Selling on Amazon vs Walmart and Shopify: What Sellers Should Know

2. Sponsored Brands highlights the uniqueness of your company and three product offerings by allowing you to feature your brand logo, a custom headline, and multiple products.

They are available in the same countries as Sponsored Products to professional sellers enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry, vendors, book vendors, and agencies. To create your campaign you must follow the same steps as you would for  Sponsored Products, the only difference is that you’d have to submit your ad for review, and wait 72 hours before approval.

Walmart Advertising Partners is the retailer’s new self-serve ad platform. It was launched on January 3rd to better position Walmart to compete with Amazon Advertising.

Walmart Performance Ads operates similarly to the early stages of Amazon Ads.  But at its current stage, there are several distinctions to consider between the two.

Walmart’s sponsored products are called Walmart Performance Ads. They are granted to sellers if their products rank organically within the top three search pages. And they must be winning the Walmart buy box.

The company allows for two sponsored products per search results page. It has a $1,000-minimum lifetime campaign spend, and a $100-minimum daily spend. However, the limited number of sponsored product spots available in Walmart means sellers can capture long-term customer visibility.  You may also want to read up on how to use Walmart product listing variation to maximize exposure to multiple products.

Check out this Sponsored Products Made Simpler Webinar from Walmart Connect to learn more:

• Google Smart Shopping

This feature lets you run effective ads campaigns in a few clicks. Just set a daily budget in Shopify and Google will pull your product information to create the ads.

Smart Shopping optimizes your campaign by choosing which products to advertise, how much to bid and who to target. Then, Google will analyze the results and use them to optimize your campaign.

• Facebook Ads 

When you connect Facebook and Instagram to Shopify, products automatically sync so you can create and manage ads for social through Facebook Ads.

(In order to sync your Instagram to ecommerce, you need to set up a Facebook business page and have products on your FB catalog.)

You can share products with social posts and use Facebook’s Carousel Ads to group items and encourage followers to discover your products.

Sellers can also take advantage of the apps’ marketplaces. You can let customers browse and buy your products directly on Instagram and Facebook.

Both Walmart and Amazon’s Sponsored Products programs offer sellers control over campaign budget and spend. They also use a similar CPC format. 

Advertising costs, however, are a bit variable. For example, Brands could pay a lot more bidding on Walmart. Amazon uses a second-bid auction, where the winning bidder only pays the cost of the second-highest bid plus one cent.

For instance, if you bid $10 for the “lemon scent lotion” keyword, and another marketer bids $8, you would only pay $8.01. Sellers can bid high, knowing they won’t necessarily pay a full bid.

Walmart has a first-price bid auction model. This means sellers pay the exact price of what they bid. So, if you bid $10 and another seller bid $8, you’d have to pay $10. Bidding high is not necessarily the right strategy in Walmart. It is better to scale bids to increase CPC and visibility. 

When you sell on Amazon, you have Amazon’s reputation backing your business. With Shopify, you are fully responsible for promoting your business and building your brand awareness. You have to put time and effort into optimizing your Shopify site so people can find you online. It requires using SEO for relevant key terms and decreasing site load time so your site can rank in search

Account metrics are part of how online marketplaces rank sellers. Amazon tracks four performance metrics:

1. Order Defect Rate (ODR) evaluates your ability to provide a good customer experience. You must keep an ODR below 1%. 
2. Pre-fulfillment Cancellation Rate tracks all seller-canceled orders prior to shipment confirmation. This Rate should always be less than 2.5%.
3. Late Shipment Rate represents orders confirmed after the expected ship date. Less than 4% of your orders must be confirmed over a 10-day or a 30-day period.
4. Valid Tracking Rate (VTR) measures a Seller’s use of Valid Tracking Numbers. You must keep a 95% Valid Tracking Rate.

Walmart metrics require sellers to:

1. Keep 90-day ODR at less than 2%
2. Keep your Shipment rate above 99%
3. Maintain a Valid Tracking Rate above 99%

Both retailers will work with sellers who fail performance standards, as long as they are actively addressing their violations. The worst-case scenario for negative metrics is a Seller Account suspension. Should this happen, make improvements at once before appealing to Amazon or Walmart.

Once you’ve purchased a selling plan and set up your account on Amazon, you can create your first listings through the Seller Central dashboard.

You can either create individual listings manually or upload listings in bulk using an inventory file template. Walmart’s onboarding process is a bit tricky.  New sellers must send in an application and undergo a “trust and safety” review. which can take several weeks.

Once accepted, you will receive a launch checklist with instructions for registering your company. You can then create new listings manually or through Excel uploads. Shopify is more time-intensive. It may take a few days to puzzle out how the platform operates, which storefronts are best suited to your business needs, and how to make a store live. However, Shopify is highly customizable. It offers 70+ free and paid tweakable themes to create a custom storefront.

Amazon, Walmart, and Spotify offer their own distinctive routes to success. The path to success for sellers is unique on each platform, and the results or user experience may be different. It may not be necessary to make a choice, however.

Sellers recognize that each platform has its appeal and advantages. They all have pros and cons, but the better option to diversify your business may be to ensure a presence on all.

In a nutshell:

• Amazon is a customer-centric marketplace, good for small and big sellers alike who don’t want to pay an upfront cost in advertising. Additionally, the platform boasts an outstanding reputation among e-shoppers around the world.
• Walmart rose to second place in eCommerce retailers in the US. It offers a great opportunity for online growth.
• Shopify gives you more independence, allowing you to personalize the front end of your website while building a stronger brand identity, and more scalable pricing.

In the end, big names such as Spotify, Walmart, or Amazon bring more customers and increased visibility. It’s up to you which one you chose to kickstart or grow your business. Good luck!

Esteban Muñoz

Esteban is an SEO copywriter at AMZ Advisers, with several years’ experience in digital marketing and e-commerce.  Esteban and the AMZ Advisers team have been able to achieve incredible growth on the Amazon platform for their clients by optimizing and managing their accounts and creating in-depth content marketing strategies.