Walmart VP Reveals How WFS Powers 44% of Walmart Marketplace Sales & Fulfills for Amazon Sellers

Hello, everyone.

This is Omnitalk Retail.

I'm Chris Walton.

And I'm Man Mazinga.

And we are coming to you live from the Walmart Seller Summit at the beautiful Gaylord Hotel in San Diego.

And joining us now is Kyle Carlile, the VP of Fulfillment Services at Walmart.

Kyle, welcome to omnitalk.

Yeah, it's great to be here.

Thanks for having me.

Kyle, I'd love to start by getting a little bit of your background and what you do as the VP of Seller Services at Walmart.

You bet, you bet.

So I've been at Walmart for 11 years now, and I've had the opportunity to work in supply chain, and most recently I was in global sourcing.

In global sourcing, I had the opportunity to lead a lot of our resilience strategies about where we're sourcing from everything from bananas to toys all around the world.

So a fun opportunity for me.

And now I get to take that and evolve it here with Walmart Fulfillment services.

So that is a big dichotomy.

Bananas to toys, I like that.

So I'm curious.

So as you just mentioned, you recently transitioned to lead to wfs.

For those in the know, Walmart Fulfillment Services.

I sounds, I feel so cool saying that.

How are you gonna apply the work from your previous jobs into your new role?

You bet.

You bet.

We're here today.

We're meeting with, you know, hundreds, thousands of sellers here today.

And as I think about my role in sourcing, we were in factories, looking at Christmas trees and looking at all the items around the world.

These sellers have the same challenges that they're thinking about where do they manufacture and how do they get it to the customer.

And so I've had to learn about that global supply chain and some of the capabilities that we've been developing for WFS actually help enable those sellers be more successful.

So things like, how do we help them with our ocean transportation, our scale of Walmart, how do we help them leverage that out of Vietnam and India and more origins to come.

But we're helping greenlight new origins for them to leverage our transportation.

The Walmart fulfillment services feels like a major, major component to the future of where Walmart's marketplace is going.

How do you plan to kind of chart the next phase of Walmart fulfillment services and kind of continue to deepen that integration and be so relevant for the sellers?

Yeah, no, it's a great question.

It all starts with listening.

We spent a lot of time listening to all of our sellers taking feedback about how we can get better right now, about 44% of our sales are on WFS.

Okay.

Out of all of our marketplace, 44% of that is in WFS.

And it's growing.

Okay.

It grows every year.

And that scale helps us get better with our sellers.

So just by listening, it helps us learn about new capabilities that would help them grow their business, because that's what we're all about.

Things like multichannel solutions.

So this is a new capability that we have that allows our sellers that have inventory in our fulfillment centers, they're obviously going to use that to fulfill on Walmart.com yeah.

But it also helps us.

They can leverage our service to fulfill that for other channels as well.

So like Shein, Temu, even Amazon, they can fulfill their orders via our inventory in wfs.

Wow.

That's unique.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The global point is really interesting too, because that brings a whole nother scale perspective to the whole discussion, which is, you know, we were talking beforehand.

That's something I hadn't thought about too.

All right, I'm curious.

We had David Gugina on here earlier, and I think he said, faster, faster, faster, like three times.

Right.

And at least three.

So.

So I'm curious, how are you living up to his promise of making things faster from your role?

How is speed playing into things?

Yeah, speed's so important.

Our customers have spoken.

Our customers want to shop how they want to shop.

And typically speed is really important for them.

Whether it's a backyard barbecue or whether it's an event that they're hosting, getting those items quickly to the customer's doorstep is really important.

So we've been working alongside our sellers to enhance our platform, give them better inventory visibility of where they've deployed their inventory.

And we've enhanced capabilities to actually spread that inventory across our whole network.

That allows us to be more efficient with our sellers and allows that inventory just to get closer to the customer.

So it's transparent to the seller, but also it's great for the customer because they see that and when they see it next day on Walmart.com that's really important to them.

Yeah.

Well, where does that go?

How do you make that even better or faster, as I know is a key component for you and the team to really continue to be that, like, best in class experience for the sellers on your marketplace.

Yeah, best in class is where we aspire to be.

So we're working across our own supply chain.

We've invested a lot in how we think about highly automated fulfillment just so that when that order comes through, we're automatically fulfilling it and making sure that the customer's getting it as soon as possible.

And so getting that as close to the customer, like I said, with the right transportation options, that's what it's all about.

And so we're using our scale and our large supply chain to help figure that out.

Well, Kyle, that's great.

Well, thank you also for taking the time out of your incredibly busy day to sit down and interview with us.

We really appreciate it.

It's great meeting you, too.

Yeah, great to meet you.

Always great to meet an Omnitalk fan.

Kyle listens to our weekly podcast on his commute.

You bet.

It's great.

And thanks to Walmart and the Walmart Marketplace team and the whole seller summit for allowing us to come in and provide you with these great interviews with all these fabulous Walmart executives today.

And until next time, Anne, be careful out there.