Conflict at Walmart threatens its ecommerce battle with Amazon
The problem with Walmart and ecommerce are one of self-cannibalism.<p>Walmart.com is not Jet.com. They actually compete against each other! Why any corporation would run two separate ecommerce operations that compete is beyond me.<p>- When Walmart bought Jet.com, they already had Walmart Marketplace, which is very much like Amazon in that it&#x27;s products stocked, sold and shipped by Walmart themselves - but also many 3rd parties which stock, sell and ship on Walmart.com too.<p>- Just like on Amazon - most customers are not aware they&#x27;re not buying directly from Walmart. Unlike Amazon, there&#x27;s no built in messaging system (you end up directly emailing customers, and until recently they didn&#x27;t even proxy the email addresses - meaning you obtained customer&#x27;s real email addresses). Returns are sloppy and painful for the seller to handle, and the Seller Central UI hasn&#x27;t changed in years. It&#x27;s a &quot;modern SPA&quot; website, but each button click must be doing some poorly designed queries or something terrible, because each view takes multiple seconds to display (showing a busy spinner gif while waiting). This makes doing trivial things very painful in the UI.<p>- Walmart.com&#x27;s API isn&#x27;t stable either. It&#x27;s on version 3 now, and still seems to lack important features like advanced reporting - features Amazon has had for the decade we&#x27;ve been selling there. When version 3 of the API rolled out, they gave everyone a months notice that all previous versions would be &quot;deprecated&quot; - although someone at Walmart things deprecated means turning it off completely. This left anyone foolish enough to integrate with this clunky API 1 month to rewrite everything since it was a major change.<p>- You still have to be invited to sell on Walmart.com. Unlike Amazon - not anyone can just apply for an account and start selling. This is a two-edged sword, of course. While it cuts down on random people selling out of their garage - it does limit the diversity of products and sellers on Walmart&#x27;s Marketplace - and ultimately revenue Walmart.com can bring in.<p>- Walmart offers no &quot;Fulfillment&quot; options for their 3rd party sellers. While this is currently not necessary, since you must be a legit ecommerce business of a considerable size to even be invited to Walmart.com, it would be a great option for many to help cut down on delivery times and shipping fees by stocking some products on the other coast, or throughout the country. Many large operations on Amazon take advantage of the FBA program specifically for these reasons.<p>Now speaking about Jet.com - I&#x27;m not sure why Walmart didn&#x27;t fold them into the Walmart.com branding. It&#x27;s a disaster. It&#x27;s been 2 years since we seriously looked at Jet.com, perhaps some things have changed - although I have my doubts due to how Jet.com wanted to operate.<p>We also have a Jet.com account - but chose not to participate because the barrier to entry was too high for such low projected sales.<p>- Jet.com requires API use to do anything. There is no Seller Central UI to manage products or orders.<p>This requires an API to even list a product. No CSV or Flat File uploads, which both Amazon and Walmart allow. No manually editing product details for a listing, or manually reviewing your orders via an Order Manager page.<p>While that may be good in that it makes the barrier to entry high enough to keep out casual garage sellers - it also kept out larger profitable operations like us. We took one look at it, reviewed their API, and decided it wasn&#x27;t worth the development effort to get a handful of sales each week. At the time, there were no good integrations that we could just pay for either - not to mention they wouldn&#x27;t integrate with our ERP software either - so we&#x27;d still have to spend the development time anyway.<p>Essentially, Walmart Corp is trying to run two, competing ecommerce websites - both with serious flaws that prevent either one from being easy or enjoyable for their sellers. Being customer-centric is great, but you have to at least make sure it&#x27;s easy for your sellers to manage their operations on your platform - otherwise they will just choose to not participate or put enough energy into the platform to make it really great.