Walmart Marketplace Is Now the Clear No. 2 — What That Means for Your Catalog

For years the conversation about online selling was effectively a conversation about Amazon, with everything else lumped into a distant 'other.' That's no longer accurate. Walmart's online marketplace has climbed past the old number-two contenders to sit firmly in second place for U.S. retail e-commerce, and the gap behind it keeps widening. If you sell on Amazon and you've been treating Walmart as a someday-maybe, the momentum is worth a serious look — not because every catalog belongs there, but because the audience and the buy-now infrastructure have grown to the point where ignoring it is a decision, not a default.

Why Walmart's rise actually matters to a seller

Rankings make for nice headlines, but what matters to you is whether the traffic converts and whether your product can win a share of it. Walmart's climb is built on real foundations: an enormous existing shopper base that already trusts the brand, a fast-growing membership program that drives repeat visits, and a fulfillment network that lets third-party items qualify for fast, tagged delivery. That combination is what turns browsers into buyers. A marketplace can have huge traffic and still be a poor place to sell if nobody completes the purchase — Walmart's second-place position reflects completed sales, not just visits, which is the number you care about.

The seller's case for being there early-ish

Walmart's marketplace is still far less crowded than Amazon's in most categories. That has direct consequences for you:

• Less per-listing competition means your product can surface and rank without the brutal saturation you fight on Amazon.
• Lower advertising cost-per-click in many categories, because fewer sellers are bidding on the same keywords.
• A second demand stream that doesn't share Amazon's algorithm, so a bad week on one platform doesn't sink your whole month.
• Reusable assets — your images, copy, and packaging mostly carry over, so the incremental work to list is far smaller than starting from scratch.

None of that means it's free money. It means the cost of testing is low relative to the upside, which is exactly the situation where a measured experiment makes sense.

Which of your products actually belong on Walmart

The mistake is to copy your entire Amazon catalog over and hope. Walmart's shopper skews toward value, everyday essentials, and family-oriented purchases, and its fee and fulfillment math differs from Amazon's. Some of your SKUs will be more profitable there; some will be underwater. Before you list anything, run each candidate product through the actual Walmart fee structure — the referral percentage and, if you use Walmart Fulfillment Services, the per-unit and storage costs — and compare the net margin to what the same product earns on Amazon. Lead with the products that price competitively for a value-conscious audience and still leave you a healthy margin after Walmart's cut.

Treat the launch as a measured test, not a leap

You don't have to commit your whole business to find out whether Walmart works for you. Pick a handful of products where the margin math is clearly positive, list them properly with full content, give them a modest advertising push, and watch the real numbers for a few weeks. The goal of the first phase isn't scale — it's data. Once you can see which SKUs convert and net a profit on Walmart specifically, you expand into the winners and leave the losers on Amazon. That disciplined approach is how the marketplace's momentum becomes your growth instead of just an interesting statistic.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a separate inventory pool for Walmart?

Not necessarily. You can fulfill Walmart orders yourself from the same stock, or send dedicated units to Walmart Fulfillment Services for fast-delivery tags. Many sellers start seller-fulfilled to test demand with minimal commitment, then move proven winners into WFS once the volume justifies it.

Will selling on Walmart hurt my Amazon listings?

It shouldn't, as long as you keep your pricing consistent across channels. The bigger risk is the reverse — a lower price on Walmart or your own site can trigger Amazon's fair-pricing checks. Keep prices aligned and the two channels reinforce rather than undercut each other.