🛠️ 1 Solutions Worth Checking Out:

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🚀 This Week’s Walmart Hack: Your Listing Quality Score MATTERS

Poor. Good. Excellent.

Those are the three words that Walmart’s Seller Center uses to describe your online store’s overall Listing Quality Score, individual listing quality scores, and key category performances.

And who doesn’t want to be excellent? Each of these descriptors is tied to a specific score range:

• Poor:  0-59%

• Good: 60-79%

• Excellent: 80+%

We needed a 90% or better to land an A for excellence in school, so an 80% doesn’t sound too bad by comparison. Let’s take a look at the five key categories that contribute to your brand’s Listing Quality Score, and how you can earn your Excellent tag in all five of them.

1. Published and in Stock

No matter how great your product is or how optimized your listing is, you can’t sell products that you don’t have in stock. Properly managing inventory to ensure that customers interested in buying your product are always able to do so is at the top of your priority list.

For details on unpublished items and other listing issues, check the Catalog section in Seller Center. If you’ve got any outstanding issues, they will be listed here, with steps on how to correct them. Whatever you do, do not neglect this!

2. Ratings and Reviews

Positive seller ratings and product reviews build customer trust in your brand. To quickly generate more feedback, consider these useful tools on eligible products:

• Review Syndication – Transfer your product reviews from other approved online shops.

• Review Accelerator Program – Offer monetary incentives in exchange for feedback on purchases. FYI, this is Walmart’s ine copy-cat. Use it liberally!

3. Content Quality

Seasoned sellers already know the importance of optimized content quality that includes an accurate title, detailed description, product specifications, and outstanding images. If you are making the transition from selling on Amazon to selling on Walmart, take the time to carefully review each of your listings and titles to make sure they are formatted properly for Walmart. And please, whatever you do, DO NOT go cheap on your images for Walmart! Their AI scraper is actually really good, and they WILL ding you if you upload trash.

4. Shipping Speed

If you use Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS) for your Walmart Marketplace shipping logistics, you will automatically receive a 100% Excellent score in this category. Using any other shipping method, you can maintain an excellent score by delivering all orders in two days or less.

5. Price Competitiveness

The final piece to the Listing Quality Score puzzle is competitive pricing. One of Walmart’s main goals is to provide great value to its customers, and as such, it has programmed its algorithm to reward sellers who have low prices with high scores, buy boxes, and preferential placement. Checking competitor prices should be a regular part of your routine, and price should be one of the first things you analyze if a product listing ever has a sudden dip in performance. This is a HUGE difference versus Amazon, where sales velocity matters and your price point does not as much. An important distinction.

When you hone in these key categories, achieving an excellent Listing Quality Score is as easy as 1-2-3… 4-5. Don’t forget four and five.

🔥 Hot Walmart Seller News: Ads, Ads, Ads!

While improving your Listing Quality Score and organic search rankings can have a significant positive impact on your brand’s bottom line, there’s no denying that to truly compete in today’s e-commerce world, you need to be budgeting for ad spend.

Have you been feeling like more search result spots are being taken up by sponsored product listings on Walmart lately? If you have, you aren’t imagining things. Walmart has been quietly increasing the amount of sponsored listings in its search results in recent months, and is now on par with Amazon in sponsored ad slot usage.

You can confirm this for yourself in any product category with a random search. For example, I searched “creatine” on Amazon, Walmart, and Target. Putting aside banner ads and focusing specifically on first-page search results:

• Amazon: 15 out of 70 (21.4%) sponsored results, including the first five slots
   

• Walmart: 12 out of 57 (21.1%) sponsored results, including six of first eight slots
   

• Target: Five out of 29 (17.2%) sponsored results, including four of first eight slots

Unlike Target that is still just sprinkling in sponsored slots, Walmart has fully embraced them, as its rival Amazon did a while back.

What does this mean for you? That the days of competing for premium search result real estate without advertising are officially in the past.

Plan and bid accordingly!

🙏 THANK YOU for reading this week’s edition!

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Until next time,

— Jon