Walmart Fast Shipping Q&A For Sellercloud Merchants | Webinar | Descartes Sellercloud

Webinar Transcript

Lisa Wise: Welcome, everyone. You are here to learn about the Walmart fast shipping program for Sellercloud sellers. We’re super excited to introduce you to the program and answer your questions. We want to make sure everybody knows what the program is, how it works, how to get started, so you can start reaping the rewards of this great service.

First, a few housekeeping items. My name is Lisa Wise, I support channel and partner development at Walmart. And I’ll be your moderator. Sidharth, who is also from Walmart, he’s a strategic partner Development Manager supporting the two-day program, he’ll be giving an overview of the program. Esther Nierenberg is an account representative from Sellercloud, she’ll discuss how to get set up in the Sellercloud app. And then we’ll be hearing from Michael Krakaris, Co-founder of Deliver with information about their fulfillment service.

After their presentations, you can ask a question by typing it in the panel on the right. We ask that you wait until the presentations are over. Since they will be answering many of the questions you probably have. A member of the team will respond and it does get busy so please be patient and we’ll get to you. The team will also be answering some of the questions aloud for the group. After the session, we’ll be sending recording to everyone who registered. So don’t worry if you miss something. Without further delay, I’ll hand it off to Sid now to get started.

Sidharth Sahoo: Thanks, Lisa. Hi, everyone. Welcome to our session on Flexport and Sellercloud and the Walmart partnership. To kick things off, I’d like to just go over a quick overview of Walmart 2-day shipping, talk a little bit about the program overview, what you need to do to be eligible and gain access, walk you through enrollment. And then we’ll talk a little bit more about how to track your performance on the program as well.

So with that, first let’s start off with a little bit of background on Walmart today. Free shipping is kind of no longer a nice to have in e-commerce. It’s pretty much a staple and has been since 2017 and that’s when we launched free 2-day shipping on walmart.com. In 2018, the program was extended to all our marketplace sellers and in 2019 we’re actually wrapping that up. And that’s part of this effort here.

So what are some of the key features of the two-day program on Walmart? You can choose to do it either nationwide 2-day, or you can enable it regionally for certain regions. The advantage here is that even if you’re unable to fulfill nationwide, you can enable it for certain areas geographically where you can fulfill today. The advantage is that you get a 2-day shipping flag, which leads to increased visibility and it leads to you showing up higher on search rankings, as well as in filter settings. It also leads to buy box prominence, allowing you to show up over other sellers selling the same product.

Let’s dive into this a little bit more. As you can see, the two products on the left have the 2-day flag, and you show up much higher in search rankings as well as browsing organically. You are also included in filter inclusion. For customers that are browsing using the two-day shipping filter, you’ll be able to show up on those searches as well.

Let’s talk a bit more about how to enroll in the program. You have two options: either ship yourself (the seller fulfilled option) or participate through our vetted 3PL partner Flexport, who is pre-approved for 2-day nationwide on behalf of Walmart. The steps to get into the program include checking if your account is eligible in Seller Center, requesting access, enrolling in the program, and configuring settings for your SKUs.

The eligibility criteria for the self-fulfilled option include having an on-time shipping and delivery rate of over 95%, a valid tracking rate of more than 95%, a cancellation rate of less than 1.5%, a favorable return policy, and selling on Walmart for at least 90 days or fulfilling at least 100 orders.

To request access, go into Seller Center under General Settings and shipping, and there you’ll see an option to request access. Once a team member looks at your account performance, you'll receive approval or denial within 48 hours. As for configuration options, you can enable your entire assortment or just select SKUs and choose specific regions to ship to.

After enrolling in the program, track your performance on a 7, 14, or 30-day horizon, focusing on metrics like on-time delivery, valid tracking, and cancellation rates. The performance team will provide periodic reports to support you and help improve those metrics if needed.

Mike Krakaris: Alright, guys. Thanks Sid. If you have questions, feel free to leave them. Today we'll cover various strategies for selling with 2-day shipping on Walmart and then open it up for questions.

We’ll discuss the Flexport aspect next. Flexport acts as an FBA-like fulfillment service for Walmart and other channels. We’ve seen substantial sales improvements after integrating Flexport with 2-day shipping, with some sellers experiencing an increase of up to 156% in orders per day after enabling the 2-day shipping flag.

We have case studies, like Earthwise bags which went from 69 orders in month one to 800 in month three after implementing 2-day shipping and leveraging Walmart Ads. And another example is Red Rox Retail, where they saw a 300% sales impact almost immediately after enabling 2-day due to competitive advantage in search visibility.

Esther Nierenberg: Hi, it’s Esther here. I will go through an overview of what Sellercloud is and our integration with Flexport. Sellercloud is an order and inventory management system, managing everything from catalog to reporting and warehouse management. To set up integration with Flexport, create a warehouse in Sellercloud, set up an employee for Flexport, and gather necessary credentials to connect with Flexport.

This integration allows us to import inventory from Flexport, automatically send orders, and manage the fulfillment process.

Mike Krakaris: As we wrap up, I encourage you to utilize the Fast Tags feature in Flexport to easily activate fast shipping programs, which simplifies the overall process. If you have any further questions, feel free to reach out.