The retailer Walmart first opened up in 1962 with a simple mission: to offer customers the highest quality merchandise at the lowest price. And now, they’re continuing to pursue that mission by extending their reach via ecommerce with Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS).
Here’s everything you need to know about WFS and how it can help Pattern brand partners win more sales:
What is Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS)?
As part of their focus on ecommerce these past recent years, Walmart has released their own fulfillment platform called Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS), which makes it simple for their merchants to deliver orders efficiently.
The program’s goal is to help merchants automate fulfillment so they can focus on what matters most: selling and marketing their products. Here’s how it works in four simple steps:
- Your store first ships their merchandise to one of Walmart’s WFS centers.
- Walmart will store, pick, pack, and ship orders for you when products are purchased.
- Your orders will be delivered within two days across all US states.
- Walmart will then handle all of the customer care and returns for your brand.
For your products to qualify for WFS, there are going to be a couple of requirements to respect. The criteria looks as follows:
- You must be shipping your products to Walmart Fulfillment Centers in the US
- Your product must not weigh more than 30 pounds
- You can’t deliver any perishable or regulated products
- Maximum product dimensions are 25″ x 20″ x 14″
4 benefits of WFS for your Amazon business
Walmart Fulfillment Services offer many opportunities for businesses to manage their store and sell more goods on Walmart’s marketplace. Here are the main benefits that come from taking advantage of WFS:
1. Simple pricing for businesses
WFS comes with a simple pricing structure that only comes with a fixed monthly fulfillment and storage price estimated on your product’s shipping weight to make life easier for merchants.
It means that stores will be able to easily offer Walmart customers low, competitive prices on their products. You also won’t have to go through countless estimations to determine how much you’ll pay to deliver orders.
2. Drive more product sales
Each order delivered via WFS comes with trusted “Shipped by Walmart” tagging and Buy-Box wins. According to Walmart, they increase sales growth by up to 50% due to boosting the customer’s trust.
3. Wide range of support
WFS comes with various resources to help stores on their journey. For example, you’ll get access to phone support and strategic advisory services seven days a week. This eliminates stress as you can get the answers to any question you might have on your orders or the fulfillment process, at any time.
Stores also get help from Walmart in terms of account management. The platform will provide you with custom recommendations on the best ways to optimize your business for growth and scalability.
4. Seamless customer service, returns, and replacements
Customer service can be challenging and take a toll on your schedule. That’s why Walmart does the hard work for you by managing all of your customer inquiries, refunds, and returns.
How working with Pattern helps you get the most out of WFS
WFS offers new ways for Pattern’s brand partners to win big on Walmart and has helped us boost our total Walmart sales. Here’s how Pattern’s connection to WFS is going to help widen your reach and drive more sales:
Create the best product listings on Walmart
Generating traffic to your product pages is just the first step. If you want to generate sales and conversions, creating product listings to get customers to pull the trigger will be essential. The aspects that drive a successful product listing include:
- Content: How descriptive is your listing? From your product images to descriptions, everything needs to be as accurate as possible on the product page.
- Offer: How competitive is your offer? Aspects that influence the value of your offer include shipping prices, speed, and in-stock rate.
- Performance: How great is your customer performance? For example, you need to take into account the speed of your responses and your brand’s policy adherence.
By optimizing each of these three aspects, you’ll be on your way to create better product listings. But to make things even easier for our partners at Pattern, we have an algorithm that makes it simple to understand the power of your product listing.
Our platform assigns a percentage out of 100 to determine the quality of your product listing. From there, you can go back to your listing and use the data to improve your score. Even boosting your listing score by 10% could make a significant difference to your conversions.
Keep everything in your store in-stock
Another factor that influences the success of your business on Amazon is how well you can manage inventory. After all, you can’t sell a product if you don’t have an item available to sell in the first place.
Going out of stock frequently can harm your customer satisfaction and brand reputation. Retailers lose over $1 trillion in sales and revenue each year to stock-outs alone. Walmart itself admits to losing around $3 billion in yearly sales because of stock-outs.
The issue with inventory management is that it involves a lot of repetitive, manual work. Being able to forecast product demand accurately is also not an easy task due to the unpredictable nature of ecommerce.
That’s why Pattern helps manage their inventory and prevent stock-outs more effectively through our WFS Inventory Dashboard. You get access to all relevant data on your inventory, such as your predicate average GMV and the amount of money you lost due to stock-outs.
By keeping track of all this data in one place, you’ll instantly know when it’s time to reorder an item that’s running out of stock. You’ll also be able to adapt your inventory based on product demand.
Analyze your performance and identify trends ahead of time
To drive the best results on Walmart, you need a clear idea of your store’s performance: what sales are you generating? Are there areas of weakness that you can improve?
Also, keep in mind that things in ecommerce are constantly changing quickly. For example, a simple viral Tik Tok video could instantly make one of your products unprecedentedly popular.
With Pattern’s sales dashboard, we provide you with 24/7 data on everything going on within your store. You’ll get a clear picture of whether or not your store is winning.
If you’re not happy with the results, it’s not the end of the world. You can always take a step back to understand what is holding you back so you can improve. You can also look at the details of each of your items and identify which are your top-performing and worst-performing products.
The sales dashboard allows you to keep track of trends that are causing spikes in sales. From there, you can start preparing your inventory to keep up with the new demand.
Take your Walmart business to new heights with WFS
Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS) make delivering your orders to customers a quick and easy process. And by partnering with Pattern, you can maximize the service and step up the customer experience on Walmart even more.
To learn more about Pattern’s services for Walmart businesses, request your demo today.
