👀 Sponsors, I Want YOU

Are you a Walmart agency, software provider, lender, or analytics provider? Then I would love you to become a sponsor and join me on this journey as I build Walmart Insiders in 2025 and beyond!

This newsletter averages a 50% open rate and is growing fast. The average reader is a 7-figure brand looking to invest heavily in their Walmart presence. Past sponsors include SellCord and Doola.

If this sounds interesting to you, please fill out this form, and I’ll contact you right away.

🚀 This Week’s Walmart Hack: It’s Time to Address the Elephant in the Room

Imagine the following scenario:

You have developed an incredible pillow. The perfect balance of softness and support, made with high-quality materials. And you’ve even managed to manufacture it in a manner that lets you price it competitively against other pillows! Your local brick-and-mortar Walmart orders a batch to sell, and you are confident they will fly off the shelves.

When early reports indicate that your units aren’t selling as well as you’d expected, you go to the store to investigate. You head to the bedding section and walk into the pillow aisle- only to find that your pillow is nowhere to be found. Turns out there was a stocking mistake, and your pillows were accidentally stocked in the home decor section with the decorative throw pillows.

Suddenly, the poor sales numbers make sense. Customers looking for bed pillows weren’t finding your pillow in the correct section when they visited it, and most of the customers looking for decorative pillows weren’t in the market for yours.

Sadly, this hypothetical situation can play out for real in the digital world if you find one of your online products categorized incorrectly on the Walmart Marketplace. If you’ve got any underperformers in your online store, it may be time to investigate categorization mistakes.

Step 1 – Investigate Your Competition: Search for products like yours on Walmart and open the product listings on the top relevant search results. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the product and category tree. If you sell headphone cases and note that the top listings being displayed are categorized as Electronics / Audio / Headphones / Headphones Accessories / Headphone Cases, then yours should be too!

Step 2 – Utilize Item Spec 5.0: Since the launch of Item Spec 5.0 in 2024, Walmart reports that there has been a 60% drop in generic attributes, a 65% increase in granularity, and a 10% improvement in content quality site-wide! All you have to do when adding or editing a listing is select the correct product type in your Item Spec 5.0 file, and the proper categories and attributes will be applied.

Step 3 – Confirm Changes and Get Support if Necessary: After making an update to your Item Spec 5.0 file or product listing, be sure to check that the changes you have made are live on Walmart. Technical difficulties are rare, but if your updates aren’t saving or keep reverting back to their previous state, you’ll want to catch this ASAP and contact support for help.

And it’s as easy as that! If you’ve been putting off migrating to Item Spec 5.0, now is the time, as Walmart support for Item Spec 4.0 ends on August 31, 2025. Walmart sellers will no longer be able to add or edit listings created with Item Spec 4.0 after this date, which could lead to frozen or suppressed listings.

It’s catalog auditing time!

🔥 Hot Walmart Seller News: Walmart WAIVES Peak Season Storage Fees

Santa has been known to check his list twice, but I had to check to make sure I was reading this holiday news correctly THREE times. Walmart is waiving peak season storage fees?!?

You probably had to re-read that a few times, too, right? Not RAISING peak season storage fees like Amazon sellers see almost every year. WAIVING them!

During peak season (October 1 to December 31), Walmart sellers typically pay $1.50 per cubic foot per month for inventory stored over 30 days. This year, sellers will only pay the standard storage fee of $0.75 per cubic foot. This fee waiver is in place for both WFS and MCS programs!

Amazon sellers, be honest- can you even imagine Amazon being this generous to its third-party sellers? Passing up on millions of dollars in fees to make life easier and profit reports higher for those sellers? Sounds like something out of the Twilight Zone to me.

But alas, what would be unthinkable on Amazon is just another day in the life of a Walmart seller. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, actions speak louder than words. And actions like waiving peak season storage fees show just how much Walmart cares about its sellers.

We’ve already reached the middle of August, which means Q4 and the holiday season are right around the corner. It may still be too hot for a mug of cocoa next to the fireplace, but it’s never too early to get excited about reduced fees!

🙏 THANK YOU for reading this week’s edition!

Your Feedback is valuable. Respond to this email and tell me how you think I could add more value to this newsletter.

Interested in reaching 18,000+ growth-minded Walmart sellers like Simple Modern, Kitsch, HexClad, and other legends? To become a Walmart Insiders sponsor, reply to this email or fill out this form!

Until next time,

— Jon