We’ve explained why your brand needs to account for Walmart’s marketplace as part of a holistic eControl strategy, now let’s look at what creates an effective approach.
Walmart’s online sales increased by 74% during the global pandemic, making it not only the largest retailer in the world, but the second largest online retailer in the US. Walmart estimates that around 220 million customers visit its sites weekly, making it a great commercial opportunity for many brands—as well as a platform that needs to be appropriately controlled.
Your eControl strategy for Walmart must account for both authorized and unauthorized sellers, backed by the requisite legal foundation and data insights. This breaks down into four key stages:
Let’s take a closer look at each stage.
Through its Brand Portal, Walmart allows companies to manage product listing assets such as images, descriptions, and other elements. To do this, brands must apply and be approved for access, then once in, you have the option to submit copyright and trademark infringement claims. Brands can and should use the portal to address any clear violations of their IP on the platform.
There are currently over 100,000 third-party sellers on Walmart Marketplace. Moreover, sources estimate that there are between 50 and 60 million products available to browse, with Walmart allowing sellers to list as many SKUs as they want for free.
The reality is that the Walmart Brand Portal does not address gray market unauthorized sales. Thus, brands need to implement an authorized seller program with its authorized distributors, retailers and dealers. These policies will make expressly clear where and how your products can be sold in an authorized manner.
Next, brands still need to be able to stop unauthorized sellers. To do so, brands must implement a legal foundation to overcome the first sale doctrine and enable direct enforcement against the resellers off-platform. This is critical to being able to have an effective basis for enforcement against unauthorized sellers.
Brands need to be able to regularly monitor Walmart to understand all sellers of their products, the buy box percentage owned by each, as well as the commercial return associated with control efforts. Being able to identify, quantify, and precisely action disruptive actors to maximize commercial ROI on your brand’s control program is critical. Vorys ancillary Precision eControl's Walmart Insights* module provides brands with each of these capabilities and fills a critical role in an effective eControl program.
Once brands have the requisite foundation, monitoring and disruption insights in place, it’s time to start conducting efficient, effective and legally compliant enforcement against unauthorized sellers. As product sources start to emerge, brands can then work to shut those off. All the while, brands should be measuring commercial impact—i.e., buy box and sales increases—rather than vanity metrics like takedown numbers.
Dive deeper into these stages and see how Walmart is interconnected with other marketplaces and a vital part of your effective eControl strategy in our Walmart Playbook, a comprehensive resource designed to help brands gain control on this ever-growing channel.
To schedule a channel control assessment and learn how a customized eControl program can set your brand up for success across Walmart.com and your other high-impact channels, contact Daren Garcia.
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