Welcome to Provider Spotlight

In an effort to familiarize our Marketplace sellers with resources available to help them succeed, we’re introducing a new regular feature: Walmart Marketplace Provider Spotlight. In these posts, our approved solution providers will offer insights and tips and highlight the services they offer sellers.

This month, Commercehub, a full-service solution provider with much to offer, discusses how conducting a content audit can help you identify ways to optimize your catalog.

What a content audit can do for you

To be successful on Walmart Marketplace, you have to make it easy for your items to be found.

At CommerceHub, we work closely with our customers to ensure their product content is optimized, and we do this with a proactive content audit, providing the insight they need to successfully list and sell products on Walmart Marketplace.

Read on as we review the process and outline the key benefits you can expect from your content audit: better discoverability and higher conversions.

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When sellers audit their product content, they gain insight that directly leads to higher GMV.

The best way to sell more

To start, let’s look at some of the top reasons to work with a trusted partner like CommerceHub to perform consistent content audits:

  • The high seasonality of some items you may be selling means you want to get those products front and center at the right time
  • To keep pace with product lifecycles
  • To maximize your merchandising efforts
  • Most importantly, the ever-changing, fast-moving nature of the eCommerce competitive landscape demands it so that you stay relevant and make sure your products can be found wherever and whenever people are shopping

A proactive content audit (catalog optimization data analysis) provides you with enhanced visibility to understand unrealized Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) and take action to capture it.

Key focus areas of a content audit

1. Unpublished items

We review all unpublished items within Walmart Marketplace and provide a detailed, SKU-level analysis of why products are unpublished and the steps needed to get the products live.

The most common reason that we see for unpublished items is “Reasonable Price Not Satisfied.” This can happen when one of two Walmart rules are triggered: (i) Price Parity Rule—this rule will automatically unpublish items from Walmart Marketplace if a customer would save by purchasing the same item from the same seller on a competing website, including the cost of shipping; or (ii) Price Leadership Rule—this rule will automatically unpublish items from Walmart Marketplace if a customer would save drastically by purchasing the item on a competing website regardless of the seller (including the cost of shipping). When these rules are triggered, we work with the sellers to review all competing offers across all marketplaces to identify the discrepancy and provide pricing guidance to resolve the suppressions.

Additionally, other common reasons for unpublished products include restricted or prohibited products and/or categories and product performance issues (i.e., item-level cancellations and returns). Some issues can be fixed easily with changes to product descriptions, but in other cases, we will refer you to the Marketplace policies that apply.

2. Channel feed errors

CommerceHub offers a Channel Error Resolution tool. This tool provides a SKU-level summary of all products that have hit an error or warning when trying to list on Walmart Marketplace. Common errors that we see include product ID discrepancies, image issues and missing attributes (i.e., size, color, style). It can be overwhelming to track these down on your own, but our tool makes it manageable.

3. Buy Box winners

The CommerceHub account management team actively analyzes Buy Box reports and provides pricing guidance based on those reports. We then work with sellers to implement SKU-level pricing changes via Content Edits or Content Rule overrides to ensure all products are competitive. Ongoing reviews and edits are essential for keeping ahead of your competition.

4. SEO impact

Our ability to quickly and efficiently edit all content via Content Edits or Content Rules provides sellers with a major advantage. We have designed tools that give us the ability to edit almost all content fields that are sent to Walmart.

Our SEO review helps increase your search rankings resulting in higher discoverability of each product being sold. Walmart SEO best practices must be met for product content to be searchable and relevant. For example, we follow Walmart’s title guidelines and list information according to the format: Brand + Clothing Size Group (if applicable) + Defining Quality + Item Name + Style (if applicable) + Pack Count. The same applies to descriptions: we apply Walmart’s SEO best practices and make sure descriptions include the Product Name, Brand and keywords describing the item’s features and benefits along with any related words that customers are likely to use to search.

On a site with millions of items, these extra steps can make all the difference in reaching customers.

5. And more

In addition to the key areas described above, our content audits often look at additional areas, including:

  • Missed GMV from errors
  • Common errors
  • Missed GMV from products not included in the assortment (excluded products)
  • Description and title population and character count
  • Feature population
  • Missing and broken images
  • UPCs
  • Pricing

The content audit can also help ensure your product content is in full compliance with channel best practices. It can check title, description, search terms, features and images and can alert you to any adjustments that could be made to improve your discoverability. To ensure the catalog audit is geared to what is going to make the most impact on GMV, we recommend focusing it to review your assortment, locate errors and search for any suppression.

Case study

To illustrate how this works, here’s a real-world example of how we helped a seller increase GMV via a product content audit. During our review of the seller’s product catalog, we found more than 60,000 channel feed errors that had greatly depleted their product assortment. If your products aren’t listed on the site, your customers can’t find them. Correcting these errors expanded their assortment and delivered more than $600,000 in product sales in a little more than six months.

The CommerceHub advantage

CommerceHub provides the guidance and expertise to make your Walmart Marketplace selling a success. To increase your conversions and GMV, we go beyond basic data reviews with our product content audits. We provide SKU-specific details, including character count, content depth and Marketplace content compliance. We don’t just move the data, we provide a prioritized to-do list based on the GMV impact for each identified area to address. From there, we work with sellers to both source and implement the needed content changes.

Our top priority is to ensure your product content is optimized and working to deliver the most conversions and highest GMV. We combine our 20 plus years of industry expertise with our long-standing partnership with Walmart and leverage this combination to fuel your success on Walmart Marketplace. Our close relationship allows us to provide feedback to the Walmart team, participate in beta programs and take your Walmart Marketplace selling to the next level.

We support a number of Walmart Marketplace seller programs: Free Value Shipping, 2 Day Shipping, Enhanced Returns (return to store) and Walmart Performance Ads. And, since launching this integration, we have enabled more than 1 million orders on Walmart Marketplace. The combined GMV for CommerceHub partners selling on Walmart Marketplace increased by 18 percent in 2018. To learn more about how CommerceHub can help you thrive on Walmart Marketplace, connect with us at hello@commercehub.com.

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Provider Spotlight

This is a guest post from CommerceHub, a distributed commerce network that integrates with Walmart Marketplace, enabling both retailers and brands to reach more customers through this growing channel. CommerceHub supports both Walmart 3P Marketplace and 1P Drop-shipping with a robust platform and proven scalability to help you take your sales to the next level.

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