7 Best Walmart Promotional Strategies

What are Walmart Promotional Strategies?

The eCommerce market is, without a doubt, saturated. This is common knowledge among us. Building and launching an e-commerce site can be time-consuming, complex, and costly. Online markets can provide an ideal solution. Walmart is one of the most renowned names among these marketplaces. In order to ensure that your advertisements have the maximum impact in the market, you must be familiar with Walmart promotional strategies.

Therefore, we need to examine them more closely. We will begin with an introduction to Walmart Marketplace and why you might want to sell on Walmart instead of other e-commerce platforms.

What is Walmart Marketplace?

“Walmart marketplace,” which was launched nine years ago, is a popular e-commerce platform owned and operated by Walmart itself. Customers at Walmart can choose from millions of products and brands sourced from multiple Marketplace Sellers.

The Walmart marketplace can be a good place for you to sell your products since Walmart has an enormous audience that visits the website regularly. The Walmart Marketplace enables third parties to list their products on Walmart.com, similar to how they list their products on sites such as Amazon or eBay. Sellers prefer this platform as Walmart’s promotional strategies have proved to be a good return on investment.

It has now better understood the Walmart marketplace and benefits small businesses. Let’s discuss some techniques for advertising that can be beneficial in the long run.

7 Walmart Promotional Strategies To Follow

Here are 7 Walmart strategies to help you get what you want out of your shopping experience.

1. Ensure that the price is as low and competitive as possible

If you’ve ever purchased from Amazon’s Buy Box, you probably know that price is important, but it is not the only factor. The Walmart Marketplace is different, as having the lowest price is your best chance of winning a Buy Box. Here are a couple of tips to keep in mind while setting your pricing policy:

• You will end up hurting your overall profit margin if you engage in a race to offer the lowest prices.
• Go after the lowest price by considering both the product and shipping costs.

2. Make sure you have enough inventory

Getting the Buy Box on Walmart Marketplace is crucial to boosting your overall sales, and this strategy is closely related to the one above. You may have the lowest price, but if your competitors have more stock, then they will steal the Buy Box from you.

3. Providing customers with products that they otherwise would not be able to get

A huge variety of products are available at Walmart, and many of those products can also be found on other shopping websites. Although other sites and stores offer more products than you do, the depth and breadth of the selection can’t be matched.

4. Customer service must be excellent

We all know that Walmart’s customer service isn’t always the best. It will be a challenge to compete with Amazon’s customer service policies, especially when compared with Amazon’s adherence to the highest levels.

Here are a few metrics to focus on if “excellent customer support” is difficult to define for you.

• In order to maintain organic ranking positions, you should use a standard shipping rate of 99% or higher.
• There should be a minimum 99.5% shipping rate on the product.
• An acceptable cancellation rate for a product should be less than 1.5%.
• It may not be possible to avoid returns due to damage or defects, but keep this rate at or below 3% and process refund requests within one business day after receiving them.
• Your 90-Day Seller Rating metric must be between 90 – 99%.
• It would be best if you kept your escalation rate below/equal to 0.5%
• Aim to respond to at least 60% of customer calls within 24 hours and 90% of customer emails within the same period of time.

5. Promote Your Great Products and Services – Get the Word Out About What You Have to Offer

On the internet, reviews are an important part of the process of building trust among prospective clients in an environment where face-to-face interactions are not as easy to achieve. Your chances for ranking higher in search engine results increase the more (positive) reviews you have from your customers. Since buyers are rarely patient long enough to scroll through pages and pages of searches. Therefore, ranking high on the first page of a search results page greatly increases your chance of making a sale.

6. Take advantage of the lack of fees at Walmart

Amazon charges a fee for pretty much everything: account subscriptions, FBA services, shipping, storage, commissions on seller referrals, and so on. It is one of the best Walmart promotional strategies. Their fee charges are lesser than Walmart’s. When it comes to Walmart, though, you only have to worry about referring your products, and those fees are determined by the category in which the product belongs.

Then you can use those savings to boost other areas of your business. Such as adding discounted shipping, expanding your inventory, allowing your customers to run promotions or anything else you can do to improve your business.

7. Organize strategic marketing campaigns

Promoting your listings is an excellent way to increase sales and draw more attention to your listings. Here are two banners where you can choose whichever suits your needs.

• Clearance. If you select this promotion, customers will see the word “CLEARANCE” displayed above the product, which means they are getting a better deal. If you have inventory that is slow to move, excess inventory, or seasonal items, use this promotion to promote them at the end of the season.
• Reduced. For this promotion, products over $100 are displayed with the “REDUCED PRICE” badge, and items under $100 are displayed with the 5% off the badge. You can give yourself a boost with this one.

Why should you set up an e-commerce store with Walmart?

Use Walmart as your Ecommerce platform to reap the benefits of Walmart’s promotional strategies.

1. Reaching a wider audience

Given Walmart’s vast audience daily, your products have a greater potential to stand out. It is an added benefit if your listings are aligned with Walmart SEO guidelines since they will rank on the first page for a given search term.

2. Getting Rid of Slow-Selling Stock

Online marketplaces are used by most businesses to liquidate their overstock. Instead of keeping them in a warehouse, they list them on a marketplace and wait for the right opportunity to sell. Eventually, it sells, giving the company more storage space for fresh products and free up its inventory.

3. It’s Easy To Manage

Utilizing a marketplace has the advantage of the ease of use and simplicity of management. Fees are either fixed or calculated according to the transactions and listings in the catalog, which makes managing the catalog easy.

4. Monitoring your competitors is easy

You have the option of analyzing the behavior of your competitors since they use the same platform. You will recognize price differences, marketing strategies, and customer service, among other things.

5. Developing a reputation

You should consider Walmart if your business is just getting established, and you are planning to build a name for yourself. Partnering with Walmart will help you build credibility and ensure the widespread distribution of your products.

6. There are no upfront or ongoing fees

You are only required to pay Walmart referral fees as a seller, determined by the product category in which you sell. It is noteworthy that Walmart’s closing fee is not subject to any variable fees, no per-item fees, or referral fees, unlike Amazon’s.

Walmart vs. Target promotional strategies

Its sheer size still gives Walmart a competitive advantage in the big-box discount store market. Despite this, the company’s primary competitor, Target, has secured a majority share of the market. They have achieved this through catchy advertising strategies and creative design collaborations. There are also differences in the business models employed between the two companies.

The Walmart chain of stores encompasses a variety of brands and products above and beyond its main competitor, Target. This is reflected in Walmart’s higher inventory and asset value turnover and the operational dollar generated per dollar of assets. Target’s business operations are also less efficient than Walmart’s.

Walmart’s main rival, Target Corp. (TGT), operates 1,800 stores in the United States, while Walmart has about 11,000 across the globe.

This year, Target experienced over 30% growth in e-commerce sales, and its low pricing strategy is similar to Walmart’s. The Target business model is less focused on lowering costs than drawing younger customers to mega-stores like Walmart.

Walmart and, in some cases, the entire sector seem to perform better on profitability than Target. Target has a significant margin-of-profit advantage over Walmart regarding gross profit margins. The low-price guarantee policy of Walmart, according to which the company guarantees that its products will have the lowest possible price, may have a part to play in this.

When comparing and contrasting Walmart and Target’s promotional strategies, we can say the Target strategy is better since it is slightly more profitable than Walmart’s. The low-price guarantee policy of Walmart and the daily low-price strategy is responsible for the company’s lower gross profit margin. This also contributes to the lower net profit margin of the company as well.

Final Words

New Walmart sellers will find this article extremely helpful in establishing themselves. Amazon and eBay require different selling strategies, but they’ll become second nature once you’re familiar with Walmart’s promotional strategy. Take a look at a few suggestions here and see what results you receive.