Cracking the Walmart Code for Amazon Brands

Paul Sonneveld
I'm Paul Sonneveld, co-founder and CEO of MerchantSpring, and a host of this weekly podcast. Now, before we get started, a very quick note. MerchantSpring is proud to be a sponsor at Amazon Accelerate this year. If you are attending, come and see us in our booth to discover our newest features, enter our exciting year-long subscription giveaway, and even chat with me about being a guest on this very podcast. I'm always looking for great speakers. All right. 

Now, today, I am joined by, you saw her briefly, Hailee Johnson Engelbert, co-founder of Cartbloom, a Walmart-first advertising agency helping brands build and scale successful Walmart businesses through Walmart's Connect advertising suite. Hailee began her e-commerce career at Amazon Seattle headquarters in vendor management before moving on to Amazon advertising, where she met her future Cartbloom co-founders. She later became the VP of Advertising and Marketing at the Genius brand, leading expansion into Target and Walmart.com. 

Now her passion for Walmart led her to join the inaugural Walmart Connect Marketplace team, giving her a rare insider view of the platform's unique best practices. Quick spoiler, it's of course nothing like you know from Amazon. Uh, we are live today. So, drop your questions in the chat, LinkedIn or YouTube, as we go. And of course, Hailee, it's great to have you here. Welcome to the show.

Hailee Johnson-Engelbert
Hi, Paul. It's very nice to see you again. Thanks for having me today.

Paul Sonneveld
Absolutely. This is a topic that's always dear to my heart because it always generates a lot of debate. In fact, many, many years ago, probably about two, three, I would say, a lot of agencies would always tell me, oh, Walmart, it's too hard, too difficult. Sales are not big enough, which leads me really into that first question, right? Might as well face into it. Why should Amazon first agencies really invest in Walmart now?

Hailee Johnson-Engelbert
I think before we even kick this off, Paul, and dive into the nitty gritty, I think expectation setting is always really important. And at Cartbloom, we do like to expectation set from the get-go with our agency partners, with our brands, especially brands that are moving from Amazon, considering it, or also moving from their D2C to test on the Walmart platform is job. Expectation setting number one: sales initially are not going to be as strong as their overall Amazon sales are at this point.

Something that we have said even when the three of us were working on the Walmart Connect side three-ish years ago now, four years ago now, we would tell our clients, Hey, remember when you started on Amazon and you were yelling at us at Amazon advertising about how Amazon wasn't working for you like in 2017? We really want everyone to understand that the Walmart marketplace platform and the advertising platform is like Amazon's was at that point. So once people understand that, that we're not necessarily comparing apples to apples, and your sales expectations, at least for your first couple years, should be that, then it's good to be able to move into some of these topics.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, expectation management, that is so critical. I mean, I think just in general, for any agency business, or if you're in the business of serving people, Absolutely. It's certainly a different platform. It's not, hey, it's just another Amazon V2, right? Which brings us on to the topic of onboarding or even getting started.

Hailee Johnson-Engelbert
Yeah.

Paul Sonneveld
I mean, it's so intriguing because you know both sides of the fence, if it is a fence, I guess. You know the Amazon side really, really well. You know the Walmart side really well. So, for those people who spend most of their time with two feet on the Amazon side of the fence, how would you describe the differences when it comes to getting started and onboarding?

Hailee Johnson-Engelbert
Yeah, so this is where I think things get really exciting. So I know a lot of agency partners, brands like yourself, just introing, we're talking about, they hear about Walmart, they hear about this scale, they hear that it's the place to be, it's the place for growth, but they haven't really been able to make it happen. It does take following a few things very critically in order to onboard and have some success. So something that's different, well, there's multiple differences. The first thing that I'd like to highlight that is different is if you are a strategic brand or you're working with a strategic brand, whether it's initially or eventually after you've proved some success, you may have access to a SAM, which is a seller account manager that's there to help for overall strategy. And they are free of service. 

So Amazon has had different programs before in the past that they've baited, but ultimately, they are focused on selling that product. When I was a seller myself, that could cost upwards of $5,000 a month just to have access to different partners that Walmart does provide you for free. They can help with things like commission breaks, which can help your margins, launching on WFS, which is the similar platform to Amazon's FBA, as well as helping you with price parity, selection, things like that. So that's one of the first ways that your onboarding experience can be different.

They also have sub-onboarding teams within that tier system. There also is something called a spec sheet. Walmart just recently rolled out this past week, spec sheet five, which is their new onboarding item setup sheet. That specifically is not one-to-one with everything that Amazon requires when actually creating your listings. So brands and agencies will make this mistake pretty early on, where they just take everything they have from Amazon or their D2C, upload it into a spec sheet to get their items live. And then they're not filling things out correctly because it's not one-to-one. And then you end up with different taxonomy issues, different attribute issues, which, if you were doing that incorrectly from the get-go, is going to have a whole lot of problems. So that's something that we really say you should focus on. 

And then furthermore, Walmart has more so than Amazon, I would say, this focus on the content quality being a huge part of their overall algorithm. They have something called an OLQ score. And within that, there's a content quality score that it's very important that you are above 80% for relevancy, as well as both paid and non-paid traffic. So, if you're not paying attention to your OLQ score, your content quality, as well as not following the correct attribution steps, that's going to be something that makes it challenging for you when launching.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. It's, you know, this is one of the things that really surprised me when we built our Walmart integration a few years back, the fact that Walmart already had APIs ready to go to really help you assess your content quality. You didn't have to sort of build an outside sort of third-party tool, you can just plug in. And it's very much front and centre. So interesting, I'd love to get on to the topic of listing optimisation, how that impacts organic ranking a little bit further. 

But I want to sort of sort of lay the groundwork here and switch to the ads side, right? Ads is such a big deal on Amazon right now. It feels like, my agency customers are spending 80% of their time on advertising strategy, either on Amazon or off Amazon. I would love to just understand the perspective of Walmart's advertising tools, right? How would you summarise the key differences between Walmart, I think it's called Walmart Connect, and say Amazon sponsored ads?

Hailee Johnson-Engelbert
Of course, yeah, we can get into the different ad type strategies, things like that. Before we do, I would also like to say one of the key differentiators that we would even hear as Walmart Connect employees from our brands and our agency partners is how great of people there are across Walmart, across Walmart Marketplace, across Walmart Connect. Brands feel like they can get a lot of help and have access to people, which I would also say is something that is unique in experiences.

We can speak to that both internally and externally about how wonderful the human element of support is on the advertising side. With that being said, we wanted to make sure too that we acknowledge where Walmart Connect is in terms of their advertising solutions and offerings. Like how I was just saying that we would talk about how Walmart Connect and Amazon advertising definitely do get compared to each other, but Walmart Connect is very much where Amazon advertising was years ago, when we were first working and launching on those products. 

So I would say the Walmart Connect suite is probably where Amazon's was in 2019, maybe early 2020. So you have The sponsored product suite, so you have the lower funnel capabilities. So sponsored products, sponsored brands, sponsored video, all included there. You have the two different types of sponsored products in terms of targeting. So you have automatic and manual offerings there which that's great. So you won't see too many differences in terms of the sponsored products we're offering. They do have display self-service. So that is something that is available to brands if they're brand registered. So just like Amazon in that facet, brand registry is important to unlock sponsored brands, sponsored video, display self-service, and then any additional betas and testing that Walmart Connect may require.

Paul Sonneveld
I was going to just briefly have a follow-up question there around brand registry. I know Amazon's improved their approach a lot over the years, but it used to be a real, real pain point.

Hailee  Johnson-Engelbert
Yes.

Paul Sonneveld
What's it like on Walmart having to register your brand and, you know, making sure you get recognised for that? I mean, what's involved and more importantly, like harder, easier, about the same compared to Walmart? What's your take?

Hailee Johnson-Engelbert
Yeah, so I would say if you do things methodically from the get-go, you will end up in a much better place than if you try to slap everything together, slap your listings together, just start some advertising, don't really develop the partnerships that it takes to really be successful on the platform, and then you're trying to get brand registered, that usually ends up in a situation that's a rat's nest. 

If you've gotten the attention of SAM's or you're working with different internal partners, they can usually help you with navigating some of these challenges. So there's not anything from our knowledge today that is different between what is required on Walmart that is not required on the Amazon side or vice versa. Brand registry is just crucial to unlock some of these ad placements, as well as some other marketplace betas and things. 

So what we would recommend you doing is doing that as soon as possible amongst launch, following the exact protocol that you need to, depending on what category you're in, and as you're developing these relationships, if you have any hiccups that come up, SAMs, Walmart Connect partners, different people internally are usually the key to helping unlock and move things forward.

Paul Sonneveld
Thank you. So it sounds like if you've managed to be successful, going shopping through the various hoops on Amazon you should be in a good place.

Hailee Johnson-Engelbert
Yes, I think once Amazon, like you said, has put everyone through a lot of hoops. I can empathise myself on the health and wellness side, multiple years ago of having to get all those forms getting kicked off, getting shut down, things like that. I know that might be relevant to a lot of people right now and what their experience is, but there should be some solution, even if you're not successful in terms of sales, having relationships can help lead to a path forward if you are doing everything correctly.

Paul Sonneveld
Good, good advice. So let's talk about, we talked a little bit about, advertising. I want to just go back to the other side, which is the organic ranking, right? Organic sales, all of that. What are some strategies in terms of, I mean, obviously this is probably a webinar in self. I was going to say, how does the search algorithm work on Walmart? Probably not. Right. But in terms of, let's just talk about SEO strategies on Walmart, you know, trying to get that ranking up, particularly as an early, an early hour or a new product on Walmart. What are some things that really help in terms of organic ranking?

Hailee Johnson-Engelbert
Yes, so getting things set up correctly. So we talked already about making sure that your house, your foundation, is set correctly through spec sheet five, your taxonomy is good. Walmart Connect, the sponsored products are going to be your number one friend to start driving internal traffic to these products for lower funnel shoppers. And then, as you're also participating in other parts of the flywheel, so things that are critically important that I did want to highlight are your reviews. 

So that actually is a key difference, too, when onboarding between Amazon and Walmart, is that Walmart, you are not able to port over your reviews from Amazon. But you can port them over through your own D2C. So if you are on Shopify or a host of other platforms, there's a couple of brands that we can help get you in touch with or a couple of different projects we can get you in touch with that would help you port your reviews over. 

So that's also something that we did want to highlight. You need to make sure that your foundation is correct. So your content quality, which also is inclusive of those reviews, your taxonomy is correct. You're starting to layer on Walmart Connect. You have price parity with Amazon. You have fully decided to invest in this channel. So you can also be promotional, which that will just help drive additional, additional sales on walmart.com for you. 

And then from there you can get some additional earned media past the sale point. So like you would at Amazon as well. And then at that point, you can definitely start taking into account some of these external traffic drivers, which do help with SEO in our opinion. So things like there's an SCM beta. So within your seller account, Walmart will actually give you a rebate right now. I don't know if it'll last forever, but right now, they'll actually link to Google shopping ads. You can set up and test with that to help drive some external traffic onto your products, which is wonderful. We definitely recommend you take advantage of that, as well as other external traffic drivers.

So if you're really capturing everything internally, then definitely be testing some of these. Because the more eyeballs you can get to a detail page, the better it is for relevancy. And then it's kind of chicken or the egg. You just have to keep helping to drive external traffic, as well as Walmart growing naturally at the rate that it is. so that you can glean some of this, these additional added features that will help the SEO. 

Cartbloom is also a beta partner with Teikametrics and their Gen AI Builder, which, so far, we've absolutely loved testing with them. We've enjoyed the product. And that's something where we can actually take parts of your own item titles, listings, bullet points, things like that, that have already we've already helped you be optimised successfully to Walmart, but will also help, help further with the Walmart experience and how this site is changing and how customers are purchasing. So that was a very long answer.

Paul Sonneveld
No, no, it's, it's great. It's good to, you know, I'm writing down my list of little like gems and insights. I wrote things down like commission breaks. Never heard of that in the context of Amazon. So I wrote that down. But the other one here was this free SCM. So if you do that, if you're already selling on Warminer, you have access to that. Go and check it out. While it lasts.

Paul Sonneveld
That's great. I forgot to mention or forgot to ask you sort of a bigger question here, really at the start around growth potential. Not all categories are the same. Are there certain areas or categories right now where you feel there is disproportionate growth, maybe because Walmart is sort of catching up or they're underrepresented or they really fit with their particular demographic? What are some areas that you say are really popular or hot right now from a seller and growth point of view versus maybe there's some areas to say, look, if you sell in this category, Walmart's just not a great fit. Are there some things you would put in either bucket?

Hailee Johnson-Engelbert
Yeah, this is a great question. This is something that we do get often. The three of us co-founders have worked across all different categories. So we do have different experiences and different opinions about this question. But I would say Walmart naturally, if you think about Walmart, I feel like everyone's mind is an actual physical retail store. So that's definitely a conversation we should come back to here in a second, because that is an overall piece of something that makes sellers really excited, is the opportunity to figure out, okay, which is unique, how do we get into a Walmart store? 

Going back to your point of specific categories, that Walmart store I feel like most people associate with grocery. So where is the best price you can get items, and grocery items, and then maybe lawn and garden, some household items, some sporting goods, things like that. But really, Walmart has expanded their selection so much that outside of grocery and consumables being its largest mover, we've really seen some impressive results from sellers that are on the fashion side of the business, we've helped scale while at Walmart Connect, but then also here on the Cartbloom side, some fashion accounts and grew them into some of the largest marketplace accounts that exist today, as well as home goods. That's been a really hot category for sellers and businesses in general, is the expansion into home. 

But grocery is always going to be the bread and butter, I would say, of the amount of volume that can be done or that what we've seen. However, with Economic standing, I would say that the market share of who is shopping at Walmart continues to grow and grow and grow. And so all of these other items are also growing and growing as well. So all these other categories too, because consumers have it in their head that Walmart is the best place to shop for these products with the lowest prices. So to definitively answer your question, I think, I believe today that there's opportunity in every category. It's just about the strategy and the price point and the investment that you are willing to make into your Walmart marketplace strategy.

Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, I mentioned this, given the size of Walmart, there's probably not many U.S. consumers that don't tend to shop at Walmart at some point in time looking for things. So absolutely.

Hailee Johnson-Engelbert
Walmart can now reach 90% of U.S. households with same-day grocery delivery through their WPlus program. So that's something that has very much expanded in the past four years. And the reach there is huge. And when I say grocery delivery, you can get anything that you can think of within an hour.

Paul Sonneveld
That's great. That is great. Now, I want to sort of look at this, the Walmart opportunity from the point of view of an Amazon agency, right? Because I know a lot of people tuning into their Amazon agencies, they always get asked about Walmart, their clients want to go there. And there's a hesitancy. 

So I just want to just focus, you know, ask you a few questions there on their mindset and, with some tips and tricks there, for example, what do you see? This is what I call my banana skin question, right? What, what is the most common mistake that you see either like Amazon sellers or Amazon agencies make as they tried to bring kind of their Amazon business across to Walmart or expanded onto Walmart. 

What are the biggest mistakes? And I think you've already alluded to one of them, which is around the spec sheet V5 and just uploading your existing Amazon content. That's definitely one of them. But what are some of the other mistakes that you see time and time again?

Hailee Johnson-Engelbert
Yeah, one of the things that we consistently talk about, and this was why Cartbloom was actually created, Paul, was we felt that there were so many mistakes being made consistently. And it's not because people didn't have heart, or it wasn't for a lack of trying. I think a big part of that was the expectation piece that we talked about in the beginning. 

And then the second part was the amount of time and strategy that it takes. And that's why Cartbloom is a Walmart-first agency, is because it's not something that can just quickly be done. It's not one-to-one. You need a full strategy and time to be able to do something like this. So it's not something that you can just throw up with popsicle sticks. It's something that really needs to be methodically planned out with time and energy. So that's, that's a mistake that we would see as people trying to throw up everything onto the site like they would for Amazon, the exact same way. 

And then also relaying on top the exact same advertising strategy, which is also not one-to-one as well. So that's a common mistake. And there's so many agencies out there that do Amazon great. There's so many brands out there that do Amazon phenomenal. And I'm sure there's so many people that will watch this that'll nod their heads with me because they have taken countless hours to create a strategy on the ad side that is hundreds of campaigns with a very strong promotional price focus, different things. It takes hours to create a master strategy like that. And so then they just immediately deploy that onto Walmart Connect, and then it does not yield.

Paul Sonneveld
It doesn't work. Yeah. In terms of what does work, obviously I appreciate the benefit of specialisation, right? Having someone who's thinking about Walmart 24 hours, well, maybe not 24 hours a day, but you know, but anything else when you're thinking, you're thinking about Walmart, right? So I'd love to just understand, like, you know, you must, you guys must have seen some fantastic successors, by applying, you know, your knowledge or specific Walmart experience and the like. I mean, is there an example you can share with us? You know, which client success story are you most proud of? And, you know, feel free to sort of mask the client name, if it's not appropriate for us to hear that, but I'd love to just understand, you know, the from to, right. Where did you take them from? Where did they end up? And were there any particular things that really worked for that particular client?

Hailee Johnson-Engelbert
Of course, I'll start. I will definitely answer your question, Paul. And I'll give you a recent case study from our July savings period. So, for those that do not know, Walmart calls their prime day or their prime days July savings. And it is typically the exact same days that Amazon has set. Sometimes it'll start a little earlier, sometimes it'll be on parity, sometimes it'll have a couple days extra towards the end. But it is essentially Walmart taking advantage of that external traffic shopper as well as just traffic on the site increasing.

So I'll be able to share with you a story here on our largest jewellery marketplace seller and their success in our strategy. I will say before jumping into that, I want people to be able to take away something about the ad strategy too that does work, you know, that are tuning into this webinar today, before diving into it with an example. While we can't fully get into our like what, like our proprietary blend, our proprietary information. I will say that something that you should definitely try as an agency or a seller is making sure that you have a way to harvest your keywords. So as you're launching campaigns that you are, you have some dedication to harvesting keywords and then some dedication to adjusting those bid multipliers and then you know, making sure that you are optimising for success based off of that.

So, the example that I can give you from the July savings period with the largest marketplace jewellery client, this brand had very large year-over-year comps that they needed to achieve for this July savings time period, as well as for the entire fiscal year. And they are already a very massive client, like I was saying. So we needed to put forth a lot of preparation for this time period. We worked with his seller account manager to help with him as well, make sure that we felt the overall ad strategy was strong from the deals that the jewellery category, the fashion category had selected for his business.

And then once we aligned on the deals, when they'd be running, what products they were, this seller is on the engagement ring side, as well as some costume jewellery, moissanite jewellery, lab-grown. So lots of different subcategories there. We then moved forward in figuring out, okay, how are we going to track these items specifically in campaigns? So we had to update our existing campaign structure, make sure that we were tracking these items appropriately ahead of time. And again, this took place 30 days prior to the actual July savings period. We needed a good way to amplify before so that we could optimise and then also make sure that we were amplifying during the event. 

We also on top of this, added external traffic drivers, like testing with some SCM, as well as we are beta partners with Amazon, I'm sorry, with the Walmart attribution. So testing some additional affiliate and attribution tactics to help drive external traffic, which we do believe is an increasing part of the overall Walmart marketplace algorithm. And so we're like, we know there's going to be traffic out there on the internet. We know Walmarts will grow, but we also need to make sure we're driving external traffic for him to really hit the comps that are necessary. So with that overall strategy of external traffic drivers and the way we structure campaigns, we drove an increase of 213% in GMV year over year with the same timeframe and had a lift of over 240 units sold while still maintaining their ROAS efficiencies that needed to hit.

Paul Sonneveld
That is very impressive. I mean, the number will speak, but I was like, yeah, that's just versus the prior month, but no, year on year, that is fantastic. Like cycling over the same event. 

Hailee Johnson-Engelbert
Yes. 

Paul Sonneveld
And outpoured by that amount is that's fantastic.

Hailee Johnson-Engelbert
Thank you. And they are a legacy seller on Walmart. So we really we help at Cartbloom net new sellers. We help sellers in all different platforms. Clients and all different platforms not just sellers, but that was an example of really proving some growth early on, utilising Walmart Connect as well as Walmart marketplace tactics. 

Paul Sonneveld
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Hailee. We are out of time. So when we need to wrap up this episode of marketplace masters, I just want to say thank you so much for coming on and really bringing that Walmart-specific expertise to today's conversation. Very useful. I've got my list of insights written down. Very, very interesting. And I'm super curious about your secret sauce. It's something to do with keyboard harvesting. I picked up on that. I'm sure there are either agencies listening today or Walmart sellers or Amazon sellers, in fact, that love to maybe explore further conversation with you, maybe pick on some of the themes. What is the best way for them to get hold of you? What's your preference?

Hailee Johnson-Engelbert
Yeah, we are very personable. We'd act as an extension of any team. And I'll say you can definitely treat outreach to me like that. You can add me on LinkedIn, message me on LinkedIn. You can send an email to hailee@cartbloommedia.com. And also, you can visit our website. There's information about our exact services there, as well as a form to fill out if you want more information. That website is cartbloommedia.com. As well as, I guess, one last plug is that one of my co-founders, Bryce Browning, and I will be at a Walmart Seller Summit August 25th through 27th in San Diego at booth number two. So if you're going to stop by the Walmart Connect booth, even just stop by and say hi to us, we'd love to meet you.

Paul Sonneveld
Awesome. It's definitely conference season. So yeah, great conference coming up. If you're a Walmart seller, you would have known about this already. But if you're thinking and exploring Walmart, I highly, highly recommend to go to San Diego and check it out. All right. Thank you so much, Hailee. I look forward to catching up soon. Thanks for your time.

Hailee Johnson-Engelbert
Thanks, Paul. It was good to see you. Have a good day.

Paul Sonneveld
Take care. All right, everyone. That is it for today's episode. I hope you enjoy that. Don't forget, you can explore all of our past episodes and register for any upcoming ones at merchantspring.io. And of course, if you're looking for a partner to help you simplify reporting, performance analytics across Walmart, Amazon, and other marketplaces, we'd love to show you what we're building here at MerchantSpring. My name is Paul Sonneveld. Thank you so much for tuning in, and we will see you next time. Take care.