MGR eCommerce Edge Weekly | June 17, 2020

The Shopify news over the past two months has been relentless, and this week they’ve dropped another bomb.

Shopify and Walmart have announced a partnership, allowing any Shopify merchant to apply to sell on Walmart.com, and once approved their product catalog can immediately be synced and listed on Walmart.com.

How does it work?

For now, they’ve made it very simple. Any orders that come in through Walmart.com will show up in your fulfillment dashboard in Shopify alongside your normal orders. You can use the same shipping and fulfillment for all Walmart.com orders that you already use for your normal ones.

What hasn’t been announced yet, but almost undoubtedly will, is full integration with Walmart’s new Fulfilled by Walmart offering. They launched this in beta earlier this year for select Walmart.com merchants, but I anticipate they will open it to everyone down the road as the push harder to compete with Amazon.

A wolf in sheep’s clothing?

So far everything about this partnership sounds great, it’s little extra work for you and you get exposure to an entirely new distribution channel. However, as is often the case in the cutthroat eCommerce business, opportunities are never as clear as they seem.

Walmart isn’t doing this just because they want new merchants, Walmart.com was already growing and as they invested more, merchants would be drawn to it with our without a Shopify partnership. Walmart wants data, particularly the data of DTC companies who are seeing massive growth and stealing from the traditional players’ market share.

What they do with the data they accumulate from these brands is at their own discretion, but don’t think for a second that Walmart above doing exactly as Amazon does: create their own private label copies of successful products and unfairly boost their positioning on search pages on Walmart.com.

This isn’t to say that merchants shouldn’t take advantage of this opportunity, but they should certainly weigh the potential benefits and costs before jumping in.

1. Amazon is likely acquiring JC Penney, what does this mean for retail? – GLOBE ST

2. Don’t sleep on Snapchat, they’ve been making a quiet comeback, Snap Summit last week was a must watch – YOUTUBE

3. Quibi is still in denial – WSJ

4. Gamestop’s eComm sales are up 519% – RETAIL DIVE