Walmart Goes Global with Marketplace Shipping | Fast Five Shorts

Walmart is launching a new cross border shipping program called Walmart Exports for its third party marketplace sellers.

According to Supply Chain Dive, Walmart Exports will allow eligible Walmart fulfillment services items to be shipped from the US to shoppers in Mexico and Canada with additional countries to be added over time.

Eligible products will be automatically enrolled in the program with Walmart handling the picking, packing and shipping.

0 additional friction required for from its sellers.

Quote.

Walmart is currently testing new marketplace capabilities that leverage our fulfillment and logistics network to help sellers on our U.S. marketplace reach customers shopping across borders and quote, a company spokesperson told Supply Chain Dive.

Ken, you, you are the, this, this, this headline was written for you to answer so we're going to go to you first.

Are you buying or selling the idea of Walmart Exports?

I am buying in bulk on this idea.

I'm a Walmart buyer in bulk on this particular issue.

So you know I, I think it's a great idea.

I think that Walmart will, they may require a little bit more information from their vendors to make sure they have all the information that they require to be compliant.

It's up to the vendors to make sure their product is saleable in those destination markets.

But it is absolutely a good plan.

Walmart has scale on distribution and volum volume and this is a great answer to Amazon's capabilities and it makes people want to join their, their marketplace.

So I'm absolutely buying on Walmart offering this capability.

Love it.

Chris, you are, you are gleefully in, in unison with Ken.

It sounds like why, why does that, why does that emotion come to be for you when we're talking about Walmart exports?

Oh I mean, yeah, 100% agree with Ken.

I love how he said it again too.

I mean there's a couple reasons.

One, you know, the infrastructure, what's the infrastructure set up?

Which essentially it is, you know, once you do it once it's so easy to rinse and repeat this for scale and you just make it part of the wfs, the Walmart fulfillment service offering from now going forward.

So it's like a no brainer.

But then the other part about it that I like is, and this is a kind of a new wrinkle to discussion is we've, we've talked about marketplaces and retail media and the relationship between that and so this expands the reach of Walmart's marketplace for Walmart sellers which in turn means more retail media dollars from the sellers too.

And retail media and advertising has become the key growth vehicle for Walmart which for those paying attention just became a trillion dollar company yesterday on the back of said advertising business increases.

So it just makes a ton of.

Sense and yeah I mean and I think you have to look at the new appointments that Walmart has put in place too to support this strategy.

You have David Gugina you know with his supply chain and E Com know how running the show now for for the US Walmart team.

Seth's Dalliers growth and marketplace expansion experience and then Chris Nicholas is bringing bringing in his financial operations and the know how to kind of operate this from an international perspective.

I think you have the right team in place to further catapult this into what I think will be a very direct direct competitor for Amazon sellers and for the fulfilled by Amazon service.

But John, let's have you close us out here.

Any any other thoughts on our what seems like our unanimous decision that this is a buy for Walmart Imports?

Well I'm not to be the the Danny downer but just qualifier just a bit of nuance I think Right.

Okay headline for me is the devil's in the details and as you just covered right they they bu out a pretty impressive team to mind those details and and make sure that the all the promise that I think we are aligned on right.

Anytime you can expand the pie that's a good thing.

Yeah but if it was you know if it was so easy to do it would have been done already.

So the I just.

That's what I would add to this discussion of okay.

In this particularly in this macroeconomic environment or you know, administration etc.

With international trade dynamics kind of changing by the week it seems sometimes right there's, there's going to be a lot more volatility maybe than if they were trying this several years ago or maybe several years from now.

There will be a lot of a lot of details to mind and you can imagine, you can somewhat easily imagine a scenario where sellers are getting you know suddenly seeing a lot of fees showing up that maybe that they weren't aware of you know goods getting kind of caught up crossing borders and then delivery times being shaken up consumers not being you know so that story is possible but any good idea has risk.

Right?

Not saying that's a reason not to do it but we'll just be very curious to see how the execution of the strategy right the classic well hey 80% of the value is in the execution, not the strategy and the idea.

I think this one in particular there are some meaningful considerations that I'm sure that team is going to be very on top of and looking to nail down.

We shall see.

That's right.

Yeah.

Because if it doesn't work right the first time, you might have some sellers that are walking back from their experience with maybe Walmart Marketplace, us too, not just the Mexico and Canada versions.

Ken, did you want to close us out here with one more thought?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it's obviously great to start with Canada, New Mexico, those are the easy buttons of international shipping from the United States.

So that's the place to do this.

You know, I think, you know, vendors need to be aware that they are now going to be responsible for compliance and making sure things are in the right language, marked the right way, packed the right way, with the right requirements.

So I'm sure Walmart will be very good at communicating those requirements backwards.

But you know, Canada and Mexico is the place to start.

They got lots of volume, scale, you know, scale is all that matters in transportation.

So at the end of the day they can deliver a heck of a value for folks that were trying to do small parcel shipping from their house, that that's never going to work.

So, you know, fire it up and let's go.

Now we start going across oceans, it'll get a little trickier, but we'll see, right?

Yeah.

And I think too, Ken, you know, to that point, to the point you guys brought up about the vendors, like let's not forget there's a lot of vendors already doing this via Amazon.

So there's a lot of vendors that understand the cross border dynamics.

There's probably thousands, if not tens of thousands of them that are already doing this with Amazon.

So they're not going to have trouble acclimating.

So as long as Walmart can get the execution right, it'll work.