Walmart's Marketplace Velocity Play | Fast Five Shorts

Walmart is launching next day delivery for third party orders in major cities.

According to chainstorage, Walmart has unveiled a suite of tools and initiatives designed to accelerate the growth of its marketplace sellers at the company's annual let's Grow Walmart Marketplace Seller Summit, which Chris and I also had the pleasure of attending last week.

Yeah, we did.

Yes.

Walmart introduced new AI powered tools and seller incentives to help sellers grow faster, operate more efficiently and reach more customers.

It also announced expanded next day delivery in major metros and enhanced omnichannel opportunities, including showcasing marketplace items in store.

Walmart Fulfillment Services, which stores and ships products for the chains third party marketplace sellers is now offering expanded next day shipping across US Cities including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Houston and Atlanta.

The next day deliveries will begin with some of the most popular items on the E commerce platform.

Chris, is Walmart right to be going after marketplace growth so aggressively?

And why do I feel like I already know your answer to this?

Yes, you might be alluding to my article I dropped last week in Walton's Weekly Ramblings talking about their you and we win philosophy.

So yes, and 100%, I think they're right to be doing this.

I love what Walmart is doing here.

They are out Amazoning Amazon and especially when it comes to speed.

Walmart is aiming to have 95% of the country deliverable in under three hours, and they're already at 93%, I might add.

And also we should note that 1/3 of Walmart's deliveries, which we learned at that conference, are already that fast.

So one third of their deliveries are already in under three hours.

And 25% of those, this gets even better.

And 25% of those are delivered in under three hours, 30 minutes.

If you didn't digest that, please do because it's pretty freaking remarkable.

Now Walmart is trying to bring their marketplace sellers into that speed game too.

So and they're going to do it for a couple of reasons and I think ultimately at the end of the day, so one, customers clearly want it based on the statistics I just read.

So like the demand is there.

And two, it could start to chip away at Amazon's FBA business.

And you know, it's the whole idea of it is to get more sellers onto Walmart Fulfillment services, or WFS as they like to call it.

So that's pretty compelling because selling with Walmart to Amazon, it does offer another ability that you can't get with Amazon, which is the ability to grow up in your business to eventually go into stores as well as a component of what Walmart can offer the sellers that come onto wfs.

So net net, it's Walmart's omnichannel flex, pure and simple.

I think they should be going aggressive and, and I think it's, it's a, it's a, it's a play that's hard for others to match at the end of the day.

Yeah, I, I completely agree.

You kind of hit on all the points that I had noted too.

I Eminem you.

Oh no, it's okay.

We have, I think we have, it's, it's just a, an encouraging thing for our listeners to listen to.

Go back, catch that interview with Dave Gugina from Walmart from last week because he does really dive into what this looks like both for the marketplace sellers, for Walmart and for the end consumer.

I think for me the, one of the most impactful things that he, he told us in that interview, Chris, was that this efficiency and speed that they're offering their marketplace sellers is also helping those marketplace sellers keep their costs low.

And if marketplace sellers can keep their costs low, then customers know that they can reliably go to walmart.com time and time again and know with a high degree of confidence that they're going to get the best prices.

And this gets back to, you know, what John Furner said in closing at, at the keynote sessions at the summit this week.

The whole like you win, we win mantra is 100% true.

And you can see the investment that Walmart, Dave Gugina and team are really putting into making sure that they are developing a path that these marketplace sellers can go down for future growth online in their 4,600 plus stores and that Walmart's really truly investing in in them.

It's not just here's another place for you to sell your product.

So 100% agree on, on the, the momentum that they're building here.

Yeah, that's a great point you bring up too because didn't Walmart also tell us that they're the, the most effective from a cost standpoint too at like I think the rate they claimed, 15% cost advantage by using Walmart for your fulfillment relative to other options.

Now who knows if that's right but I'm guessing Walmart's probably not going to say that publicly unless they're pretty confident in it too.

So yeah, there's a lot at play here.