🎅 Holiday Sales Are on the Line: Sellers Are Losing Nearly Two Days a Week to Manual Tasks

ChannelEngine’s new Marketplace Seller Trends Report shows that while sellers are expanding rapidly, with a third already active on seven or more marketplaces, including Amazon and Walmart, outdated manual processes are stalling growth. On average, 36 percent of the week is lost to tasks such as fixing listings and updating inventory, leaving sellers slower to respond to pricing and visibility challenges.

With 91 percent calling automation business-critical, the findings underline a clear takeaway: sellers that streamline operations will be the ones positioned to win sales, protect margins, and scale successfully across channels this peak season and beyond.

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🚀 This Week’s Walmart Hack: A Coffee Case Study

If you are still on the fence about expanding your e-commerce business into the Walmart Marketplace, it might be time to wake up and smell the coffee. More specifically, one of my personal favorites, a fresh-brewed cup of Lavazza!

Luigi Lavazza founded the Lavazza coffee company in Turin, Italy, back in 1895. The company is still based in Turin to this day, and over its 130-year existence has remained in control of the Lavazza family across four generations.

Lavazza has been the market leader in the Italian coffee retail market since the late 1950s. Its products are present in over 60 countries worldwide. With so much local and global success for its brand’s name, Lavazza could have easily rested on its laurels and stuck to the e-commerce basics of just selling on Amazon.

Instead, the coffee company embraced Walmart Marketplace early, and that was a decision that has brewed up some exciting results. After a few years of testing the waters on Walmart with seller-fulfilled products, Lavazza decided to take the plunge and start utilizing Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS) in 2023.

The positive effects of this move were as quickly noticeable as the energy surge Lavazza’s espressos provide. Michael Roubini, Lavazza North America’s eCommerce Sales Director of 3P Marketplaces, shared the following in a recent story on the brand:

“We initially started sending in our top ten, fifteen products. We noticed that these products were not just overselling, but in a span of a year and a half, we were able to grow our business almost 200% from that first year.”

Lavazza now uses WFS for 70% of its GMV, which has helped the company produce an On-Time Delivery rate of 99%. Considering how important coffee is in many of our daily routines, being able to lean on Walmart’s outstanding logistics to ensure that deliveries are virtually always on time keeps coffee pots filled and customers happy.

Including its impressive run on Walmart, Lavazza has an annual revenue of $3.3 billion, and that translates to over 30 billion cups of coffee served every year. How many millions of dollars in revenue would have been missed out on (and how many millions of cups of coffee would have gone unserved) if Lavazza hadn't started selling on Walmart Marketplace? And how much profit would have been lost, especially when you factor in that WFS costs 15% on average than most logistics competitors?

Whether you’ve been in business for 130 years or 130 days, you can’t afford to miss out on all of the new potential customers and sales that Walmart can help you unlock. Time to turn up the heat and brew your own Walmart success story!

🔥 Hot Walmart Seller News: The Dreaded Return Window Has Been Extended

It’s the holiday season, and experienced sellers on Amazon and Walmart know what that means– extended return windows.

In Walmart’s case, items purchased between October 1, 2025, and December 31, 202,5 are eligible for return until January 31, 2026, with just a few exceptions (such as food and beverages). The adjusted return window will be applied automatically to all of your sales during this time period, so no action is required on your part.

An increased rate of returns in January sadly comes with the territory of the big boost in traffic and sales that the fourth quarter provides. Customers returning unwanted gifts or products they impulse purchased during the holiday season is unfortunately part of the cost of doing business. There are, however, a few things that you can do to help keep your return rates in check:

• Make  Your Product Listings as Clear as Possible – This, of course, should be a priority year-round, but it is especially important this time of year. Do your product details include answers to frequently asked questions? Are you utilizing all of Walmart’s advanced image options to give a clear visual representation of your items? Infographics or tables (like a detailed size chart for clothes) are a great way to draw attention to important information that a buyer may miss in text form.
   

• Utilize Useful Owner Manuals and Packaging – While product listings ideally answer customer questions and help them to avoid confusion BEFORE they make their purchase, a detailed owner manual and/or packaging does so AFTER. The same rules apply here; be thorough, provide clear instructions, and provide visual aids whenever you can.
   

• Answer Customer Emails ASAP – Target a response to all customer messages within 10 hours. If a potential customer doesn’t hear back quickly on their inquiry, they may simply buy the item with the plan to return it if it doesn’t match their expectations.

And lastly, when next year rolls around and you get the January return blues… pull up your fourth quarter sales numbers again. For every item that gets returned, a WHOLE LOT don’t. Perspective always helps!

🙏 THANK YOU for reading this week’s edition!

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Until next time,

— Jon