Walmart’s marketplace reached 150,000 active sellers as new sellers joining the platform continue to accelerate, attracted by growing GMV.
According to Marketplace Pulse data, Walmart added more than 50,000 active sellers over the past twelve months. That’s significant for a marketplace launched in 2009, with 50,000 active sellers in total as recently as 2022.
Walmart reports that its marketplace GMV grew by more than 30% in each of the past four quarters, with external estimates placing the GMV at roughly $10 billion. That has solidified its role as the second most important channel for most marketplace sellers. Walmart has also become less stringent about seller approval and allowed international sellers. As a result, international sellers — nearly all from China — now represent 35% of active sellers.
Walmart has over 420 million products for sale on Walmart.com; the marketplace is at least 95% of that. Over the past few years, Walmart has pushed sellers to Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS) for fulfillment, thus enabling it to control the delivery experience and to pack items from Walmart retail and marketplace in the same box. Now, 66% of the top sellers use WFS. To get items into WFS faster, in August, Walmart introduced Walmart Cross Border, a “port-to-door full-container-load ocean freight service from China to the U.S.”
Blending the marketplace into the broader Walmart ecosystem is the key. WFS was step one, but Walmart is ultimately all about its 4,606 physical stores in the U.S. — it fulfills 50% of online orders from one of them. Marketplace items need an option to be picked up in stores. In an interview with CNBC a year ago, Jaré Buckley-Cox, Vice President of Walmart Fulfillment Services, said store pickup for marketplace items is coming within the next five years and described it as “a high priority.”
While seller growth measures one dimension, all the services and features Walmart rolled out over the past few years, like advertising and fulfillment, have expanded the marketplace into an ecosystem. For years, growth came from adding sellers; now, it comes from integration and seller enablement.
