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The Fastest Way to Grow Sales by Adding Walmart Marketplace

Most established Amazon sellers know they should be on Walmart. They've heard the pitch — 500 million users, growing platform, incremental revenue, omnichannel presence. But the reason they haven't pulled the trigger usually comes down to one thing: they've heard Walmart growth is slow. And honestly, that reputation isn't entirely wrong — if you do it the way most people do it.

The brands that ramp slowly on Walmart are usually doing two things: treating Walmart like a copy-paste of their Amazon account, and trying to manage the whole thing themselves without the one relationship that changes everything. The brands that grow fast — and we've seen it happen — have a different playbook. Here's exactly what it looks like.

The Thing Everyone Misses: The Walmart Account Manager

Before we talk about listings, ads, or fulfillment — we need to talk about account managers. This is the single most undervalued lever in Walmart growth, and in 2026, it's harder to access than it's ever been before. You can't just sign up for one. They're assigned by category, and getting the right one on your side early is something you have to actively pursue.

What does a Walmart account manager actually do? A lot of things you can't do yourself. They can place your product on virtual shelf categories — essentially the digital equivalent of being merchandised into a specific aisle in a physical Walmart store. Shoppers browsing that category see your product without searching for it at all. They facilitate access to daily deals, promotional events, and what Walmart calls "tent pole events" — their major seasonal campaigns. These events drive enormous sales velocity, and access to them goes through your account manager.

This is not something Amazon offers. On Amazon, everything is self-service — you set up your campaigns, you optimize your listings, you figure it out. Walmart has a layer of human relationship that Amazon simply doesn't have, and leveraging it correctly is what separates brands that plateau at a few thousand dollars a month from brands that scale to six figures. Don't underestimate this. Securing your account manager relationship is step one of this entire playbook — before you set up the account, before you list a single product.

Walmart Is Not a Second Amazon Channel

The most expensive mistake we see Amazon sellers make when they come to Walmart is assuming the two platforms work the same way. They don't. Walmart is not Amazon Lite. It has a completely different search engine, a different ranking algorithm, and shoppers who search with different terms and different intent.

We've seen sellers take their Amazon listing — keyword-optimized title, bullets, backend terms — and copy it wholesale into Walmart. The result is usually a listing that barely gets indexed for anything, because the keywords that drive traffic on Amazon are not necessarily the keywords Walmart shoppers are using. We do Walmart-specific keyword research for every single listing we set up, separate from whatever Amazon work has already been done. The overlap exists, but it's not a given, and assuming it's the same is a costly shortcut.

Reviews also behave differently on Walmart. They carry more weight earlier in the ranking process, and there's a feature most sellers have never heard of: if you have a Shopify store with a Walmart-trusted review partner, you can import your Shopify reviews directly onto your Walmart product pages. That means instead of starting at zero reviews and fighting for visibility from scratch, you launch with existing social proof already on the page. It's a significant advantage that most sellers never use simply because they don't know it exists.

The 5-Step Launch Playbook

Here's the process we use to get a brand live on Walmart and generating sales as fast as possible:

1. Secure your account manager. This is the first call we make — not the last. Getting the right account manager by category, before the account is even live, sets the entire trajectory.
2. Create and configure the seller account. Business documentation, tax information, payout setup, seller profile — done correctly the first time so nothing gets flagged or delayed.
3. Build Walmart-native listings. Walmart-specific keyword research, properly structured titles and attributes, your Amazon ASIN entered in the backend so Walmart can use your existing sales history as a ranking signal.
4. Import reviews from Shopify. If you have a Shopify store using a Walmart-trusted review partner, we do this immediately after listings go live. Don't skip this step — it's one of Walmart's most powerful and least-used features.
5. Launch PPC and promotions. We run Walmart Connect Sponsored Products campaigns for at least the first four months to build daily sales velocity and ranking momentum. Simultaneously, your account manager will be presenting opportunities for daily deals and promotional events — say yes to these aggressively in the early months. The ranking gains compound.

For a deeper look at how Walmart's advertising platform works, see our guide on Walmart Connect PPC — what it is and what to expect.

Real Numbers: $1,000 to $150,000 in 8 Months — With Zero PPC

We worked with a brand called Sugar Plum that came to us doing roughly $1,000 a month on Walmart. Within eight months, they hit $150,000 in a single month — with November at $120,000 and December at $150,000 at peak. Along the way: $30K months, $40K months, $60K months, building progressively as the playbook took hold.

This isn't a fluke or a niche case. It's what happens when you treat Walmart as its own channel, build the right relationships, and use the promotional tools that are available to sellers who know how to access them. The brands that stay flat on Walmart are the ones treating it as a self-service extension of their Amazon business. It's not.

WFS Is Non-Negotiable

Walmart Fulfillment Services — WFS — is the equivalent of Amazon FBA. You send inventory to Walmart's fulfillment network and they handle storage, picking, packing, and shipping. And just like FBA on Amazon, Walmart's algorithm heavily prioritizes WFS-fulfilled items in search rankings. Products shipped directly by the seller are competing uphill against every WFS listing in the same category.

The data backs this up: sellers using WFS see an average 50% lift in GMV compared to non-WFS equivalents. In 2026, WFS is not a premium option or something to consider later — it's the baseline requirement for any brand that's serious about building real Walmart revenue. We say this even knowing that Sugar Plum's extraordinary growth happened without WFS. The number would have been significantly larger with it.

Our full breakdown of the expansion process is covered in detail in our guide on how to expand your Amazon brand to Walmart.com.

The Opportunity That's Being Left Wide Open: Grocery and Home Goods

If you sell a food product, a beverage, a consumable, or anything in the home goods category — and you're not on Walmart — you are missing something that deserves to be taken seriously. Walmart is the largest grocery store in the United States. A massive portion of Walmart.com traffic comes directly from the Walmart app, driven by customers who opened it to buy groceries and stay to discover other products. That's a shopper who is already in purchase mode, already in the Walmart ecosystem, and already on the app.

CPG and food brands that have found this audience have consistently been our fastest-scaling Walmart accounts. The opportunity is real, the competition from other brands who understand this is still lower than it will be, and the window for getting there early is still open — but not forever. Walmart's marketplace added 44,000 new sellers in just the first five months of 2025. The platform is filling up. The best time to be on Walmart was two years ago. The second best time is now.

For a full strategic comparison of the two platforms, see our breakdown of Walmart vs. Amazon in 2026.

The Bottom Line

The fastest path to Walmart sales is not a secret — it's just not the path most sellers take. It requires treating Walmart as its own platform with its own rules, building listings from Walmart-native keyword research, getting your account manager relationship locked in before you go live, and using the promotional infrastructure that Walmart has built specifically to help sellers grow. WFS is your fulfillment baseline. Review imports from Shopify are your early social proof shortcut. And for grocery and home goods brands, the audience is already there — you just need to show up.

SellTru has helped brands execute this exact playbook across our Walmart marketplace management service. If you want to know whether your brand is ready and what the fastest path to Walmart revenue looks like for your specific account, book a call with us. We'll walk through your brand, your category, and exactly what we'd do.