[tokyobreakfast]

Sell on Walmart Marketplace instead.

Amazon caters to the ALLCAPS Chinese scam stores. They know how to game the system and have invested a lot of resources into it. Your little home-based business doesn't stand a chance. It's a matter of time before they clone your product and undercut you by half.

[qiller]

Big nod. I've been trying to register our company to sell customized products. It's been quite an ordeal with document rejections etc, and at the end they just said the rejection is final. No support, no appeals, no transparency. Yet those ALLCAPS companies seem have no troubles.

[mmooss]

I understand the problems described for Amazon, though that doesn't make Walmart good or without the same or different problems and advantages. What is Walmart Marketplace like for sellers? And how is the sales traffic, relatively?

[tokyobreakfast]

I can give you perspective as a customer. I can't imagine they treat sellers any differently. I quit Prime (after spending tens of thousands over the years) and Amazon immediately started treating me like a third-class citizen. Free shipping is normally 5+ days. Lots of mysterious shipping delays that never happened before. Obscene amounts of dark patterns trying to get me to sign back up for Prime. Literally every checkout flow is a maze where I have to ensure I don't accidentally click the wrong thing or I'll find myself on the hook for a subscription.

I started giving more business to Walmart. Free shipping promos are just that, same dollar threshold as AMZN but items often arrive in a day or two (sometimes same day). They arrive by the date stated. Free shipping is the default selection. Experience with third party sellers has been good. They do shill Walmart+ (their cheaper Prime equivalent) but it's not obnoxious and no dark patterns. They do have the Chinese products but for some reason they do not pollute the search anywhere near as bad as Amazon. It's easy to filter out third party products with one click. I know stuff I'm getting is not counterfeit - they seem to have much better control over supply chain than AMZN. Many products are drop shipped direct from the manufacturer.

Unfortunately the Chinese flea market junk is Amazon's bread and butter so they have intentionally made it difficult to exclude it.

The downside is Walmart's site is a bit rough around the edges but lately Amazon is doing a great job of destroying their own site in multiple ways - like removing the ability to print real invoices, removing the ability to effectively filter third-party sellers in search, etc.

[mtlynch]

I used to sell on Amazon, and Walmart Marketplace reached out to me to convince me they could offer me a better seller experience than Amazon.

I was excited because I hated dealing with Amazon, but I had the call with the Walmart rep and he couldn't cite any benefit over Amazon.

Would Walmart take a lower fee? No, it would be the same as Amazon.

Would Walmart give back its fee if the customer sent the product back for a refund? No, Walmart would keep my fees and have the same perverse incentives that pushed costs onto the vendor.

It was surprising how much hubris Walmart brought to the discussion. The constant tone was, "We're Walmart, so obviously you want to work with us."

[TMWNN]

I sell on both platforms.

>Would Walmart take a lower fee? No, it would be the same as Amazon.

Walmart charges less in two ways:

* No monthly membership fee.

* Seemingly random fee discounts, up to and including 0%. More than once I've sold an item early in a day, then sold it again later that day with a different fee percentage.

>Would Walmart give back its fee if the customer sent the product back for a refund?

When Walmart refunds a customer, it takes from the seller's reserves exactly what was paid for the sale in the first place. No more, no less. It is Amazon that charges sellers a "refund processing fee".

While Walmart definitely has its issues, there are also many virtues vis-a-vis Amazon. It is worthwhile selling on both. My 2025 Amazon and Walmart sales are equal.

[mtlynch]

This was 3-4 years ago, so it's possible that they've improved since then or that the rep I was speaking to was misinformed, but at the time, he told me there was no fee advantage on Walmart Marketplace, and I tried to be polite in my reaction of, "Then, why would you be an attractive alternative?"

[TMWNN]

The refund structure has always been in place in the going on five years I've sold on Walmart. The random discounted fees have started in the past year.

[mmooss]

Some reasons for switching are in the OP and in other comments in this subthread. What about those?

[mmooss]

The OP talks about being locked out by Amazon, and the comment I responded to above talks about being overtaken by scams.

Edit: you say it too:

> I hated dealing with Amazon

Yet the comments in this subthread all talk only about costs - they say the costs are the same so why switch to Walmart? Aren't the reasons already given?

[kasane_teto]

Don’t worry this guys a hero, and has lots of endorphins. He’ll find a way.