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Walmart is now encouraging third-party sellers to fulfill products sold from channels outside its own online marketplace.
During its Marketplace Seller Summit in San Francisco on Tuesday, the company unveiled its new Multichannel Solutions program, which will allow sellers already using Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS) to fulfill orders from any e-commerce site via Walmart’s supply chain.
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Walmart will launch the program on Sept. 10, which will enable merchants to store and fulfill orders from the company’s warehouses at fulfillment costs they claim are 15 percent lower than competitors. The retailer also can manage returns for third-party sellers from any sales channel.
Sellers using the service can choose between an expedited shipping option of two business days and a standard shipping option of three to five days.
Walmart said it would fulfill online orders placed through other platforms using plain brown boxes rather than Walmart-branded packaging.
There are still some limits to which sellers are eligible. Sellers must be able to ship to one of 11 facilities throughout the U.S. Multi-box items are currently not eligible.
The company’s advance is yet another decision to compete directly with Amazon on the logistics front. WFS itself serves as the retailer’s analogue to Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), in that both enable third-party sellers to store goods in their warehouses, where both retailers’ employees do the picking, packing and shipping. Additionally, both services are tied directly with premium services including Amazon Prime and Walmart+, enabling sellers to offer perks like free shipping.
But the new Multichannel Solutions service now brings Walmart head-to-head with Supply Chain by Amazon, the end-to-end service that enables sellers to offload their logistics needs onto the tech titan—whether it be inventory storage and replenishment, ground transportation and delivery—even if the goods aren’t sold on Amazon.
Expanding these services has been lucrative for Walmart, with the company revealing in a second quarter earnings call that sales growth from the online marketplace and WFS has grown more than 30 percent in each of the past four quarters. Growth from Marketplace sellers using the fulfillment services increased 8 percentage points in the quarter.
Walmart has more than 420 million products on its marketplace and more than 100,000 active sellers, over a third of whom are based in China, according to research firm Marketplace Pulse.