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Firing The Man
THANK YOU TO OUR 25,000+ LISTENERS! We are so thankful to be one of the TOP E-Commerce Podcasts delivering high-quality authentic content to you! Serial Entrepreneur’s David Schomer and Ken Wilson share tips, advice, and insider knowledge about all things Amazon FBA, Walmart WFS, and E-Commerce. Discover how you can create multiple income streams by selling physical products online so that you can have the time and freedom to do what you love - whether that is spending more time with family or traveling the world. Ken and David have successfully created several six and seven figure online business ventures. During the journey, they have had major wins, losses, and lessons learned. This podcast will teach you about selling physical products online through platforms such as Fulfillment by Amazon, building a team, outsourcing, listing optimization, pay per click (PPC) advertising, driving traffic to your listings, and productivity tips / life hacks that will provide a path to be successful in building your online business. It’s a mix of interviews, special co-hosts and solo shows from Ken and David you’re not going to want to miss. Hit subscribe, and get ready to change your life.
Firing The Man
Unlocking Success on Walmart Marketplace: Strategies, Insights, and Opportunities with David Milstein
Unlock the secrets of success on Walmart Marketplace with David Milstein, co-founder of Cellcord, as our special guest. Discover why Walmart's platform is a hidden gem in the realm of e-commerce and how it stacks up against giants like Amazon. David takes us through his fascinating entrepreneurial journey, from his time at Lebro Industries during the pandemic to establishing Cellcord, the leading agency for Walmart Marketplace success. Gain insights into the unique advantages of Walmart's less saturated space and learn about the tailored strategies that can give your brand a significant edge.
Elevate your e-commerce strategy with our deep dive into optimizing product listings. We'll guide you on how to use rich media to attract consumers and boost algorithm appeal across platforms like Walmart and Amazon. Learn the impact of compelling infographics, enhanced brand content, and the power of videos in improving conversion rates. We also break down the pricing structure for these features, giving you the tools to make informed decisions and keep your listings competitive in a crowded marketplace.
Maximize your advertising campaigns on Walmart with data-driven insights and strategic bidding techniques. David shares expert advice on utilizing Walmart's extensive reports to optimize your keyword strategies and ad performance. Understand the transition from Amazon to Walmart, including the benefits of using Walmart Fulfillment Services, and how to anticipate and achieve strategic sales growth. We also explore pricing strategies and the opportunity for growth through Walmart's New Seller Savings program. Connect with Cellcord to explore collaboration possibilities and tap into the untapped potential of Walmart Marketplace.
How to connect with David?
Website: https://www.sellcord.co/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sellcord/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SellCord/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sellcord/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SellCord
Welcome everyone to the Firing the man podcast, a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle every day and know you are capable of more, then join us. This show will help you build a business and grow your passive income streams in just a few short hours per day. And now your hosts serial entrepreneurs David Shomer and Ken Wilson. Entrepreneurs David Shomer and Ken Wilson.
Speaker 2:Welcome everyone to the Firing the man podcast. Today, we are joined by an inspiring guest who's making waves in the e-commerce world David Milstein. David is the co-founder of Cellcord, the largest agency specializing in helping brands launch and scale on Walmart's expansive platform. Cellcord, under David's leadership, manages an impressive portfolio of over 50,000 products across 300 brands. Though David is only in his mid-20s, he's already a seasoned entrepreneur. His experience spans co-founding product marketplace, lebro Industries and leading fitness accessories brands. Spawn Fitness recognizes the number one fitness brand by Women's Health. David's expertise also includes implementing proprietary systems as the CTO of Always, where he optimized operations across five warehouses in 3 million square feet.
Speaker 2:In today's episode, we'll dive into why Walmart is a smart choice for sellers, especially in the landscape dominated by giants like Amazon and TikTok. We'll discuss common pitfalls sellers face on Walmart, the unique strategies that drive Walmart success and David's insights on scaling a brand to achieve multi-million dollar results. This conversation is packed with actionable insights, so let's get started with David Milstein. David, welcome to the show. All right, david? Wow, thank you for the extensive introduction. Absolutely, absolutely so. To start things off, can you share a little bit about yourself and your entrepreneurial journey?
Speaker 3:Sure, sure, I mean, it's really been something. Something else. Uh, I joined actually the, the lebar brothers, back in 2020. Well, they, they already had started off the e-commerce side of things. First, I was doing my work in brieville on the warehousing. Uh, I joined them like in the heat of covid. It was actually perfect, kind of for like the spiring the. It was actually perfect for inspiring the man.
Speaker 3:I was working this job in 3PL. I was not loving it Really. Not having to drive an hour away both directions. Two hours of driving a day was really just making me crazy. Especially, I was working in implementation and IT, an area where you could totally do it remotely. It just was not for me. I ended up working just speaking with Michael. I was like, okay, you know, let's, let's do this, let's, let's, let's pick something off.
Speaker 3:And we initially started off selling our own products at Walmart because we noticed there was a lot of traction over COVID. We were selling fitness products they were doing really well working out from pole resistance bands, classics, and we went everywhere. We actually had an analog of over a thousand listings on Walmart and we're growing traction, like, hey, let's pivot a little bit and when our mom has an Amazon agency. Let's kind of see what opportunities exist at Walmart. This is before you saw a lot of Walmart investing in the platform, like you do today, and we started to sell for it up. Back then we went to our first Prosper like a bunch of idiots who didn't know what we were doing, just going around asking people what was up, suitcasing like crazy. But it was great. We were able to find the first few clients where they build our processes and now we're the largest Walmart marketplace agency. So it's really been an amazing journey so far.
Speaker 2:Outstanding, and you had mentioned a little bit about the Amazon agency being pretty crowded. What characteristics about the Walmart platform attracted you to that over e-commerce giants like Amazon?
Speaker 3:So I generally think like when there's the unknown, there's more opportunity. You know Amazon just been so fully flushed out. You know people pretty much know what's going on. They'd have all this information that exists. They have strategies, all those plans. With Walmart it's like it's a newer marketplace. I mean, it's been around forever, right, but like just the three-peat availability and opportunity on Walmart is so new and growing and with that people have a hesitation that people don't know. People have that fear of the unknown over there. But it just it can learn and you do learn.
Speaker 3:We developed this team that knows the ins and outs of Walmart, how to fix things, how to make things work. It just shows that opportunity and it's still to this day. All these shows that we go to. You know we're constantly hearing people come to us. Hey, you know, my Walmart business isn't working. I'm having these problems and it's just so common that people are still not figuring it out. And it's not that Walmart's bad, it's just that people are not necessarily investing or that there's not necessarily the information out there on how to make Walmart's success. I just we view it as just an opportunity to educate as well as, obviously, a big client share of just people looking for support in this new marketplace.
Speaker 2:Okay Okay. You had talked about people trying out Walmart and not having success. If you talk to a hundred people like that, there has to be some common themes. What are some common themes? That you see across people that are unsuccessful on the platform.
Speaker 3:Sure, I mean, obviously, this is a very common, like I'm saying, and the typical thing that I see is the lack of investment in the platform. You talk to these people about their Amazon business and they tell you these 500 things that they did to make sure that their listing was perfect and their categorization was off point, that they filled in every attribute, that their title has been. You know, the SEO is top notch, the keywords, the stuffing, everything is perfect. They did all this investment, the images, they've done A-B testing. They really did all this work to make this perfect listing for Amazon. And then they go for Walmart and they just dump the same thing from Amazon and they expect it to perform the same way. That outworks. There's an algorithm that Amazon uses to succeed. There's an algorithm that Walmart uses. Two different dev teams, two different platforms. They have different methods and metrics and KPIs that they use to determine success in the algorithm.
Speaker 3:So your work that you invested in on Amazon is not necessarily going to work on Walmart and you have your listings. You throw up an auto campaign or even at best, you throw up an auto campaign. You don't put in the thought, the learning, what differentiates Walmart from Amazon, and then you're like, hey, this doesn't work. This platform doesn't work because you're using the same exact tools and data that you used on Amazon. You have to understand it's a different platform. There's different things going on over here. It's a different platform. There's different things going on over here you have to factor in.
Speaker 3:Okay, let's say, a common example is the titles on Walmart. Walmart has a different algorithm for how they take keywords in the title. You know you want to make sure that they have, let's say, a sorter title with one long tail keyword and then do all your keyword stuffing in the description Versus on Amazon you might want to do a lot more of the keyword stopping in the title. You know it's different things like that that really separate the two platforms. And if you don't give the investment in Walmart that you do in Amazon, of course you're not going to see that success.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, so for the, you had mentioned an example of the titles, which I think is really helpful, and I'd like to. There are a lot of listeners of this show that are Amazon sellers, and so, for the Amazon seller that is considering switching over to Walmart, you had mentioned that taking what you have on Amazon, dumping it into Walmart, doesn't work. It's not an effective strategy, and so, as they're making that migration, what are the things that they need to pay attention to?
Speaker 3:Sure. So I believe item categorization is one of the key things to success on Walmart and it helps with so many different factors when it comes to your right. So Walmart has right now it's called a product type. It's the newly rolled out item spec type. We know we can get into that, but there's items are set up on a product type level and you need to do the research prior to this to understand what is the product type to set up your listings.
Speaker 3:Now to do that, what I would suggest doing is first you have to identify your number one keyword. You have to really see where the volume is going to be coming from, Because if you have your number one keyword or you're targeting, you'll be able to understand what the product type is. So on Walmart, if you put in your number one keyword to the search, it might be the same number one keyword as you have on Amazon. It's super common that that is the case. A shopper is a shopper that often uses two different of a keyword on Amazon and on Walmart. So if you put it in the number one keyword, you're able to look at the top listing see what their product type is. Also, if you take a look at. It's all like the source data. You like right click and like inspect source word, You'll be able to see what the product type is of listings. You can also find out the top product type on the search term itself. If you look at the source, there's some data over there. Share that across if you have any questions. And once you know your product type, you can now categorize and classify yourself into this correct space, which will allow you to rank properly.
Speaker 3:The product type determines which keywords you're able to rank for. It also determines which attributes Walmart wants you to fill. Once you have your categorizations to the correct, it now gives you a guide of what directions to go. Product type also determines how long your title should be, how long your description should be. I don't pay too much attention to that. You want to obviously keep it more precise than your Amazon title, but it's okay to go a little bit over and lose maybe a couple of points on what Walmart calls listing quality score, but making sure that all your attributes are filled out.
Speaker 3:This is actually pretty interesting here, with attributes which we could definitely get into, but there are certain attributes that are actually going to determine which keywords you're able to rank for. So, for example, we had a client come and sell I think it was like men's underwear and they weren't even ranking for that keyword because for the gender attribute they had it set as unisex instead of mid, so they just into the algorithm itself. You couldn't even rank for it because the attribute wasn't filled out Like. There are just so many of these like complex things that if you just spent the prime and filled in what Walmart tells you to do, Walmart gives you the list of attributes that they want you to fill out. Walmart tells you how the property should be built, should be booked out. Walmart gives you a lot of information and you just listen to what they say, you are already putting yourself leagues above others that just kind of dump their Amazon information to the wall.
Speaker 2:Okay, and where is that information located? Sure, sure.
Speaker 3:So there is on the left menu at Seller Center, there is a I think it's called Growth they moved that and it's called Listing Quality Listing Quality. There's one of the sections there and if you see there it'll actually list each one of your listings. If you click Details and scroll down, you'll be able to see the list of all the attributes that are required and the ones that are missing, and I'll let you go in right there and edit. Now, for those of us that deal with large catalogs, that's obviously a major pain to go one by one. You're talking about thousands of listings. It takes forever to do this.
Speaker 3:So on the 1P side like the supplier one, which is how suppliers manage their business with Walmart they actually have this great feature where you can export a file and it will highlight all missing fields in yellow, all attributes that are required on the product type level. Unfortunately, not all of us can be suppliers or may not want to be suppliers, so I know on the 3P side, walmart would be more worthless because you can export data on a GTIN level. If you go to your catalog and you go to update listings, you can do a GTIN match and export all your data up to 10 product types in one file and you'll see all the attributes. Now you might see way too many attributes, ones that are not required, but you can just use that as a reference and just fill in whatever you have. Also, most of you sellers are probably not selling across that many product types. You know mostly. You have your niche, you have your space, you have your category.
Speaker 3:What you can do is take a combination of both of these. Go to the listing quality under the growth section. Look up one product per product type. Take a little paper or take your Excel file, write down what are the 10 attributes that Walmart wants to fill out. Then go to the GTIN max. Put in all your products under that category, under that product type, put in all your GTINs under that product type, export that file and now you know these 10 attributes is what Walmart wants to fill out. It's all based on product type. You know for one listing, you know for all listings.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, very good, very good. So the category is really important, the attributes are really important. We spent a good bit of anything else on that. On that topic, sure.
Speaker 3:So I would say like, overall, you know the main, the main areas I like to think about from the back end perspective are categories, attributes, making sure that they build in, build it correctly on the front end, copy and images. You know these are the, these are the. These are the standard things that you're going to want to have. Images, I would say, are very similar to your Amazon images. You know what You've seen success over there. We'll bring you success on Walmart.
Speaker 3:Generally speaking, you want to have strong infographics. I believe that's the best way to really present your listings the way I. This is not a unique take, but I say that copy sells your listing to the algorithm and your images sell your listing to the consumer. Even though you're writing out what the details are of the product, the dimensions or whatever it is in the copy, make sure your images reflect that as well. Show the product, give it a lifestyle, give it an infographic. Make any image an infographic, even if it's a lifestyle image. Throw in a little text bubble to say what's going on and how to enhance it. It just generally works on both Amazon and Walmart. Outside of that, obviously, review strategies. You want to make sure that your listing has reviews. If you have zero reviews, it's going to be a little more difficult to gain traction and it's pretty simple. But you know, those are just like the few things you need to have a successful listing.
Speaker 2:Okay. So, as we're talking about creatives on Amazon, they have enhanced brand content or A-plus content and, if I recall, Walmart has something similar. It's a paid you kind of pay for that real estate. Can you talk a little bit about that and is the juice worth the squeeze?
Speaker 3:so Walmart, I might call it rich media. There are actually a couple of modules that you can do through the Walmart UI. You could do videos and also 360 images. Now it might be a little bit more complex, I know on the one piece side also a little bit easier, but those are both called above the fold and the below-the-fold content is where the real juice is. You know the EBC, you know there's a couple of vendors on Walmart where we actually provide this as well for the rich media content and I've seen some crazy numbers that people threw out in terms of conversion rate. That helps drive and I can't necessarily attest to being either 70% conversion rate increase. I think that's all crazy and I can't necessarily attest to being either 70% conversion rate increase. I think that's a little crazy. But there definitely is an increase to conversion rate when you have the rich media on your listings. It's EBC feature set, it's called whatever you want to call it. You don't have comparison charts. Help drive listings traffic to other ones of your listings. Unfortunately there's not as much data as I would like to see over there. Unfortunately there's not as much data as I would like to see over there like. I would like to track that information more about more like to see clicks, engagement, views, like stuff like that. If that information was available it'd be a little bit more useful to actually see. But there definitely is an impact. Listings aside from just a basic conversion rate which helps you just see, you know more people are. There's more information you provide for your listings more videos, more infographics, just more information on the description. You're also preventing other people from advertising and targeting your listing. What I mean by that is like if you're scrolling down on a listing that has extensive below-the-fold content, it takes a while before you start to see ads, versus if you just have a description, like a short description, you're seeing ads immediately. So you kind of prevent the others from like you know, if someone's you have more time that they're engaging with your listing, then they're jumping off some other spots listing right below. You're actually able to keep that engagement a little bit longer. So it definitely is an increase in conversion rate and, done the testing of listings, we run ad data before and after using it. So there's definitely been an uptick in controversy rate from this and we do recommend it.
Speaker 3:It's also best in class when you want to compete with your You're trying to compete with these top dogs that are winning the space, you'd have something that's special. You have something that stands out. Interestingly, it is A lot of the top listings out of Walmart in many categories are dominated by these lumpy suppliers that have just been in store for years and their content is typically extremely lackluster. You can see, I love the plastic. It's like a supplement bottle. It's just like here and here. Here and here and like get out of here Like dumbest pictures, and that's it. It's the number one listing. Get out of here, dumbest pictures, and that's it. It's the number one listing. And if you're trying to compete with that, you're actually able to utilize both your images and your below the ball cloth and be like I have a premium listing. I have a great listing just sitting here and it's just helped. Their engagement helped them to converse right and actually be able to beat out some of these dinosaurs that have just been at the top of the page for years.
Speaker 2:Okay, Okay Now. Is there a fee for the EBC? Is there a fee for that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, so it is anything that's below the fold. There are fees for it. It's all based on who you're working with. I know we have what I believe is best pricing for it. If you want to work through software, it's something you guys could definitely reach out for, but there is definitely a fee for it and there's a number of different providers. Some people are. There are some very exclusive, very high-level softwares out there. I think one called Eco maybe They'll call me on that they do.
Speaker 3:On the main listing. They have this really interactive listing top of the page. That's a lot more expensive. You feel like real work, but general below the full top end is like much cheaper and you could get. You have some places that charge by model, some modules. Some places charge just out of the whole. You get all modules inclusive. So we have a price of $10 per listing, per parent listing rather, and you get access to as many modules as you want. So videos, all the juice, interactive tours, comparison charts. You can post documents over there. They'll call anyone, but those documents you can actually link your website. I mean you shouldn't do that. Obviously it's a service, but you can if you play those games.
Speaker 2:Understood, understood. Now you touched on advertising a little bit bit and I'd like to dive into this. So, coming from Amazon the complexity of Amazon and going over to the Walmart advertising portal boy, does it look and feel differently. And so I'm curious, you know, for people that don't have experience with Walmart advertising, can you kind of give a lay of the land and a general strategy there? For sure, for sure.
Speaker 3:So it's definitely different than Amazon ads. I will start with this I'm by no means an Amazon ad expert. I don't have much experience on the Amazon side, but I work with a lot of people who do have that Amazon experience. But I do know Walmart. That's what I do know. So from some high-level things.
Speaker 3:Just a basic strategy that you want to always implore is start with auto campaigns In general, because auto campaigns have a lower base bid. You're talking about a base bid of $0.20 compared to a base bid for manual being $0.30. On Walmart, because of the lack of competition, you oftentimes actually be winning below that 30 cent bid. So if your average CPC we have many, you know, six-figure monthly accounts like regular seven-figure Walmart accounts that their average CPC is below 30 cents. So that means you need to really be relying heavily on auto-company. Now for auto-company strategy, they generally recommend grouping together where you can. You can also take one campaign and put all your items in it. Why I don't recommend that is just because you want to be able to play around with multipliers. Multipliers is definitely something you want to factory for Walmart. You know like your platform, your page type. You want to make sure that you do have the ability to mess around with those multipliers. So generally I would say is group items together in an auto campaign based on their product type. I would say that's a good breakdown. The reason for that is because, on Walmart, campaigns compete with each other a lot. If you have one campaign, one auto campaign per product, you're going to notice a lot of competition. You're not necessarily going to notice it, but your CPCs are going to get driven up because they're competing with each other for the same keywords, versus if there was two items in the same campaign, they're not going to be competing with each other, they'll just kind of work with each other. The one that gets more traction will be the one that lives at the top. Now, that said, you might have five products in the auto campaign and all two of them are getting traction. If you really need those other three to really succeed, then you could break them out and put them into their own campaign, so they are actually getting the traction. The automation of Walmart is all just going to attract, plus what works. That's the auto campaigns.
Speaker 3:The next thing from there is Walmart has a really good report called the Item Keyword Performance Report, which will show you the breakdown of on an item level, on a keyword level. You could actually use like pivot tables in Excel to aggregate the data together and be able to see which keywords by item are doing well, and you could also then, if you do some Excel work, you could do which keywords by category are working well. So you don't have to necessarily look at each individual item and then you want to do keyword harvesting, start pushing this towards your manual campaign and, again, start simple with your bids. I always believe start lower and then you could build up from there. Walmart has what they call suggested bid and Walmart also has these product managers that you might work with. Walmart might maybe assign a product manager that does your advertising, assists you with the advertising it's important to note. Their goal is to make you spend more money. Their goal is not for you to have a five-year loss or a 10-year loss. Their goal is higher benefits. That is their number one goal, something to keep in mind. They are very useful and could definitely help you out, but it's important to note what their motives are. So you need to consider that, what you're taking from them, with just a grain of salt, that if they're calling your suggested bid, that might not always be the best suggestion.
Speaker 3:I always say just start a little bit below your suggested bid or start even at the base bid and just kind of see what happens. If you're getting zero impressions, obviously start the bid up. If you also want to take a more aggressive approach, you can go the inverse. You can just start off with a really aggressive bid and then just bid down. So and obviously there's a lot there's a lot for your own ad strategy. I want to just try to make sure that people understand how bidding works as a whole. There is Walmart in the past few years obviously a little later than Amazon, but in second price option when, for example, if you bid someone below, you're bidding 50 cents and you're bidding a dollar and you'll win the bid at 51 cents instead of 50 cents. However, there are scenarios where you might actually be able to be winning that bid at 40 cents that you're not necessarily capitalizing on. So what do I mean by that? The way the bid is placed right.
Speaker 3:If you look at any keyword on Walmart, you see the top of certs. They're the top four positions. You might think that the guy number one is paying more than number two, than number three than number four. That's not always the case. A big factor is what's called what Walmart deems a relevancy score. Now, a relevancy score is not a real number. I mean it is real I'm worried about. It's not something they're ever going to tell you and it's the whole combination. It's the whole calculation based on the bid multiplied by this relevancy score, which is typically how does your item compare to the top items for this keyword? Okay, that's what it means.
Speaker 3:Now, what does it mean by compare? So you use a number of factors. One of the main ones is, like we've been discussing here, product type. If your item is the same product type as the top item for this keyword, you're going to have a higher relevancy. If your item is the same category, it's also going to have. If your pricing is similar, if your keywords are similar, all these factors are going to go into your relevancy.
Speaker 3:So what does this mean? As your product continues to rank up and grow and get to the top of its keyword, what ends up happening? Let's say you're the number one product organically, the relevancy score is how relevant are you to yourself, which is obviously going to be the peak? You're the most relevant to your own listing if that makes sense. So you'll have such a high relevancy score that your bid doesn't even need to be so great.
Speaker 3:So many listings and this is, I think, a common issue is people are overspending when they don't need to. People are spending and Walmart's going to charge you If you're putting in a dollar bid, even though you're technically winning second price auction. You might actually be able to win that bid at $0.30 or $0.40. So how do you figure this out? How do you understand this? There's obviously, if you could get into the keyword tracking, which is the whole suggestion. I would generally suggest looking at that. That's a good way to go about things.
Speaker 3:But Walmart has a great report that I love, called the Search Term Impression Report. What this report tells you is it tells you by keyword, so on a whole, on a whole level, because there's a keyword as a whole. It tells you how your, how your impressions are going. It tells you, first of all, number of impressions. Then it tells you how many times are your impressions actually serving like percentage wise, as well as where you're ranked compared to others. So for this keyword, you are ranked number five, you are the number five, you're ranked compared to others. So for this keyword you are ranked number five. You are the number five, you're getting the number five of the number of impressions and they also tell you their top of search. They tell you for the top four spots, same information what percentage are you serving your ad? And then also what rank are you. So you can now know a couple of things. Just based on this information, you can know how many people are ahead of you.
Speaker 3:If you're the number one guy in serving impressions, slow down, you're killing it. You're doing too good. Keep on lowering your bid as you may pay that number one spot. Obviously, if you want to be top of the list number one, please go for it. You want to be there, but make sure that you're bidding effectively over there. And then, secondly, you can now just see its trend overall. If you know that overall impressions you're number five, but top of search you're number six, you know that you're not bidding enough to be winning top of search, but you're bidding enough to be on the first page. Or could you just be the player ad? After you see the universe, you're bidding more than the average because you have top of thirds, but overall people are winning more general ads. So you just use this data to really help you out In general. I mean, I could really go off of your answers.
Speaker 3:The data that Walmart provides you is so valuable. I really don't think people utilize a search term impression report, and there's so many other reports that we could dive into over here that Walmart even has recently added. I actually just made a few links to posts about these three different reports that Walmart put together, with the sales rank, as well as the keyword rank and the item, there's one which is just a sales rank and a quote which shows you your product against the product type, what rank you're holding In terms of sales rank. You know well, amazon obviously has BSR and all that goodness and Walmart doesn't provide that information. Hopefully, yet you know, hopefully they get to that at some point. But they do give you your sales rank. They tell you how you're performing against your product type. So if you see your number 20 in your product type, do something else, you know spend more, figure out how to grow your listing to become a better seller.
Speaker 3:It also tells you which keywords to even go after. I mean, we just talked about keyword research. Before using your Amazon keywords, walmart tells you what keywords they recommend you go after based on. They tell you even your impressions, your clicks and your active parts by keyword, a percentage. Do you know that you're dominant? If you're getting like 50% of active parts which you already know, you're killing it over there. It tells you all this information. They're giving you this job a silver platter and I really don't think people are utilizing this. If you take all this data and you zoom out and you just look at your whole picture, you now have so much more insight into what keywords to go after. Which items do I have the most opportunity? So a little bit of a tangent over there on ad strategy, but there's so much information that Walmart does provide. Just to recap, a very quick recap start with autos, keep it simple. Harvest your keywords to manuals and then look for opportunities to succeed at the drive Very good, very good.
Speaker 2:And those reports that you're mentioning. As a current Walmart seller, I was not aware of those, so I'm definitely going to be checking those out. It's some huge knowledge bombs there. So if you look at, you know I'm speaking from an Amazon seller standpoint, but this could also be someone with a D2C website. When they're making a decision to come over to Walmart, one of the considerations is well, we have to fulfill inventory through WFS. We can no longer we can't use our FBA inventory. That's correct, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you cannot use FBA to default the app, the Walmart you, so I've heard of very few scenarios and exceptions to this rule. I've seen in some WhatsApp chats some people say that I have not seen this personally where Walmart will suspend you. Walmart will even terminate you for doing that, so not recommended.
Speaker 2:Okay. And so people are asking themselves okay, I've got a pretty significant investment in inventory if I want to go over to WFS? What type of velocity, you know? Let's just use a million dollar business. Someone's doing a million dollars on amazon what? What would they anticipate if they come over to walmart?
Speaker 3:this is a very common, a very common question. We get from a lot of sellers you, you know what, what? What type of business should I bring there? And oftentimes you're asking, like, what are you currently getting? People are oftentimes getting between like half a percent to 10%, sometimes five.
Speaker 3:You know we generally recommend that a good, a good, a good Walmart business should be doing that to 20% of your Amazon business. That's like a good, a good range business should be doing 10% to 20% of your Amazon business. That's a good range to consider. So if you're kind of just at the bottom seven figures on Amazon or really just doing about a million, your Walmart business may not be crazy successful with doing. If you're only going to be about 100K, it's not like a crazy business. But still, 10% of your business a day is enough. That, I think, warrants an investment. I would say something to really think about is to look at your category and understand how much opportunity exists in Walmart for you. Now we're big fans of just bringing people to Walmart, even if it's a catalog that might not have a lot of traction. Get in the head of the gate. Walmart is growing. Walmart is an investment in the future. It's achieving massive growth and massive successful growth year over year, and it will catch up somewhat to Amazon over the next few years and getting in now is going to be much cheaper than in the future. So I believe, across the board, just put your price on Walmart, it doesn't matter. Just get it going. Invest, get to the top of your keywords, even small. But just something to note is take a look at your space on Walmart. Go ahead, take your main keyword from Amazon, put it at the Walmart and see what the competition's like. If you see that the top products have zero reviews or terrible reviews and terrible images and pricing is all over the show, you know it's not really much going on over there. But if you see that's a competitive landscape, you see your top competitors over there, you see what's going on. That's something to consider. You know you can get in over there and you can probably make an impact. Also, consider is and this is, I like to say, this kind of like this evolution of the marketplace is and this is like, I think, from amazon and the walmart.
Speaker 3:I'm not sure how big talk is and all that, but I believe things start off very largely in the reseller area. Like big resellers like dominate. In the beginning of amazon they dominate. So today there's a lot of big, big money in reselling. Then you have people coming in with more standard products. The private label of the reselling comes at the time like, okay, you know you have more private label, standard, generic products. And then you go up to this premium niche area where it's like, okay, check out this garden, this garden will also cut your grass for you, whatever it is. You have this super niche, expensive product and you're dominating over there because people, that's what the Amazon shopper is looking for. The Amazon shopper comes and they search for whatever keyword. They oh, they see this premium product. They're more inclined to buy that and spend for that.
Speaker 3:On Walmart, we're still in like that middle phase of the reselling for the private label generic product. So you're more standard priced, you're more value products. Also, walmart is the rule of all this. You know like their whole mindset is about they're all trying to be like great value, their brand, like was everyday low prices. You know like they have all these ideas and about price and value. So, generally speaking, those types of products will do better.
Speaker 3:So on Amazon, where your category may be super saturated and very difficult for you to succeed. Those are the exactly the type of places where, on Walmart, there's so much opportunity because it's not saturated. Yet you know you could get it ahead of the game. You could get it. What's crazy to think about is like if you were to sell you know, the plastic, the garlic press that's what people always say on Amazon trying to sell the garlic press Like you could actually sell a garlic press at all. We used to sell garlic presses on Amazon a lot. We used to sell them and make profitable and like we were ranked well back when we were doing our selling. You can do that still today. You could take a look at the landscape. Yes, it's more competitive. Yes, you're competing with these top brands Walmart and store brands. Yes, that's going to exist.
Speaker 3:Using these tactics I've discussed here, where you have better content, where you're really pushing your listing and you're building an app, you're making sure that all your categorizations are correct.
Speaker 3:You're going aggressively with ads. You can actually get to the top of these super generic keywords that you would not have thought you'd win on, and Amazon is crazy to consider getting into some spaces. So take a look at your catalog and understand the dynamic of what's going on with Walmart and what's going on with Amazon. Interestingly, you work with a number of brands that have these larger catalogs and their more premium niche products are what fill for them on Amazon and at Walmart it's the more generic products in their catalog that are doing terribly on Amazon just because it's so saturated. Like this guy was selling vitamin C serum On Amazon, it doesn't do well for him because it's so saturated. There's nothing going on, but at Walmart no one else was in it, so he was immediately able to just dominate over that. Actually, he was making more on a Walmart than an Amazon. So I like to live by this 10% rule, but it's not necessarily applicable depending on your catalog.
Speaker 2:Okay, okay, one other. And thank you for all these Amazon to Walmart comparisons. It's going to be particularly relevant to the listeners of Firing the man, particularly relevant to the listeners of Firing the man. The next question I have. It relates to the economics of a sale. And on Amazon, you've got your referral fee, you've got your FBA fee, you've got a tacos of some percentage and then you've got your net profit. And so this is a two-part question. What's your guidance on pricing? Should you match Amazon, go above or below? And the second is are there any major differences in the economics of a sale?
Speaker 3:They're very relevant, very relevant questions, as always. The first component of the matching Amazon Walmart Our suggestion in general is to always match, because a lot of people come into Walmart and they'll put up their price higher because you know why not? You know I can make more money great. But you have to consider, like it comes back to our idea of the investor. You're no longer investing in the platform because if someone, an actual shopper, is looking to buy your product and they go to put on Walmart and put on Amazon, it's a bit cheaper. You're driving away your traffic from Walmart, but if you're the same price, maybe if they make an order with Walmart, you know they'll go ahead and buy your product at the same price anyway. Also, walmart will give you an issue. They will reduce the score for not having a competitive price. So I definitely recommend it to make sure that your prices are the same. In fact, I would even say you might want to even look into running promotions on Walmart to show Walmart that you're really invested in their platform. And we've even seen scenarios where if you go cheaper on Walmart temporarily, amazon didn't pick up on that and it ruled your buy box, but obviously Amazon's running the majority of your business so you don't want to risk your Amazon business for it. But just something to consider is, like Walmart loves, one of the big strategies for growth on Walmart is through promotions. I think advertising is obviously one of the most basic and simple ways, but if you get Walmart's investment on the promotion side, you could really really dominate. And that's I think, where, if you have the ability to look into promotions on Walmart, you really have a lot of opportunity for success. You've seen brands that were running ads for years and doing like their Amiga or like $20,000 a month. They're like what are we doing over here? They decided to take a few products, make them like Walmart, run promos, 30% Black Friday, cyber Monday, that type of deal. There's the event throughout the year, there's flash deals, and they've been able to grow their account legit from 20K to 200K. I'm not making this up, I can show you the account data Just by investing in Walmart, investing in what Walmart wants, because you get a good placement, you kill it, we fly. Just something to consider.
Speaker 3:When it comes to pricing, generally, you want a max, and not only that. When you're running a promo on Amazon, narrow it on Walmart. You know a strike through is going to help you with your conversion rate drastically. The second component was the fees. So, generally speaking, the fees are very similar on Walmart to Amazon. The only thing that Walmart does not currently have I know they were testing it in beta, I haven't really seen it across the board is what is it called the Fast and Light program, like the cheaper. Wait, amazon also got rid of it. You're saying, don't we know? Yes, they did. Okay, so there you go. I'm not sure I'm not up to date with Amazon or Amazon Trends, but I know the fulfillment fees on Walmart have a base of $3.45.
Speaker 3:So, generally speaking, when you think of like you're a good price point for Walmart, you want to generally consider, I would say like that $20 to $30 range. And this is like, let's say, you're a developed leather, you look at a catalog. Something else to consider is the price. You know you want to find, let's say, a few different reasons. Right, it's all if you think from a percentage perspective. You have that 15% of your commission fee, you have your ACBOs, so let's say that's 10, 15%. Again over there, the thing is the Fulboma bids and the base bids are both hard numbers, so 345 is always what the base bids for Fulboma. So if you're a $10 product, that's 34%. If you're a $20 product, you're cutting that down. If you're a $100 product, you're talking about 3.5%.
Speaker 3:Over there it very much differs on whatever. Obviously that's the lowest price. So it very much differs on whatever. Obviously that's the lowest price. But the same thing for your bids Is your base bid as funny or 30 cents. So if you're bidding that, it's already like. When you're talking about a $10 product, you get 10 flips for $3. You're already talking about, yeah, another 30%. So you really want to consider those little bit $20 to $30 price points. But it's still not like a premium product. You don't want to be above the market and it's like $30.
Speaker 3:So when you're considering like product research or what to go into, I would generally recommend looking for a little bit more. What's a more expensive product? But that's the standard price Like this is how much it costs. Let's say, a lap is always $50. You can't find the lap for $20. You can't find the lap for $20. That's a good thing. It's light, it's expensive. Your bids are going to be the same, your shipping is going to be the same and you're already having a much higher profit margin over there, but otherwise to Amazon, I think the fees pretty much line up.
Speaker 3:One thing that Walmart has which is nice is if you work with Walmart, they have this thing called New Seller Savings. We actually do work with an agency partner like ourselves. There's like a bus version where you could get really great savings for new sellers, which will be commission breaks. There'll be best fee breaks. It could be a myriad of different breaks that Walmart will give you, not long-term but temporarily. And also, if you work with Walmart, let's say, for promotions, you have actually the ability to work with your not your buyer, but work with your account manager to actually get a permission break. Oh, you give us a 10% promo, we'll give you a 2% commission break. Just different opportunities like that that Walmart has to incentivize you to participate in promotions and really grow and just have that conversation with Walmart. If you sell them and you bring value just for being a successful Amazon seller, walmart loves that. Walmart knows Walmart's goal is to bring in more business to Walmart, so they'll do a lot. The bigger you are on Amazon, the more they'll want to take you into the Walmart business and help you out.
Speaker 3:What aren't just general savings that you want to take advantage of. Other things that you could consider is, let's say, this Walmart, this listing, this pro seller this is not something we discussed at all, but something we discussed is this listing, quality support. So Walmart has introduced, actually very recently, three levels of pro sellers. You should just be a pro seller, not a bad seller or a basic seller or something I don't recall exactly. If you're a pro seller and you have what's called a pro listing, which means you have a good listing score and you're a pro seller, you have to meet some basic criteria. It's really not such a big deal. You actually get incentivized there as well. They take off. A couple points on commissions Like Walmart. Walmart's in the phase right now where they're incentivizing suppliers and sellers to just do what Walmart wants Get into WFS, do these basic things that just make you have a better listing. You're really bettering the marketplace and then they'll help you be more profitable, you know, in the long run. Okay.
Speaker 2:Okay, and my last question before we get into the fire round is who does CellCord work with? What's your ideal client?
Speaker 3:So we actually have such a broad client base. We work with these little smaller Amazon accounts. We tend to be like this work with a seven-figure Amazon seller just because we're an opportunity that Walmart has. If we're just our fees range, you know it's correct, it would be about that $10,000 range. So it's like it's a little difficult to justify that if it's such a small business on Walmart. And then we also work on the very high end of things.
Speaker 3:We work with, you know, large enterprise brands. Our largest clients are the number one furniture brand in Walmart stores. They're probably about a nine-figure brand. We obviously have a much more extensive process for how we work with such brands. We work with brands like Hamilton Beach Listex. These are accounts that have no household names, that obviously have strategies that are very different. They're talking about a much more brand approach, more holistic, higher level upper funnel. But there's a lot going on over there.
Speaker 3:What also helps is we have insights into so many broad, a whole broad spectrum of what type of accounts we deal with. So we have a lot more insight into the strategy, what works, what doesn't work, based on the size of your account, based on your price points. We have a lot of very vast, very vast and broad spectrum of clients, so we're very open to work with them. And also, like you mentioned, is the rich media component. That applies to everyone. We also have a service refund stacker, which is I mean, there's a lot of these reimbursement services that exist on Amazon, where the first ones to do it on Walmart. That applies to any seller You're selling on Walmart, especially through WFS. Just an easy value add, show that you're getting the most out of Walmart.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I want to highlight the refund stacker and I'll tell you, david, did not pay me to say this, but I've been running a refund stacker for about two years and, quite simply, if you're selling on Walmart and you're not running this, you are leaving money on the table. So I can say that firsthand, david, this has been an outstanding interview. At the end of every interview, we do the fire round Are you ready, ready, all right? What are your hobbies?
Speaker 3:My hobbies Okay, I actually just had a baby, so I think everything gets out the window. Like last Wednesday it's a little nuts, so I can't do anything anymore. My hobbies right now last Wednesday, it's a little nuts, I can't do anything anymore. My office right now. I'll look from my kitchen table. I used to enjoy golfing prior to having a kid, but I love a big fan of skating out there. I know I was never a big fan of hiking, but golf is like hiking with fun, so I really appreciate a good round of golf. I suck, I do suck, but fun.
Speaker 2:Very nice, very nice. What is one thing you do not miss about working for the man?
Speaker 3:I really it's funny because, like you go from not working for the man to working for many men. You know like, as an agency owner, like you have like 300 bosses now you know you got to deal with all these different people, but just that relaxation, I know that I I could, just, I could just do my thing. I can make sure that that things are covered. I can make sure that I can just take, take a break if I need to. I work my hours. You know, like like really own own up for something specific. Obviously we do have our scheduled calls, but just it, just some that, some that level of just like I make calls, I get to decide what happens. I can just choose what to do and then kind of, like I spoke earlier, that canoe was brutal, you know I really I hate long mutes, so it's great that I can work from home or I could drive five minutes to the office.
Speaker 2:Very nice, very nice. And the last question what do you think sets apart successful e-commerce entrepreneurs from those that give up, fail or never get started?
Speaker 3:Wow, I think commitment is obviously such a big component and you mentioned giving up over there. It's very key to just weasel your way to figure out, find the success, keep trying until you do have that success that you could buy. You know, like I mentioned in the beginning, when we started, we started off as sellers on Walmart specifically and we're like, okay, there's opportunity here, but what's the big? What more can I do? And even to this day, you know we're always looking for more opportunities.
Speaker 3:You can see, like we obviously have self-credit as our main focus, but always looking for more. You know we're looking into, you know, all these other. Yeah, we have our SaaS platforms now we use like an analytics platform. We have refund stack, like always looking for value ads. I think you bring in more and more opportunities. So like Like you're not just sticking all eggs in just one basket and you know that may or may not succeed. So always looking, if you continue to invest in so many different areas, one of them will bring you success and then you'll be able to just put more into there and then grow that even further and further. So really just continue to look for opportunities until you strike both.
Speaker 2:Very nice, very nice. And if people are interested in getting in touch with you or working with CellCord, what would be the best way?
Speaker 3:For sure. So you can check out, obviously, our LinkedIn. Super simple, just CellCord S-E-L-L-C-O-R-D. You can message me personally. It's just david at cellcordcom. You can message sales at CellCord, info at CellCord, any of those things. We'll get that somehow. I think we have an Instagram or something. Go, message us there. Please Stick the link in, stick the email. You can actually text me. Call me personally. What's at me? You can drop my number. You can share it on the call. I can send it to David. Whatever you guys are interested in.
Speaker 2:Sounds great, and we'll be posting links to all that in the show notes. David, I want to thank you for being a guest on the Firing the man podcast and looking forward to staying in touch.
Speaker 3:That's great, dude. I really appreciate it. That's great, I really really appreciate it.
