Takeaways from Walmart's Let's Grow! Seller Summit

Last week we participated in Walmart’s second annual Seller Summit, Let’s Grow. In its second year, it was well attended by sellers, partners and Walmart team members, indicating Walmart’s strategy on doubling-down on marketplace growth. 

Over the two event days, we had the pleasure of spending time directly with Walmart team members and the resounding theme was, “how can we create value for our customers?”  We walked away with a sense of commitment from Walmart to continue to enhance customer experience and provide growth opportunities for sellers.   

Here are a few of our takeaways from the event:  

Digital experience  

The event itself was inviting and experiential, with category displays and Walmart support, such as Walmart Connect, integrated throughout the venue and respective breakouts. On the main stage, the narrative focused on being digital first, having more ways to shop, and tapping into the creator economy.  

Walmart’s presentation highlighted its digital experiences for key tentpoles that are immersive and value-driven, such as their back to school and holiday shops, as well as engaging with creators, which delivers a natural connection between content and conversion drivers.  

To make sure sellers are investing in creating value for their customers, access and ease of creating deals will continue to be enhanced. All these expansion areas and investments are great from an experience standpoint but now sellers will need to have stronger planning in place to win during major tentpoles.  

Given Walmart’s focus on delivering a great experience, we can expect the marketplace (and respective advertising opportunities) to get more competitive and require more investment.  

Premium assortment  

While the assortment announcements included expansion into more niche segments like collectibles and pre-owned, the prominence of the Premium Beauty program sends multiple signals to potential sellers.    

One is the strength of Walmart in beauty overall, given its retail footprint and access to a growing unique digital shopper base (especially beauty shoppers). Second, a shift in defining what Walmart can deliver via category expansion in a world where digital shopping is well positioned for high-tier and low-tier items in the same transaction.  

In the age of “dupes” and “hacks” driven by the influencer economy, the beauty category often comes out on top via the desire to explore and invest more in these products.  It will be interesting to monitor the traction that the Premium Beauty program generates and predict which categories will follow in assortment premiumization.  Is fashion next?  

Leading logistics 

Walmart’s greatest strengths have historically been retail footprint, scale and logistics.  As marketplace expansion appeals more to sellers to expand into large audiences at scale, the ability to utilize WFS for fulfillment can deliver on an accelerated growth plan to get product into consumers' hands in a more cost-effective way than fulfilling via merchant.    

Additionally, for Direct-to-Consumer brands who need to fulfill their website orders quickly (and as profitably as possible), Walmart’s Multichannel Solutions Program MCS now presents a price competitive option for consideration. We expect to see companies start to focus more on comparing marketplace profits and self-selecting more profitable multichannel fulfillment options for their businesses.   On top of this we would recommend that these sellers take a hard look at whether their fulfillment options can support multiple marketplace businesses in addition to existing DTC and wholesale volumes and speed. It will be important to have a fulfillment provider who can deliver on the increasing complexity and scale.  

There were many other great sessions, but these top-level themes should be plenty for consideration as sellers and brands determine their GTM strategy with Walmart.  If you aren’t on Walmart yet, are you monitoring who is selling your brand there? If you are on Walmart, are you investing to grow? Are you effectively using all the tools – from digital to fulfillment – to fuel that growth? And lastly, do you have the right partner in place to help you scale?  

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