Many businesses and professional sellers use large marketplaces like eBay and Amazon to sell their items to massive amounts of users not only in the United States, but around the world. Since it’s relatively easy to set up an account, the number of sellers on these platforms has grown consistently, also increasing the amount of competition.
However, Amazon draws around 184 million people a month while eBay receives more than 160 million per month, thus providing sellers with a lot of traffic that’s hard to achieve otherwise. And while the platforms offer opportunities to sell products in high demand, they require a good selection of products to ensure that the inventory rotates adequately. This puts Walmart wholesale products in a unique position as they offer smaller businesses certain advantages.
Higher profit margins
Many sellers forget to calculate certain costs associated with selling. These slight miscalculations can be expensive and can lead to a loss of revenue or even unprofitability. But marketplaces have certain costs built in which are absolutely necessary to understand. For example, selling a book priced at 30 dollars will cost you fees of $4.87 on eBay and $6.84 on Amazon. Additionally, sellers incur shipping costs and should also calculate expenses necessary to run the business such as rent, utilities, payroll, and so forth. These costs must be built into the price of an item afterward.
Once these calculations are done, many products that a company can source from wholesalers simply don’t have enough margin to warrant posting and selling the product online. Therefore, organizations need to look for better options. Walmart wholesale items are ideal as these items are a lot less expensive than regular wholesale items, and can provide a professional seller with enough margin to make the activity profitable.
Higher quality of items
Many wholesale items, when purchased through pallets of returned items from vendors like Amazon, provide great products at low prices. However, since Walmart has brick and mortar retail stores in addition to their e-commerce platform, they have a better mix of items that sell well in both environments or are ideal for a specific environment. The combination has allowed Walmart to grow at a faster rate than Amazon and the organization is no longer playing catch-up.
This growth creates data and Walmart uses this data to source their product. The higher the growth, the more data and the more data, the higher the accuracy of their predictive algorithms. What this means to companies who sell wholesale items obtained from Walmart liquidations is that these items are a good representation of what buyers look for in retail and online environments, thus producing a higher quality of items ideal to sell in either marketplace.
Product Variety and Marketplace Brands
Walmart liquidations provide buyers with the ability to purchase a great number of branded products that online shoppers are familiar with and trust. However, marketplaces such as Amazon may limit sellers from selling certain brands and categories. Take Apple for example, as sellers must be authorized by Apple to sell anything the company produces on Amazon.
Although some people see this as a limitation, this is an advantage. It is risky for businesses to depend exclusively on a single revenue stream. If a seller has a problem with their eBay account, the diversity of income sources may prevent them from facing financial hardship as they can still generate sales from other accounts. Therefore, sellers that also have a brick and mortar presence along with their e-commerce presence have a built-in risk aversion and can also use these types of limitations as an advantage by sourcing products that sellers who exclusively sell online cannot list.