My experience as a Walmart seller: Pros, cons, and lots of Amazon comparisons

I have been on Walmart Marketplace for a year. I also sell on Amazon and elsewhere. Wallysmarter.com was really helpful in this journey. Below is an explanation of things that I did like and things I did not.

Things I like:

• Far, far less gating of brands/categories than at Amazon. There is some, and to be ungated can be (amazingly) even more opaque than at Amazon, but having to do so occurs maybe 5% of the time as compared to Amazon.
• That there is an actual screening process for sellers. I got in quite easily, but hear that the process takes days/weeks/months for others, something I don’t mind, because …
• … the competition is much less than on Amazon …
• … even while the reach of walmart.com
  is tremendous, more than any other site except Amazon itself. There definitely are SKUs/categories that I’ve seen significantly more sales volume than at Amazon.
• Customer service is the same Indian semi-coherent English experience as Amazon, but seems faster to respond. The answer is probably useless but, hey, the useless answer came back within hours instead of days!
• More importantly, I have not yet seen anything akin to the hundred and one unfair/bizarre ways Amazon can give you a negative mark on your account for things out of your control, like (say) a product that is recalled as being harmful long after you sold out of the item and haven’t restocked since. After some very bad experiences with Amazon, it is not an exaggeration to say that every day I half expect something I had zero warning of or control over to shut my account down, probably for good. No such fear yet with Walmart.
• Similarly, no equivalent to Amazon’s hundred and one bizarre and nonsensical rules, such as requiring buyers to explicitly use a specific form when communicating to the seller that they want to cancel.
• Dropshipping is allowed! Well, sort of and YMMV. Walmart explicitly disallows dropshipping from competitors (Amazon is clearly the target, down to forbidding tracking numbers that start with “TBA”). I have one SKU that I keep in stock, but sometimes dropship from the manufacturer without establishing myself as seller of record as Amazon requires.
• The buy box is easy to get and often responds within seconds to a price change. There is some favoritism for WFS (which I don’t use), but not much, and FBM/WFS sellers are much less differentiated in the walmart.com
  storefront, so there is much less incentive from a buying-UI perspective to move to FBA. FBM sellers often complain at sellercentral.amazon.com
  that Amazon is moving toward a day in which there is no more FBM; no sense of that from Walmart.
• The Pro Seller rating is also easy to get; just have a good order volume and do the right thing (i.e., what is expected/required) in terms of shipping items on time.
• No need to pay $40 for a “Pro” subscription!

Things I don’t like:

• seller.walmart.com
  is terrible. It’s buggy and the UI is horrible (albeit with some marginal recent improvements). Far more tasks require a spreadsheet than at Amazon, and half the time the spreadsheets don’t work either.
• No equivalent to Amazon’s Buy Shipping. This is disadvantageous in two ways: a) No equivalent to Amazon covering INR claims if Buy Shipping is used.1 b) No equivalent to Amazon’s discount rates, especially given the special discounts on UPS/USPS Priority rates that it has been randomly offering lately. Walmart almost expects sellers to use ShipStation by default as opposed to interacting with its own site. I think this is also why Walmart doesn’t have something as basic as Amazon’s “Sold, ship now” messages for each order.
• As bad as Amazon’s seller support is in so, so many ways, at least it’s always possible to contact it. Multiple questions I’ve never been able to ask Walmart seller support, because there is no subcategory that covers the question.
• Most seriously, the inventory system is flat-out broken. During the first half of the year Walmart had an apologetic notice on seller.walmart.com
  for months. Random SKUs still show zero inventory and are thus unbuyable, and/or show prices that don’t match what buyers see. This is the most basic, fundamental part of ecommerce and should never be broken in the first place, let alone for weeks/months.

Example: Since I began selling on Walmart I’d consistently had up to one half of my sales through it (with Amazon and eBay for the rest), but starting in mid-June, for about four weeks my Walmart sales almost (but not quite) hit zero with no changes to my listings. Put it this way: I got Pro Seller rating as soon as I was eligible with tons of room to spare, but lost it for a cycle because the mystery lull’s impact on order volume. Things have improved since then with Walmart volume back up to one third of total sales, but it’s still below what it was for many months before then. I can’t help but think that something in Walmart’s perpetual listings/inventory issues broke my listings’ visibility across the board.

(And yet, Walmart is still better than Amazon policywise.)

• Inability to sell internationally. Yes, I got multiple “join Walmart.ca” messages, too. I find interesting how much Walmart is pushing this, with banners and popups in Seller Center, but I have zero interest in paying Canadian taxes. As clunky as Amazon’s approach to international marketplaces can be it doesn’t require a Canadian legal presence, and I get a meaningful amount of Canadian and (especially) Mexican sales through .ca, .com.mx, and .com.

PS – Example of a question I’ve not been able to ask seller support: Does Walmart allow use of Amazon MCF? I have FBA inventory I want to use to fulfill some orders. I’ve read the documentation that explicitly forbids TBA tracking numbers and using competitor (i.e., Amazon) boxes, so of course I’d use MCF’s blank box and blocking-Amazon-logistics options, but have heard some things about Walmart still forbidding it.

1 Yes, I know about the many reports that Amazon isn’t great about honoring said coverage, but at least it exists. The real solution is eBay’s universal INR protection as long as tracking shows delivery, of course.