Walmart

Walmart marketplace has surpassed 50,000 sellers, doubling in size from July 2019. The partnership with Shopify, announced on June 15th, has accelerated its growth, bringing over 5,000 new sellers during the six weeks since.

More brands joined the Walmart marketplace last week than ever before, setting a record for new sellers added in a week. The partnership with Shopify, announced on June 15th, was mostly why more than 1,100 new sellers joined the marketplace. That’s three times more than the average week this year so far.

Despite Shopify's new-found narrative of being an integrator, it's a poor one. And as a business, it assumes other channels will not succeed, because that would render Shopify obsolete.

Sales on Walmart marketplace increased more than on its main rivals Amazon and eBay. The marketplace, which provides over 90% of the assortment on the website, is surging, driven by the significant increase in the number of shoppers on Walmart.

Thousands of shoppers on Walmart were recently disappointed when shopping for face masks and other essential items. The Walmart marketplace is to blame. A few dozen fraudulent sellers used fake tracking numbers and other tricks to accept orders that never reached the consumers.

Competing marketplaces are not seeing a significant acceleration in new sellers as Amazon's fulfillment struggles caused sellers to reevaluate their dependence on the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) service. One month after Amazon started prioritizing the stocking of essentials and high-demand items in its warehouses, making many sellers that used the FBA service to look for other warehousing providers, it didn't drive sellers to look for alternative marketplaces.

Demand for online groceries has surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Walmart is a clear winner so far. Walmart Grocery became the number one most downloaded app in the Shopping category on the iPhone App Store. Overtaking Amazon’s, as well as other retailer’s apps.

Walmart has nearly tripled their U.S. e-commerce business in three years, growing from estimated $7.9 billion in 2016 to $21.9 billion in 2019. Walmart’s e-commerce business in the U.S. is expected to surpass $28 billion in 2020, driven more by strong growth in grocery pickup and delivery, rather than general merchandise.

Jet.com website traffic reached an all-time low in December with 1.4 million visits, an otherwise crucial month for retailers. When Walmart acquired Jet in the summer of 2016, the December that followed had 33 million visits.

On December 1st, Walmart disabled next-day delivery nationwide. The company restored it only two weeks later on the 15th. This year’s calendar meant the shortest possible holiday shopping season of 26 days - the number of days between Black Friday and Christmas eve. For more than half of it, the highly promised next-day delivery was absent.