Product Startup Podcast Episode 198: Selling on Walmart Marketplace

00:00:00 Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today we learn how to list, sell, and scale your new hardware product on the Walmart.com

00:00:05 Kevin Mako: online marketplace from an agency owner that has marketed hundreds of hardware products.

00:00:10 Narrator: This is the Product Startup Podcast, a show to learn from top leaders in hardware product development, prototyping, manufacturing, product selling, and everything in between.

00:00:19 Narrator: Hosted by Kevin Mako, the leading expert on product development for hardware startups.

00:00:24 Kevin Mako: Welcome back, everyone. Today I'm very excited to introduce Will Haire to the show. Will is the CEO of BellaVix, a marketing agency focusing exclusively on scaling

00:00:33 Kevin Mako: emerging hardware brands on Amazon and Walmart.com. After years, as a military technician and in supply chain management, Will has spent the last 10 years in digital marketing.

00:00:42 Kevin Mako: Today, Will is going to share some valuable knowledge for inventors, startups, and small manufacturers on what Walmart

00:00:46 Kevin Mako: .com marketplace is, how to list your product onto the platform and best practices for succeeding and scaling with your new hardware product. Now, on to the episode.

00:00:55 Narrator: This show is produced by MakoDesign, the original firm providing end-to-end consumer product development services tailored specifically to hardware startups,

00:01:04 Narrator: small manufacturers, and inventors. Take your product from idea to store shelves at MakoDesign.com. Now on to the episode.

00:01:13 Kevin Mako: Hi, Will, welcome to the show.

00:01:15 Will Haire: Hey, Kevin. Thanks for having me. Super excited to be here.

00:01:18 Kevin Mako: We're excited to talk to you today about getting a new hardware invention onto Walmart Marketplace.

00:01:24 Kevin Mako: Walmart online, which many people don't actually know is actually different from the store. You've got

00:01:29 Kevin Mako: the retail change that everybody knows, but there's also a very vibrant online marketplace that has many items that aren't in the stores and sometimes vice versa.

00:01:38 Kevin Mako: So today we're talking about getting onto the platform best practices and even how to scale your growth on that platform as

00:01:45 Kevin Mako: another avenue to sell a new invention idea to the market. There's a hardware startup out there,

00:01:50 Kevin Mako: whether you're at the early phases of development or whether you're looking for new avenues to sell

00:01:54 Kevin Mako: product, this episode is going to be very powerful because this is a massive channel that is growing quickly as well.

00:02:00 Kevin Mako: And who better to talk to then we'll hear on the show today. Will, you've been doing this a long time. Before we get into all the nuts and bolts about best practices, just give

00:02:08 Kevin Mako: us a bit of a history. How did you get from where you are many years ago to the success story that you are today? Yeah, absolutely.

00:02:15 Will Haire: And I'll give you guys the cliff note version. Essentially, I've been working in advertising agencies for the better part of 10 to 12 years, give or take. I like to say

00:02:23 Will Haire: Google is the gateway to marketplaces like Walmart, Amazon, and Target. So start up doing SEO, have ADD, and I just don't have the attention for that.

00:02:33 Will Haire: So I needed something a little faster. So I started doing advertising, Google, pay-per-click, which led into Amazon, which then led into Walmart.

00:02:41 Will Haire: And I've always been focused on products and helping e-commerce brands either launch into marketplaces or achieve some type of scale. So it's been an incredible journey.

00:02:50 Will Haire: And back in 2018, I'm like most entrepreneurs. I was like, you know what? I think I could do this better myself. In 2018, we decided to start

00:02:58 Will Haire: our own company, Bella Vex, and where we're hyper-focused on helping brand scale on marketplaces like Walmart and Amazon.

00:03:05 Kevin Mako: Well, much appreciated. Lots of wisdom to share there because, yes, of course, the whole digital marketplace relies on Google, SEO, search, pay-per-click, etc.

00:03:14 Kevin Mako: That feeds the beast in many ways that helps to amplify and really helps you to understand how do marketplaces works.

00:03:20 Kevin Mako: How do people who are looking for your product end up finding your product. So what better avenue and experience to learn the ins and outs of the marketing side

00:03:28 Kevin Mako: so that you could be very strategic and successful when it comes to the actual deployment and execution side of getting those new hardware products to market via these platform,

00:03:36 Kevin Mako: Walmart and Amazon, which are the most massive online marketplaces, especially for emerging and up-and-coming brands. So let's talk about Walmart marketplace specifically.

00:03:45 Kevin Mako: Just describe what it is. Yep.

00:03:47 Will Haire: So Walmart, similar to Amazon, similar to Target, they have the ability to showcase and sell products digitally online.

00:03:56 Will Haire: Walmart.com, or like 3P, however you want to position it, is Walmart's ability to showcase products. And the products that are on the website aren't always

00:04:06 Will Haire: necessarily available in stores. So it's an opportunity for brands to come in and to showcase their

00:04:12 Will Haire: products and show Walmart that these are products that have an audience, that they solve a specific problem and the opportunity to kind of grow from there.

00:04:20 Will Haire: We have seen brands scale their sales from just a 3P relationship to working directly with Walmart reps and to getting into

00:04:28 Will Haire: 1P. So it's a great way to prove the value of your product and what you're doing and to prove that

00:04:34 Will Haire: there is a minimal viable product or an MVP and an audience for that. Walmart is where you shop online and something really interesting.

00:04:42 Will Haire: We always talk about Amazon, Walmart, who's the bigger, who's bigger, so on and so forth. And obviously considering retail in general, Walmart is much

00:04:48 Will Haire: figure. But when it comes to online only, Amazon is roughly 50%. It always changes of all online transactions or online e-commerce sales.

00:04:57 Will Haire: But something that's different for Walmart is that they've been aggressively pursuing online and retail, online or digital commerce. And so to give you some

00:05:06 Will Haire: perspective, right now, give or take, I believe there's like 500 fulfillment centers within a hundred miles of every major city for Amazon.

00:05:13 Will Haire: So that's how they're able to do same day shipping, multi-day shipping. What's really interesting about Walmart is there's like 4,800 stores within 10 miles at every major city.

00:05:23 Will Haire: So you can just hear that like right now, they have the infrastructure, in my opinion, to really crush Amazon or put Amazon's feet to the fire. Walmart is still

00:05:32 Will Haire: very small. They just surpassed eBay recently in terms of e-com, like their percent of the market

00:05:37 Will Haire: share that they own to e-commerce, but they're investing and they're scaling and there's a huge opportunity for any brands they're getting in early.

00:05:44 Will Haire: I consider this a first mover opportunity. So this is like the equivalent of getting into Amazon 15 years ago. I know tons of people that

00:05:52 Will Haire: would, you know, give up a lot of what they own to get that opportunity. And that opportunity is here with Walmart. I think it's going to be around for a long time.

00:05:59 Kevin Mako: I've heard that a lot. I've heard that Walmart really is aggressive at trying to compete with Amazon as well as to other retailers and

00:06:06 Kevin Mako: other players. They're leading the charge as a store-based retailer due to that infrastructure. It's hard to compete with that when you've got that massive infrastructure.

00:06:14 Kevin Mako: So inevitably, as time has ticked on, they've looked at some of the things that other major players are doing like the eBay's, Shopify,

00:06:21 Kevin Mako: personal websites, other retailers, and of course the big giant Amazon in the room. And they're trying to see, well, what can we do to differentiate and compete?

00:06:28 Kevin Mako: What a great opportunity to be a part of that journey with new products. New products are one of the best things that any online retailer can do to compete.

00:06:37 Kevin Mako: And believe it or not, it's a two-way street in terms of competitiveness. you as a startup with a great product, especially as a new hardware startup, you're so eager to

00:06:44 Kevin Mako: get online and it seems like this massive giant world and feels like you have to go out there and beg and plead to get some early sales.

00:06:51 Kevin Mako: But keep in mind that out there, it's the job of these major players to find great new products to showcase on their platform so that they can

00:07:01 Kevin Mako: start eroding market share from some of the other competitors. So know that it's a two-way

00:07:04 Kevin Mako: street. And if you've made a great product that has a great product market fit, you've got

00:07:08 Kevin Mako: customers out there that want it that may not know they even want it right now. There are many platforms out there and this being one of the big ones out there that you can get on

00:07:16 Kevin Mako: in order to be a player in the space. Now, let's dive a bit deeper into that. How do you specifically get your product onto Walmart.com?

00:07:25 Kevin Mako: Like what are some of the actual tactical things that you need to do as a hardware startup in order to be both approved by and placed onto it? And then we'll talk about scale

00:07:34 Will Haire: after that. So it's actually fairly simple. They've actually proved the process tremendously. I think like three or five years ago, it was a process.

00:07:41 Will Haire: It was like you had to submit a request. You had to fill in all this information about your business, submit banking information. And it literally

00:07:48 Will Haire: took six months to get approved just to get onto the platform. And getting onto the platform was

00:07:53 Will Haire: all kinds of messy because it was evolving as they were getting more brands onto the platform. Now it's a little more streamlined.

00:08:00 Will Haire: Generally, you can have your Walmart account up and active in three to five days. Similar process, you're going to go to Walmart and you just submit a form

00:08:09 Will Haire: that essentially has your business information, you know, your EIN, your business address, so on

00:08:13 Will Haire: and so forth. And the whole purpose of that is their trust and safety team need to evaluate your products and what you're selling. If you're selling in like the supplement space,

00:08:23 Will Haire: anything topical or ingestable, I like to say, they're going to have you submit COAs or

00:08:27 Will Haire: other certificates to make sure your products are going to injure consumers, you know, provided

00:08:32 Will Haire: you have all that documentation submitted, you'll get access to the platform pretty quickly. And then from there, it's kind of involved.

00:08:38 Will Haire: So we see a lot of brands do to get started. Generally, they'll already be active on Amazon or they'll already have an active website.

00:08:45 Will Haire: And they'll use a software solution like listing mirror. And they'll just take all their listings and it'll pull from the Shopify or Amazon and it'll pull over to Walmart.

00:08:54 Will Haire: And then you have all your listings. You have all your information. And then it's just optimizing so on and so forth. However, it's good to get started.

00:09:01 Will Haire: If you don't have a lot of resources, you're new to it, it's a great opportunity just to get it up there and you can kind of worry about it as you have time.

00:09:08 Will Haire: But the correct way to do it would be obviously to launch each product individually because search engine optimization, how Walmart indexes your products and even

00:09:17 Will Haire: how shoppers search and find your products are going to be slightly different than they are

00:09:21 Will Haire: going to discover you on your Shopify site or how they're going to find products on Amazon. And consistently, which is kind of crazy, we find not with all brands,

00:09:30 Will Haire: but a vast majority of brands is that the products that are really popular on their website aren't necessarily going to be the

00:09:35 Will Haire: same products that move on Walmart or Amazon or Target or any of these other platforms. It's really interesting, kind of the dichotomy of the Walmart shopper and

00:09:44 Will Haire: that experience for that shopper. So that being said, it's super easy to get started. We highly recommend that even if you

00:09:50 Will Haire: have limited resources, just open the account, list your products, use one of these software solutions, progress, not perfection.

00:09:57 Will Haire: So just because it's not 100% right, as long you're not doing anything egregious, violating any rules, stuffing any keywords that don't belong in there that

00:10:04 Will Haire: might get you in trouble, you'll be good. The list that will be up. And as shoppers shop to discover your products, they'll shop where they're comfortable shopping.

00:10:12 Will Haire: They'll search you on Google. They may buy it on your website. They may buy it on Amazon. They may buy it on Walmart. But it's better

00:10:17 Will Haire: that they're getting it directly from you than from a third party wholesaler who may not have your

00:10:23 Will Haire: brand in mind, well, we may not care about the customer the same way that you do. And a lot of times when we take over Walmart accounts from brands, we'll find that it's

00:10:31 Will Haire: just, especially if they're dealing with wholesale, they really don't care. And then if your product's not selling on a wholesale

00:10:37 Will Haire: perspective, it's not going to get the attention it needs. And then you'll get negative reviews

00:10:41 Will Haire: because of shipping, you'll get all these negative KPIs that'll affect your ability to index, to advertise and all that other fun stuff.

00:10:48 Will Haire: So it's a little bit of a journey and a long-winded way for me to say it's super easy to get started. Let's get started today.

00:10:55 Kevin Mako: That sounds great. It's amazing that the platforms have become essentially startup friendly because as you know back in the day, if you want to get a

00:11:02 Kevin Mako: product into Walmart stores, it was a long process. And typically they wouldn't even take one skew products. Basically product brands that only had one independent product.

00:11:12 Kevin Mako: But a lot of that has changed because of the success of some of these amazing innovations that are coming from hardware startups themselves.

00:11:18 Kevin Mako: All of the big players have been looking at this and saying, how can we be more friendly to these up-and-coming disruptive products that are desired

00:11:27 Kevin Mako: by the world, but not necessarily backed by a Fortune 500 product company? And it's just nice to hear from your perspective as well, being in the space on Amazon and

00:11:36 Kevin Mako: Walmart marketplace. It leads me to a question now about the fulfillment side of things, because let's assume we've got the product posted. We start to make sales.

00:11:43 Kevin Mako: What are some of the best practices of our requirements that make sense in having your fulfillment,

00:11:48 Kevin Mako: set up in order to best service that Walmart transaction or sale. That's great.

00:11:54 Will Haire: So there's tons of applications that will funnel a sell from Walmart API and I'll label it

00:11:59 Will Haire: as a Walmart sale so you make sure you're shipping it properly and doing your due diligence. But there's a couple of options.

00:12:05 Will Haire: So typically what we see is that most sellers will do Walmart fulfillment services, WFS, which is the equivalent of Amazon Prime. There are a couple benefits.

00:12:13 Will Haire: You get some badges like two-day, next-day shipping, the ability to get a pro-seller badge.

00:12:18 Will Haire: There's lots of reasons why you'd want to be on WFS and lots of reason why Walmart would want you on WFS, which is a great opportunity.

00:12:25 Will Haire: And it works like FBA, so you'll pay a percent based on the category. Another option is using a third-party logistics company.

00:12:32 Will Haire: Any third-party logistics company that does the direct-to-consumer portion or the last mile, shipping will be able to identify Walmart orders, fill it, and send it out.

00:12:41 Will Haire: And then on the back end, we're tracking it. So similar to other marketplaces that have strict guidelines on your order defect rate, late ship.

00:12:48 Will Haire: shipments, making sure it's shipped out properly, damage goods, all that other fun stuff. So they're tracking that as well. And they can be negative KPI. So you want to make sure

00:12:57 Will Haire: similar to your website, similar to what you do on Amazon, that you're considerate and

00:13:01 Will Haire: you're putting your best products and your best brand forward when you're fulfilling these orders

00:13:06 Kevin Mako: with Walmart. I mean, quality is paramount. And it starts with manufacturing as well, right?

00:13:10 Kevin Mako: Make sure you have a fantastic product, well designed, well engineered for the market that you're selling it to well tested, et cetera, makes your manufacturing is sound

00:13:18 Kevin Mako: and then quality control on your manufacturing is sound. And then that goes all the way through to where you have it stored,

00:13:24 Kevin Mako: how you have it packed and picked and shipped and all the rest because all of those little details, which are well within your control, any one of them falters.

00:13:31 Kevin Mako: And it gives a negative experience to the buyer. So especially as a new product brand, you don't sell that many units. And the advantage

00:13:38 Kevin Mako: there is that you can have a tremendous amount of personal control as a startup over the quality

00:13:43 Kevin Mako: control. Whereas as you get bigger and bigger, you're going to need more systems and processes in order

00:13:47 Kevin Mako: to manage quality control, especially as you get into the tens of not hundreds of thousands of

00:13:51 Kevin Mako: units. But as a small startup, and especially as you're getting your initial orders, reviews are goal, especially for a brand.

00:13:57 Kevin Mako: The best thing you can do for many reasons, not just for subsequent sales, but also just for your brand equity valuation, your product valuation, is getting

00:14:05 Kevin Mako: great reviews online from customers that really like and enjoy your product. And it

00:14:13 Kevin Mako: So spend the care, spend the attention, especially as a hardware startup, to put the extra effort, especially on those early orders. So you can start gaining that traction.

00:14:20 Kevin Mako: Let's talk about best practices here in terms of scaling up and really doing a good job on the platform.

00:14:26 Kevin Mako: Assuming we've got a quality product and it's being fulfilled well, how do we actually continue to amplify the sales and coverage of the Walmart platform for

00:14:35 Kevin Mako: your particular product?

00:14:36 Will Haire: So a pro tip on that is you want to make sure if you're selling on your website, you have existing. thing, there are apps you can use that are 100% legitimate that will pull your

00:14:45 Will Haire: reviews from Shopify and post them to your Walmart. If you decided you were going to get on Walmart, it was less of a priority and you have a lot of reviews on products.

00:14:54 Will Haire: That can be a shortcut to boost your initial sales because we know that reviews, similar to Amazon influence sales, which influence ranking. So it all kind of works together.

00:15:03 Will Haire: Outside of that, advertising is probably the next best thing you could do to scale your brand. What's unique about Walmart, which to

00:15:11 Will Haire: compared to Amazon and other platforms is just a little different, is that you want to make sure

00:15:16 Will Haire: when you go through the guidelines for search engine optimization, because it is tied to ads. You want to make sure you follow the guidelines very specific.

00:15:23 Will Haire: So there are negative KPIs. And a perfect example is like your title should be less than 70 characters, give or take, no matter what your category is.

00:15:31 Will Haire: But your bullets and description is really where you're able to add in the keyword, the strategic keywords you want to rank for. And the user experience will be good.

00:15:40 Will Haire: you just don't want to stuff that top part. Typically, in Amazon, it works a little different. You'll get 250 characters.

00:15:46 Will Haire: And I bring up Amazon because a lot of brands will start on Amazon. And so a lot of times they just take their Amazon listing and they just copy it verbatim.

00:15:53 Will Haire: But it actually negatively impacts their listings because they're violating all these policies. And I am in no way endorsing keyword stuffing. You should be strategic.

00:16:02 Will Haire: We should identify a handful of root high quality keywords. And root keywords would be like Bluetooth speaker is the root.

00:16:09 Will Haire: Whereas like for shower, whatever else is ancillary to the root. So you want to identify what's most relevant, what has good volume, so on and so forth.

00:16:18 Will Haire: You can advertise on competitors directly. So like I couldn't do like brand A as an ad. The keywords need to exist inside my listing to some degree in order for me to

00:16:28 Will Haire: buy ads against those keywords. So if something's relevant but it's not mentioned in my listing, then I won't be able to advertise on it.

00:16:35 Will Haire: And then a lot of what happens with scales and a lot of your inventors will get kick out of this market it's all data like we're data science we're testing hypothesized

00:16:44 Will Haire: tests hypothesized tests and there are great softwares helium 10 has expanded their software capability to include

00:16:51 Will Haire: walmart keyword research so you're able to get an idea of like how searchers search for your product which root keywords should i target based on relevancy and search file how can

00:16:59 Will Haire: i bake them into my listing and using natural language and showcase the unique selling proposition of my product

00:17:06 Will Haire: and then double down with some advertising walmart similar to Amazon. You can do pay-per-click ads, which is money. That's getting people as they're shopping for your product.

00:17:16 Will Haire: That's as bottom of the funnel. Beaufu, as we like to say, at Belivix, that's where it's at. But they also have a programmatic platform that's DSP.

00:17:24 Will Haire: And so that's your ability to use display ads to target customers using Walmart's data on and off the platform. So somebody who maybe

00:17:31 Will Haire: viewed your product but didn't make a purchase is now in my audience. And I have the ability to serve them ads on mobile devices on own and operated properties.

00:17:40 Will Haire: And it's a great way to kind of hit scale. It's not something you would do as a launch. You're going to want to focus on return on

00:17:46 Will Haire: ad spend, return on investment and being as efficient as possible as you're validating the market and understanding, is this something shoppers want?

00:17:54 Will Haire: Am I solving a problem strong enough that they're willing to pay? So that's kind of how we would look at scale. And we really don't do anything off the platform.

00:18:02 Will Haire: There's opportunities with influencers. We know companies that work with influencers that drive traffic. There's ways to leverage Google, YouTube, and other platforms.

00:18:11 Will Haire: But we have been able to achieve scale with brands on Walmart, focusing on listing the product correctly, optimizing it for search and coming up with an ad strategy to help

00:18:21 Will Haire: them get the initial sales and hit the KPIs they need to hit in order to grow over and over again.

00:18:26 Kevin Mako: Yeah, that's great. And what's such a global marketplace, once you can really try and nail those

00:18:30 Kevin Mako: variables, like how do you get eyeballs on your product and then how do you best convert those

00:18:34 Kevin Mako: eyeballs, essentially is the day of the game and ideally improving return on ad spend. So once you can figure out those fundamentals, that gives you the ability to scale so

00:18:44 Kevin Mako: large, especially on these big platforms, because the audience, even for a small niche product, the audience is massive worldwide, especially, let alone just in the US.

00:18:53 Kevin Mako: What tremendous opportunity to figure these things out, do your A-B testing, really find those optimizations, nail it specific to each platform, whether

00:19:01 Kevin Mako: it's Walmart or Amazon or anything else that you're selling on. One of the big lessons coming out of here is make sure you're doing it right for that particular platform

00:19:08 Kevin Mako: and the types of buyers that are on that platform and test we can refine until you get it right.

00:19:13 Kevin Mako: And that really will lead you to really clear variables and growth opportunities for scale. Last thing before I let you go, I know we're running out of time here.

00:19:20 Kevin Mako: Talk a bit about what Belavix do to help emerging hardware startup brands and where can people go to learn more.

00:19:26 Will Haire: Awesome. Yeah, we appreciate that. So we are a full service marketing management agency. We're a turnkey option. Once that inventory shipped out the fifth phone.

00:19:34 Will Haire: Center. The team will make sure that you're maintaining account health. We're working with your third party logistics company.

00:19:40 Will Haire: We're building out the marketing and advertising strategy. And we're hitting the KPIs that are important to you as a brand based on where you are in terms of your

00:19:47 Will Haire: maturity. Obviously, a launch is going to have different KPIs than somebody's been in market for 10 years. We get clear. We try to act as your platform partner.

00:19:55 Will Haire: So the best way to think of us as your fractional Walmart partner or fractional marketplace. And come check us out. We're BellaVix.com.

00:20:02 Will Haire: That's B-E-E-L-A-V-I-X.com. The website is where you can best reach us. And we post on our blog a few times a week on just tips.

00:20:11 Will Haire: So if you're a small business or you're launching, you may not have enough funds to hire a full channel agency to manage. We have lots of information to help you get started.

00:20:21 Will Haire: What are some things to consider? Here's what we do for software. I'd say use our blog to get started. It's a great resource.

00:20:27 Will Haire: And we also have a newsletter that syndicates a lot of that same stuff.

00:20:30 Kevin Mako: Will, much appreciated for sharing that. And as always, I will put the links to that in the show notes below so anyone can just click through.

00:20:36 Kevin Mako: Thanks again for sharing all your words of wisdom today, Will, and we'll look forward to talking to you again soon.

00:20:41 Will Haire: Awesome. Thanks for having me, Kevin.

00:20:42 Kevin Mako: This was a pleasure. Thanks, Will. Take care.

00:20:43 Narrator: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Product Startup Podcast. If you found some value in the show, please do us a huge favor and hit the like button and subscribe.

00:20:52 Narrator: If you have any questions, yes, suggestions, or anything else, feel free to reach out to us anytime at our email, podcast at MakoDesign.com.

00:21:01 Narrator: This show is hosted by Kevin Mako, North America's leading expert on product development for hardware startups, and the podcast is produced by Mako Design, the original

00:21:10 Narrator: firm providing end-to-end consumer product development services tailored specifically to hardware startups, small manufacturers, and inventors.

00:21:18 Narrator: Take your product from idea to store shelves at MakoDesign.com. That's M-A-K-O Design dot com.

00:21:25 Narrator: Thanks for joining and see you again soon. Thank you.