Walmart Marketplace seller additions surge following Shopify deal, up 3x from January
Tech Crunch | July 27, 2020
Walmart’s recent partnership with Shopify to expand its online marketplace appears to already be paying off. The retailer in June announced it was opening its marketplace to Shopify’s small business sellers with the goal of onboarding 1,200 new sellers by the end of 2020. Following the Shopify announcement, the marketplace added 3,000 more sellers in June and is expected to exceed 3,600 in July, according to a new report from research firm Marketplace Pulse. That’s triple how many sellers it was adding at the beginning of 2020, the firm’s numbers indicate.
Walmart’s marketplace growth is much slower than Amazon’s, the firm notes. But this is, in part, due to its process around adding sellers. Its marketplace requires sellers go through an approval process, which is something it does in an attempt to avoid counterfeiters and other issues. Amazon, meanwhile, adds thousands of sellers daily.
The report also added that what matters most is not the size or the number of sellers, but rather the sellers’ performance. On that front, the firm recently found that Walmart’s marketplace, though smaller, was outperforming both Amazon and eBay, driven by the significant increase in Walmart.com shoppers during the pandemic. That increased traffic was also aided by Walmart’s merging of its Grocery app into its main app, a transition that is still underway. Around a month after the merge began, the Walmart app on May 13th became the No. 1 shopping app on iPhone.