A report from Marketplace Pulse has confirmed that since their Shopify partnership Walmart have been seeing rapid growth.
In just a year Walmart marketplace has doubled in size, surpassing 50,000 sellers with 5000 of those sellers joining the site after the partnership was announced in June. According to the report in the early stages of 2020 Walmart was adding 1,400 sellers, by April the amount jumped to 2,300 and in July the amount is set to exceed 3,600. It’s true that those numbers have been helped by the partnership however, Coronavirus forcing people to take action in getting their businesses online likely accounts for some of them too.
When the partnership announcement was first made in June, Jeff Clementz Vice President of Walmart expected to add 1,200 Shopify sellers by the end of the year. The goal of adding 1200 sellers has already been reached and although this wasn’t down to Shopify sellers alone, they did make up a significant number of them. With 5 months left of 2020, there is ample opportunity for more sellers to join the Walmart marketplace.
Despite the site already being home to Shopify sellers before the announcment, the partnership allowed for more focus on bringing merchants over and better establishing themselves as well as setting out to give more Shopify merchants access to Walmart’s customers and provide them with the chance to compete with other marketplaces such as Amazon. Interestingly the report also details how whilst sellers have grown catalog size has decreased but this isn’t a strong metric and neither is the number of sellers, instead the most important factor is how well sellers perform.
