We know there are countless webinars, blogs, you name it out there giving you tips and advice on how to protect your brand on Amazon. There are how-to's about each and every minute detail having to do with establishing and controlling your brand on Amazon.com. With the emergence of Walmart over the course of the past year or so (and certainly the past few months given the surge in online marketplace shopping as a result of Covid-19), we wanted to provide just a bit of insight on how to handle and protect your brand on Walmart.com.
While some of the processes and tips are the same or very similar to a solid approach to Amazon brand protection, there are a couple of differences that are key in highlighting.
Key Things to Know
Here are a few things to keep in mind as you establish your brand presence on Walmart.com and continue to expand:
Walmart’s trademark protection and overall brand assistance processes are nowhere near as formalized as on Amazon
- As you establish your brand and list your products on Walmart, only do so with an understanding of the risk involved. While you may encounter various obstacles in navigating Amazon’s IP protection processes (brand registry, report a violation portal, patent utility process, etc.), the fact remains that they exist and are available for your use as necessary. The same cannot be said about Walmart’s tools (or lack thereof) for brand protection efforts. We advise making absolutely sure that your enforcement foundations (reseller program, MAP policy, etc.) are proper and established before hopping onto Walmart to see what all of the buzz is about. The enforcement will be entirely up to you as the brand—do not expect assistance from Walmart-housed tools.
The price matching goes both ways... and Walmart will unpublish your listing
- It’s true! Now, the first part of this may be obvious and well-known. In much the same was as Amazon uses algorithms to scan competing websites and lower their prices accordingly (or insert the “Available from these sellers” link in place of the BuyBox), Walmart is constantly scanning Amazon, Target, and various other retail websites listing your products to see what pricing is elsewhere. What may not have realized is that, if Walmart finds lower prices and deems your Walmart price to be outside of “an acceptable range,” Walmart will unpublish your product listing. No joke. Take a look at this screenshot below from a real client Walmart Seller Center.
- If you have a Seller Center, check “Growth Opportunities” from the menu and click the “Unpublished Items” tab on the top to view this information. What does this mean for you as the brand? It means, unlike on Amazon, on Walmart, you are unable to simply slide by with uncompetitive pricing and hope customers will buy from you because you are “the brand.” Your listing will not appear if your pricing is not consistent across the internet. This leads right into point #3.
Make sure you have complete online price visibility for your products
- What point #2 (above) makes all the more clear when listing products on Walmart, is that every brand ought to have a tool for monitoring their product pricing across all marketplaces and websites. To simply monitor Amazon and Walmart for pricing will often prove pointless as your products are likely listed on other marketplaces and retail websites that Walmart will scrape and, in turn, use to unpublish your listings if the prices are noticeable lower.
- We have a strong partnership with TrackStreet. TrackStreet is the best-of-the-best when it comes to monitoring and enforcing both pricing and resellers across the entire internet. We’re fortunate to be able to leverage this tool affordably for our clients, but if you are currently without a solution of this type for your monitoring and enforcement efforts, we strongly urge you to land on a solution like this before stepping onto Walmart with your products. Of course, we are happy to chat with you and provide a free consultation to see if we can be of assistance in providing these services.
If you have questions about Walmart brand protection or brand protection processes in general, reach out to us.
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