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Marketplaces are not created equal, and one of the biggest differences is how they treat sellers on the platform. While technically all marketplaces consist of a list of sellers, different marketplaces approach them differently.
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Walmart reported 2017 Q1 results yesterday, and the big story is impressive e-commerce growth. Retailer's online sales jumped 63 percent, and GMV jumped 69 percent. However, we need to point out that Walmart used to report global e-commerce growth which included all of online properties. This means the 63 percent e-commerce sales growth has no base to compare it against.
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Walmart marketplace launched all the way back in 2009. But the marketplace wasn't resulting in the only thing which mattered - sales growth. So Walmart went out and acquired Jet.com for $3.3b to bring in new talent and have the founder Marc Lore run Walmart's e-commerce. In many ways Jet.com acquisition happened because everything done before that wasn't working, marketplace included.
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Last week Walmart announced a new initiative - discounts for products ordered online, but picked up in stores. By the end of June the program is expected to expand to include over 1 million products. This is the opposite of what Amazon is doing. Amazon is building features for convenience, like same-day delivery in major cities. Thus this change by Walmart raises a question - are shoppers more cheap than they are lazy?
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Since Walmart marketplace has been receiving a lot of attention from marketplace sellers, we decided to investigate how big the opportunity of selling on Walmart really is. We found one way to look at it - by comparing seller feedback. By comparing all feedback received by all Amazon sellers, to all feedback received by all Walmart sellers, we could get a relative number.
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Today Walmart passed a big milestone - 10,000 sellers on the marketplace. Even though Walmart marketplace was launched in 2009, it took a while before it started to gain traction. The first time we covered Walmart was in May 2016, when the Walmart marketplace just passed 500 sellers.
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In the 2016 Q4 earnings report published today Walmart reported promising results for Walmart e-commerce. The 29% growth reported today is the highest in 3 years since 2013 Q4. Walmart also confirmed that there are now more than 35 million SKUs on Walmart.com.
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We think Walmart marketplace is one of the most hyped opportunities in retail. However we noticed that customers are not always pleased. Average rating for top 100 sellers on the Walmart marketplace is 3.9 out of 5. In comparison, top sellers on both Amazon and eBay have an average rating of 4.9 out of 5. Most of them are nearly perfect at 5 out of 5 if not for a few slip-ups.
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Since October when we last looked at the sellers count on the Walmart Marketplace it has continued to grow by at least 1,000 new sellers each month. However while in October there were 1,000 active sellers (sellers who have received at least one feedback rating), this has been accelerating and just crossed 2,000 active sellers.
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Ecommerce sales (gross merchandise volume) grew by 16.8%, best quarter in 2016 so far. After 2 years of slowing growth, Walmart ecommerce efforts are starting to show results. Ecommerce is still only 0.5% of total Walmart sales. However last year it was just 0.15%, so ecommerce will continue to become a bigger part of Walmart every quarter.
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