that’s worth my time or others might say, if that’s kind of the best we’re doing, that’s not very, very great. We’re good. One thing I’ll tell you though, is if you’ve done your research and found that crate toys is one of those keywords you want to you want to win on, you’ll notice that nobody has a crate toy in their title at all. And here’s one thing you have to understand about Walmart kind of getting into what we wanted to chat about is they are, you know, they are far more reliant on keywords in the title and in the description than what Amazon is, Amazon is going to understand a little bit more of the context of toy. And if you don’t have, you’ll notice that every single one of them has a toy in the title. That’s really important. If you don’t tell Walmart in the title somewhere or description that it’s a toy, they may not understand that it’s a toy, even though you’re like, but it’s in the toy category. We’ve seen examples of that, where people are like, Why am I not showing up? Well, you haven’t told them you’re a toy.

Amy: Looks like this crate creatures on the page is not even a dog toy. And that’s the other thing I’ve noticed about Walmart is like the search results, obviously, Amazon converts, there’s their search results convert at a six times higher rate than any other e commerce search engine. So they really figured out how to show customers relevant search results. And I think Walmart’s got some work to do here. But as you were mentioning, if we put it right in the title, you know, we It can’t hurt, right? Because here we’ve got these crate creatures that aren’t really dog toys, right? And are not the context of a crate toy, so to say, or so to speak. But, but they’re showing up right there on page one.

Justin: Yeah. And What’s odd about these is, you’ll notice that they have no reviews at all, we’re all these ones do, which is one of the strongest indicators. It’s not selling at all. And if you look in this kind of a good place to handle it, you’ll see that it’s it’s so low rank that we don’t even track this one we don’t we don’t track the hotel that doesn’t have any movement.

Amy: I mean, neither do Amazon tools, right. And this is so interesting. If I’m the seller of crate creatures surprise here, I can clearly see that I need to do something differently, because I’m showing up. So what about understanding what keywords so for those cute so the for those products that you are tracking? Is there any reverse asin capability in data spark?

Justin: It’s coming really soon. We’ve got we’re gathering right now all of the data for that. And I don’t know when the next few weeks should start being able to release our our keyword tools to be able to show you what are the top keywords on Walmart and how does that compare to Amazon, which I will tell you is very different. Let me just give you a quick example here. You know, type in just just as an example, typing gifts here and see what you get on Walmart do the same thing on Amazon. And the way they drive these algorithms these Autocomplete is by popularity and this is often the way and you’ll see that there’s like not even an overlap. Gift Card birthday right now gift gift cards all Amazon gift card gifts for women. Actually, especially if you do Gifts, gifts for women gifts for women gifts for Mom, let’s come back and do gifts and gifts for girls gifts for girls gifts for girls, bridesmaids gifts, retirement gifts, there’s not even like an overlap on these. They’re very different. So we’re going to be releasing what the top keywords are. And then we will be able to tell you by keyword. And let me just jump to that since you ask where we can do roll ups like this. So here we have like black trash bags. And again, kind of around the opportunity is how big is the black trash bag opportunity on on Walmart and you say, Okay, it’s about 273,000 a month. Here’s the top brands, here’s what’s happening there. But we’ll have it we’ll have a bunch of different stuff in the keyword space.

Amy: Cool. And I think where there’s a humongous opportunity here is, you know, for those private label sellers who are maybe in in one of those categories, where China is getting super expensive, and they could pivot and source something from the US or from Latin America or some somewhere closer right? Especially during this crazy shipping period. Amazon does not Amazon has a lot of gates right to listing new types of products and Walmart does not have those same gates. So if you need to pivot if you’re in a situation where your private labels you can’t get them out because you’re shipping containers, you know $34,000 And you know you’re now paying more for a unit than you are for you know more for shipping than you are per unit For your cost of goods, I think that it’s it’s really a cool opportunity. You could pivot very easily into another product on Walmer. And using this data, you can see where the opportunity lies.

Justin: Yeah Yeah. So I think that’s the kind of you’re referring to this is coming soon. This I think the reverse lookup that you talked about where you can kind of put in an item and see the keywords that it’s ranking for. Definitely putting your competitors and say, Hey, what’s, what’s going on? And then we’ll have it where you can put in a list of keywords and see what items are ranking for that as well. So perfect, cool stuff coming here. Awesome. So kind of moving on to here. So you know, what’s the what’s the demand on this, we let you know what the price is what the high with the low is the 30 Day sales rank, as well as how the Buy Box percentage on here how aggressive Walmart is, which is a little bit I think, more for resellers than private, private label, but still kind of interesting information to have, you can click here, and it’ll take you to our product page where there’s a bunch of more information about this item.

Amy: And real quick question about that when you showed the buy box where Walmart had the buy box, right? In this case, like, for example, on Amazon, the equivalent of that is Amazon vendor, right? Amazon themselves is selling that product. In this case, does it mean that Walmart is selling that product and listing it on their website? Or is it more of a situation of like that’s fulfilled? But

Justin: no, this is saying it is shipped and sold and shipped by Walmart. So Walmart is the seller in this case, and that’s what we’re helping you understand if

Amy: I am a reseller, or I’m looking to, you know, we have the same question with Amazon, do we compete against Amazon? A lot of even private labelers they will not compete against against Amazon, if Amazon Basics or one of their major brands has a product? So is that a similar rule here?

Justin: Yeah, so you’re talking about from a so not from a reseller perspective, from a private label, if they’re already in that category? Should I be in that category or not? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, there’s there’s no blanket answer there, that kind of It depends. It depends on how well served is the customer in this case, if you’re going down and looking at the reviews, you know, this one here has 4.3 reviews, and I think this is a great place to get into those reviews in the same way and say, is Walmart serving their customers well or not? Especially for the customer need that you’re looking at? And so yeah, absolutely. And especially nowadays, I mean, Walmart has about 100 million skews. Amazon has 600 million SKUs. And what you’ll find is that, especially in E commerce, there’s so many needs out there, there’s so many niche products that people are looking for, that that’s why there are so many skews in the world is people want different things. And so, you know, I would say you want to put as much selection up there as you can, if you if you look on who’s really winning on Walmart, it’s people with large catalogs, they put a lot more and they found a niche, and that niche has taken off, because

Amy: they’re able to grow very quickly in that niche and kind of just dominate the category and get those repeat buyers. Now if I’m a reseller, and let’s say I was able to source this product from a, you know, a wholesaler or whatever distributor, do I want to as a reseller compete with Walmart? If Walmart has the Buy Box 100% of the time? Are they going to give? Are they going to get that buy box up?

Justin: Yes, let me think let me see if I can find this. Oh, I can’t find it. Darn it. That’s right. So I did an analysis on this. Because when I was at Amazon, around, you know, seven years ago, I had some people would come and say Justin, can you give me the list of everywhere where Amazon is selling and they’re the only seller? And and I’d say why do you want that and most people don’t want to compete head to head against Amazon. And they say well, because we found just the opposite is true. That works well for us. And you know, everyone has a different strategy. For this worked for them where they would jump on to every Amazon listing they could find that didn’t have competition because they knew they could source that brand typically. And and they knew that Amazon was eventually going to run out of stock, they probably weren’t going to beat them on price. Amazon was way too aggressive. But Amazon was eventually going to run out of stock. So and they would get this huge windfall of of sales. And of course, Amazon’s already optimized the listing. They’ve already optimized the search keywords, they put all this time and attention into growing this thing, and then they benefit from that Halo. So I looked at this on Walmart to see if the same was true. And what I found is that same is true. You’re not going to beat Amazon or Walmart typically on price but they on average lose the buy box I think it’s around 15% of the time when the buy box is competitive, meaning you have at least to other sellers. And then if you look at how many listings are there where Walmart is the only seller and nobody is competing against them, and there are like 800,000 that I could find pretty easily, you know, so we’re approaching like a million possibilities of competing. And if you look at the opportunity, it’s like $24 million a month of opportunity of competing against them. If you apply that loss by box percentage, to those same ones where there is an uncompetitive Buy Box. The biggest categories were electronics, they lose the buy box about 25% of the time, on average, and electronics, cell phones is like 50%, I think home was around 15%. So they do lose it. But you know, some people don’t like that big windfall of sales, all of a sudden, they want more consistent sales. And so it just depends on if that flavor is for you or not.

Amy: Got it. All right, please continue with the demo. Sorry, I’m all these questions. It’s awesome.

Justin: I love it. He’s a great. Okay, so one last thing we help you do, just really quickly, if you want to just head over and see this on, on Amazon, we just do a search for you with the UPC, and the first ones and you can kind of see Is this thing on there, which is interesting. I’ll see maybe the blues within here.

Amy : And we can see the price difference. Yeah, like, look, Walmart is really selling this for a low price. And somebody is probably buying it from Walmart and selling it on Amazon, you know, so Hey, guys, there’s some sourcing opportunities for you.

Justin: Yeah, and if you are a big arbitrage er, we’ve built some mass arbitrage tools out there. We Yeah, the arbitrage is just crazy on Walmart right now. And we have some really big players that have been getting our data in huge amounts, we’ve, we’ve built up some really good Walmart to Amazon matching, partly because we want to install our Chrome plugin on Amazon so that while you’re browsing Amazon, you can correspondingly see the demand and the price over on Walmart pretty easily. So that’ll be coming here soon, too. So we’ve got really good product matching. But yeah, we’ve been going through and just matching up all of them. And there is just millions and millions of dollars of arbitrage opportunity out there. But either way, Amazon to Walmart or Walmart to Amazon. So yeah, good stuff. Yeah. Pretty cool. So. So yeah, so that’s all just a couple little things. We have the UPC here, believe it or not, it’s really hard to get the UPC off of the Walmart page. So somebody asked us to add that and we put that on there. And then that URL ID that you get just making that handy. And

Amy: your ideas that like the equivalent of an asin on Amazon,

Justin: correct? Yeah, yeah, that’s, that’s the best we found for the asin is every product has it? It’s right there in the URL. And so that’s what we use as our Asin. Cool. Yeah. Okay, so coming back to the page, you get some of the similar information that we had over there of, you know, what’s the overall sales, the sales rank, the by box percentage, but now you can kind of get the trends, you know, so if you’ve used Keepa, or Jungle Scout or helium 10, you kind of familiar with these charts, it’ll show you what the price has been over time, broken out by Walmart and third party, as well as the top some of the categories that you’re that it’s in and whether it’s ranked out over time, I will tell you the number of sellers and the review count and what that’s looked like over time. And then who the Buy Box winners. This one’s not very interesting, because it’s just Walmart. I don’t know maybe some of these other ones are a little more interesting why Walmart is dominating in these whose toy one so now very interesting one to look at there. And that will show you all the categories that it’s in, you’ll see these gray ones it’s not actually interesting enough yet pets is under grocery. They’ve got it listed there twice in a grocery and then pets as a standalone. And you’ll see we haven’t found it in overall pets just in the sub nodes, vibrant life pet supplies.

Amy: And it’s it’s really interesting too, because if you’re familiar with a category, like for example, crate toys, you know, I’m a little familiar with that category, because I did this product research exercise on it. And I noticed that the number one sellers in Crete toys on Amazon are not on Walmart at all. And so the shoppers that are like Walmart shoppers, or like Amazon shoppers in terms of their loyalty, so they’re looking for these products, they’ve already got some it’s just like Target you know, if usually, if you’re a target shopper, you’re going to target like you’re you’re gonna try to find that first on target. So I think it’s also important to know you know, your market and you’ll be able to see that opportunity. Not only can you see how many of the crate toys that Walmart is selling, using Davis bark. But then also, if you are the maker of a crate toy that is doing really great on Amazon, and you’re not on Walmart, you can look and go, Okay, I can compete with Walmart on this, I’ve got a better toy. I know my market. And, you know, I’ve got, I can see how many of their toys they’re selling, and what type of toys they’re selling. And that can kind of help you decide whether or not to enter that market. Right?

Justin: Yep, exactly, exactly. Yeah, love it. Cool. So this is kind of, you know, one by one product research, which is, which is great, what I get really excited about just coming back and just close some of these here, I get excited, going a little bit more in bulk. So let’s actually start here for good. So if you come to data spark.co, which by the way, anybody listening can create a free account and try a lot of this stuff. It’s really just the sales estimate stuff and, and you have limited token limited usage. And you can use it anybody, anybody can have a free account. And there’s a lot of really rich features, especially the stuff that helps you start looking at stuff in bulk. And that’s where you can really start getting your head wrapped around a certain category or niche that you’re looking at. So we have this category Explorer. And this list, we have about 56,000 categories that we track this list down to three levels of category, starting to string with the product group. So you know, for example, just sticking with our pets theme here, you can come into pets, you know, come down here to dogs, let’s say, and you’ve got a bunch of bunch of categories within dogs that you can do. And there’s a couple of things you can do here. So like if we wanted to get to dog toys, for example, we can just click right here. And it’s going to take us to what we call our best seller view. And so that’s this view right here. And so we’re looking at all things, dog toys, and it’s gonna show us the top roughly 1000 bestsellers within dog toys. And it’s doing it based on the rank that Walmart gives us, which isn’t as clean and pure as what Amazon’s is, but you know, it’s a good proxy, it works for giving you at least some information. But then you also have what we layered on top is our sales estimates. And so if you want to come in here and say, if I were to if I just wanted to really quickly know how much is can I expect if I were to list a dog toy? Well, you see that there’s about four that have broken the $10,000 mark. And that’s it. So as of today, even the best selling toys do about $10,000 a month that may be interesting to some not interesting to others, again, answering that question is the opportunity big enough or not? And it might not be and that’s okay, you know, no. I mean, come down and you know, see these I can sort it by units if I want. So just very quickly get a feel for the top 1000 is dog toys interesting on on Walmart. And of course, I don’t know electronics is huge, what pets is still pretty small on Walmart overall. So all these numbers are pretty small electronics is where it’s really big right now home is another huge category, auto and tire surprisingly big. Those are the really the categories where you should be looking, if you’re wanting big marketplaces to play in, but as you know, you find a niche you find a customer need, and you can succeed anywhere. So we’re gonna give you the rank and what the historical rank is look like. The number of rank increases and decreases in the last 30 days, we give you the reviews, and I really liked the seeing how many new reviews it’s had in the last, you know, 3090 180 days, because another good signal that there’s movement here, there’s traction in this category, versus this one, look at number of new reviews. And last 30 days with this category versus that category, it’s a pretty good signal of how much customer demand is, in this case, a little bit around the competition. So how many offers there are on these products as well as again, that Walmart 30 day by box percentage, to where if you want to avoid Walmart, you can do that. If you want to compete head to head against Walmart and find where they’re the only seller, you can filter for that. And do things like that see here, you get places where they’re losing only 18% by box. Well in this category, they seem like they are pretty hit or miss. They’re either not on it, or they’re getting 100% You get a few that they’re losing it pretty interesting. And then of course you have the price and the price history. And so you have that information. And then just a few other things like if it’s sold as if it has unit information, whether that’s as each or ounce or pounds or whatever that may be. We have the brand, the category and then just some information on the pricing. So any questions there so far?

Amy: No, I think it gives us a really good idea. I think the big part of the confusion about entering into Walmart and selling on walmart.com is what is selling where’s the opportunity? What should I even bother? I think that’s the big from a private legal standpoint. That’s the big question that I get is people are like, should I even bother? And so I think this Data spark and the fact that you’re giving people an opportunity that do so of these searches for free, they’ve got nothing to lose, they can come over here, install your Chrome extension, get a few searches for free, and check out, you know, the opportunity that they could have and what competitors on walmart.com are doing, because I never, that’s my biggest thing. I’m like, Okay, well, let’s just go over here and look on Walmart and see what’s going on. But I don’t know what to make of it. Because I have no slick on Amazon, I understand the sales rank, I understand how many I have tools that can tell me how many of the products are selling, you know, what the price history has been? And I didn’t have that on Walmart until now. So now I have that, and I can take a look at it. I guess the big question that I would have for you is, and and obviously, you know, the data is here, and we can look and we can see what the opportunity is we can see how much our competitors are selling. We’re almost at the point where we can see what keywords they’re using. We know we’ve talked about earlier how how Walmart’s keyword and search engine is not as good yet, but we can be very literal with our keywords sometimes. But I guess the big thing would be in general search in general search, like if I if I do see an opportunity, right? In pet products, for example, since I’m in the pet niche, I see an opportunity, nobody else has some of my unique products. And I’m I am selling them on walmart.com. But how do I get to the top of search? How do I know? Like, is it that I need to offer two day shipping? Is it that? You know, I think that’s that’s the second reason people are nervous about moving into Walmart. Because even if I see that there’s an opportunity there from this what I can see in data Spark, how do I make sure that customers are actually going to be able to find my product?

Justin: Yeah. Yeah, it’s a it’s a great question. I so I only have 22 tips here. And I like to challenge me and and if you had any specific examples, I’d actually like to try to, you know, work with a seller or two on this to see, hey, can we help you get this into the very top, I love taking these kinds of use cases and just diving deep because you learn so much when you get to a very specific examples.

Amy: Well, the thing is, like, if we look at crate toys, for example, Walmart is selling nearly all of these crate toys like these are all vibrant life Walmart toys. So if I’m the seller of a crate toy, you know, like that number one crate toy on Amazon, which with the heartbeat puppy dog, right? If I’m the number if I’m selling that, and I’m killing it, I’m crushing it on Amazon. And I come over here on Walmart, and I use your tool and I’m like, wow, okay, well, I mean, 800 sales a month for this crate toy. It doesn’t have the benefits that mine has. It doesn’t have, you know, cool. But if I come over here and list it, and I’m at the

Justin: bottom of the page, I know it doesn’t look good.

Amy: Yeah. So that’s that would be my question is, it looks like Walmart is dominating this category. And if a new player comes into the category, what can we do to compete with Walmart? So can I is it that I just need to day shipping? Should I be using Walmart fulfillment services? What can I do to get to the top of the page so that Walmart doesn’t just put or or Walmart doesn’t put historic listings that have been there for a little while? There? Because it doesn’t seem like they have a really great way of indexing their listings?

Justin: Yeah, let me answer to twofold. First, let me come into this first and show you so yeah, let me come back to that question. Just a second. Because first of all, I love the question of you’re asking of, does Walmart dominate this category? And I can’t compete, like how big is three P in this category? And we can answer that for you. And let me show you how you can first answer that. And then we’ll come to that. My, my thoughts on that second part of the question, which is, how do I get up and get to the top of results. So first of all, you have in here, this full list and you can even export if you want an entire category coming back to this category explorer, if we just wanted to come over into pets. Now, you know, this stuff isn’t free part of the free plan, but you can come and just say I want to export this entire category of 246,000 items with the 30 Day sales units. And this Walmart 30 day by box percentage and that’s gonna allow us to break it apart by one p versus three P, I’m gonna generate that and it’s gonna send me an email that kind of looks you know, something like this. Here’s your full category export. And then when I come to excel, it’s going to download into Excel and I now have everything about The entire This is I think this was all Yeah, this is dog toys, the entire dog toys or pets category whatever you download whatever niche that you want. And in you know, we can help with this if if people enjoy this, we can make some better dashboards and we will be along the way, it’s not immediately on the roadmap. But I’ve just for myself created this, this dashboard so I can look at these opportunities. And so here’s where I did all of pets, I downloaded this and said, This is just the pets category pets. And I have Okay, pets overall is doing about $42 million a month on on Walmart today and their average selling price $21. But answering that question right here have the Walmart versus three P, and you’ll actually see that three P overall is dominating. Now the a lot of the best sellers, which are noting are Walmart, but overall, three P sellers are dominating here. 71% of the revenue. From there, you’ll see the price point is much higher. So the units is 57%. But the revenues 71%. So pets, you can win and three P now some like you, if I were to pull this up for grocery, you’re gonna see you’re not gonna win in grocery, they are really competitive, much more competitive.

Amy: When I see this here, the top 15 products, for example, are mostly I mean, even if they are three P, they’re like major retail brands like temptations, and, you know, brands that I buy for my gaps, you know. So it is probably this is where the arbitrage errs are when we talk about three p, right? This is where the arbitrage errs are really cashing in, because they’re able to, to put these these top products on there and get the moving. So in terms of of, of opportunity, you know, I think I think it’s good to know, but also it’s good to look at that list of of top performers and say, you know, what is that made up of just like you have to on Amazon, right? Just because there’s somebody on the top of the page or the top of the rankings on Amazon doesn’t mean that you can just come in and slap a label on a similar product and beat them because they could be a major you they could be in retail, they could be you know, a major player, and you just can’t compete. Right. So I think it’s important to not only look at that percentage of three P but also to look at what is selling well, and who is selling it and and then when you kind of dig into your own subcategories, you know, to take that into consideration.

Justin: Yeah. Yeah, I love this challenging. This is a good one, you’re gonna you’re gonna keep me thinking for several days here on how I answer this because this is a good one, like how my question is, how did prep you do it, you know, probably does like the big cages and stuff like that. And they’re doing well. You know, there’s one of the top that, and I’m pretty sure they don’t have any Walmart if I think I researched these guys before.

Amy: Simon says we can use his brands as a as a test. Sounds good. Simon, we’ll take your on that.

Justin: Yeah. So somehow they’ve been able to kind of crack the code. I don’t know what keywords are. And that that goes back to what we need to figure out is like, find the best three P brands and then reverse engineer which what are the keywords they’re using that are maybe different than maybe Walmart doesn’t compete on as well. So I don’t know, doesn’t it

Amy: say there that Prabhu is being sold by Walmart? Because it says that Walmart has the buy box there?

Justin: Yeah. So they do sell some of it? Yeah, I’d have to pull up and look at this brand specific. I looked at them some before and maybe it’s hit or miss. But yeah, they have been. They have been on there. They’re not on there right now. It appears but they have been interesting.

Amy: Yeah, I think I think that this data is good, though. Because it helps us to make informed decisions instead of just like, Okay, well, nobody’s selling my product. You know, that’s the big reason many of us are not moving to Walmart yet is because even if our products, you know, we looks like we we could fit on the page, right? And there’s not a bunch of people selling the same product as us, especially compared to Amazon. We just don’t know if it’s worth the effort. And so what data Spark is giving us is the opportunity to dig in a little bit more and figure out okay, well, what are other people on the page doing? And is it worth the effort? Right? So,

Justin: yeah, I love it. I love it. Love it. Yeah. So I’d love to come back to you on this one, Amy and I because what I want to do, as I’m thinking through how I could answer this question of what exactly does it take to get on that first page of search results? What I do know so far is that having precise keywords in your title and description are important. Like, you know, the example I kind of gave is, I was working with one of my friends pink house, she’s a brand’s three P she’s an ex Walmart marketplace executive and has all kinds of just a wealth of information that she had a client she was working with that was selling toys. But they found that whenever they were using some of these toy keywords that pet toys consistently came up in the in the search results. And and so they constantly contact one of our friends at Walmart said what’s going on? And the person researched and said, Okay, here’s what’s happening. Pet toy vendors are doing a better job at telling us that it’s a toy and toy vendors are. And the problem was that they weren’t using toys anywhere. Because it’s like it’s a given it’s a toy, of course it’s a toy, it’s in the toys category wouldn’t, why wouldn’t the toy keyword anywhere because that was assumed. And on Amazon, Amazon knows it’s a toy, you don’t have to put that in there abuse or close it and they just copy their Amazon stuff, put it on Walmart didn’t optimize for the keywords hasn’t worked there. And that made a big difference. So making doing that makes a big difference in in getting those precise keywords, making sure you have those ended at the right Walmart keywords. The second thing that I know and I haven’t dug in enough to understand exactly this, but talking to Walmart insiders is in understanding how the search algorithm works. I do know that it’s less algorithmic than what Amazon is, it’s more rules based. And so what that means is that they’re actually the the vendor team, the buying team at Walmart on a quarterly basis goes through and they’ll type it type in their tops keywords, they’ll see what the experience is. And like if they’re typing in red dress shoe. And they’re seeing that they’re getting a lot that’s not red, they’ll create these rules based on the item data to say, Okay, let’s filter only for red. So there’s a lot of these reds, and they can do it by brand, they can do it by, by brand by category, the category type that it’s in. And so sometimes there might be keywords you’re not showing up on at all. And that’s good to go through several pages and say, Ah, there’s a rule here. And that’s where you’re gonna have to contact Walmart and say, You guys are missing my brand or my category, I need an audit done here too, because I should be showing up in this keyword. And I’m not. And that might be the route you have to go down.

Amy: Yeah, I think just a lot of testing, I do have a couple of products that are in that category of they’re unique. They’re awesome on Walmer. So I’ll definitely follow up with you on that. And maybe we can play around and see what we could do. I mean, because we’ve already been selling for, you know, many months. And so we can, we can maybe use some of that data set. And we can help other private label sellers in determining what can help them enter the market and succeed on Walmart. Because for me, it’s been very tough, it is then really hard to find my product and get it going. And so Christian says, awesome. I’ve been using data spark for a few months. And I always love learning more about it. And then Kristen asks, Can you post the event link? So I’m wondering, what event link? Are you talking about? Kristin? Can you can you refine that for me? And Simon says, when we hit when we hit one 1 million with his brands on Walmart, we could split the profits. Very good. Well, you know, Justin, this has been so informative. And I think that there’s just there’s no reason that people shouldn’t get out there and give data spark a spin and figure out, you know, getting more more informed on what they’re what the growth opportunities are in Walmart and get in early. Well, everybody’s kind of discovering what what Walmart has to offer. You know, there’s, there’s just there’s so much going on, especially with Amazon right now, how a lot of people are liquidating because they’re limited on restock, right? They’re limited on restock quantities coming to Amazon. And so they’re liquidating products or getting rid of their products at these insane prices. And there’s probably a ton of opportunity to resell those on Walmart, right? Because it’s not as saturated. So I know the resellers are having a ball. But for you private labelers who have wondered, Hey, should I be getting into Walmart? What’s the opportunity? Now you have a way to look at your competition, you have a way to understand it. And you can make a more informed decision about whether or not it’s it’s worth that extra effort.

Justin: Yeah. And you know, Amy, I’ll say, I want one of the Amazon philosophies that you may have heard about is it’s always day one. Jeff Bezos was famous. The big building. That’s the Amazon building in Seattle is called day one. Because he likes that mentality. That’s always day one. It’s something we’ve tried to adopt for data Spark as well. Meaning that, you know, sure we built all this stuff, but I love it when people come and say, can you make data spark could do this and we love that challenge of saying you Yeah, if it’s day one, let’s build exactly what the customer needs. Let’s solve that exact problem. Let’s treat today as if we can build anything we can make anything. And I’d love it. If people look at data spark say, they can do anything. Let me ask them if they can do it and challenge us to say, can you get me on the first page of search results? Or could you slice your data, it shows me, like, if you’re doing WFS, the best wfs opportunities I should be going after. If you’re going if you’re a reseller, whatever the opportunity is, like, challenge us. We love it.

Amy: Yes, I love it. Okay, so you guys heard it. Justin wants your challenges. He’s ready for them. He has the experience. He’s ready for the challenge. So you guys get out there. I’m going to click the link here, try data Spark, as Justin said, for free. You can give it a shot. And I’m sure there are some premium features there but doesn’t cost you anything just to get some basic data and do some searching there. So try it out, go to data, Spark dot C O, and give it a shot. And then what about your chrome extension? Is there is that right? On the main webpage?

Justin: Yeah, you can either just go to the go to Chrome store or right here. Click on Chrome extension, we have a little banner.

Amy: Okay, Chrome extension, right on the main data, Spark dot c o page. Perfect. Well, very good. As I think we’ve pretty much covered it. I mean, we’ve been going for 51 minutes. So I think this has been a super awesome, cool tool review. And I thank you, Justin for taking the time to show us this. I think this really opens my eyes about private label on Walmart, I’ll definitely follow up with you about, you know, let’s see if we can’t play the games and and see if we can’t figure that out and wear them out. Maybe we can be the first writers have, you know, the the equivalent of the 89 algorithm papers on Amazon. So that would be cool to figure that out for Walmart. And it seems like they might need the help. I mean, if they’re, they’re manually going through and doing those searches, it’s like, man, let’s you know.

Justin: So I think the ranking within the searches is algorithmic, but yeah, the filtering down to the selection that shows up in a search term has a lot of rules that they can put behind it. So pretty interesting. Very good.

Amy: Well, thanks, everybody, for tuning in today. You know, and Justin, where where should folks reach out to, you know, try data Spark, obviously, data spark dot CEO, but where should they reach out if they want to reach out to you? Where should they go?

Justin: Yeah, you can always reach me at Justin at data spark dot CEO, is my email address. So feel free to ping me, I look me up on LinkedIn, Facebook, whatever works for you. I’m available.

Amy: Love it. Well, thank you so much for your time. And thanks, everybody, for tuning in for another cool tool review. And we will see you guys in an hour. I think no, in three hours. There’s so many things going on today. So in one hour, I’m teaching about retail, we’re talking about getting your products into retail at the seller velocity conference. So check that out in the amazing at home page. You can register for that event for free in 50 minutes. Today, we’ll be talking about that. And then at three o’clock today, we’re going to talk about sourcing from Mexico on the seller roundtable. So go to seller roundtable.com forward slash live and register for that Zoom call and get in there with us and learn how to source from Latin America and Mexico and learn about how to get your products into retail here in about 45 minutes at seller velocity. All right, so check out those links, reach out anytime and thanks again, Justin for the awesome full tool review and we’ll see you guys next time. Bye