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Most Amazon sellers who expand to Walmart make the same mistake in the first week: they treat it like an Amazon account setup and move fast. They get approved, import their catalog, and immediately start wondering why nothing is converting.

What they skipped is the foundation work that Walmart rewards heavily and Amazon largely doesn’t care about. Listing quality, Buy Box eligibility, fulfillment infrastructure, pricing strategy — these are prerequisites on Walmart, not optimizations you get to later.

This checklist is built around three phases. The first 30 days are about getting the infrastructure right before a dollar of ad spend goes in. Days 31 through 60 are about building your baseline. Days 61 through 90 are about identifying what’s actually working and beginning to scale it.

Before You Apply: What Walmart Actually Checks

Walmart’s application process is selective in ways Amazon’s isn’t. The platform requires a registered U.S. business entity — sole proprietorships are not accepted. You’ll need a business tax ID (SSN is not accepted), documentation verifying your business name and address, a U.S. warehouse with returns capability or a commitment to use Walmart Fulfillment Services, GTIN/UPC GS1 Company Prefix Numbers for your products, and demonstrated ecommerce experience.

That last one matters more than sellers expect. Walmart reviews your selling history on other platforms. Your Amazon account, if it’s in good standing with a strong track record, is a meaningful asset during the application review. If you’re applying with a thin or new Amazon history, the chances of quick approval drop.

Approval timelines vary from 24 hours to several weeks depending on how complete and consistent your documentation is. The most common cause of delays is mismatched information — your EIN must match your legal business name exactly across all documents.

Once approved, you’ll set up your account in Seller Center, configure fulfillment settings, connect your payment information, and begin the onboarding process before you can list anything.

Days 1 to 30: Build the Foundation

Decide on fulfillment before you list a single product

Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS) is the platform’s equivalent of FBA. Products fulfilled through WFS earn the “Fulfilled by Walmart” two-day delivery badge, which has a measurable impact on Buy Box eligibility and conversion rate. WFS charges fulfillment and storage fees based on product weight and dimensions, with no signup fees and no minimum inventory requirements. There’s a peak season storage surcharge from October through December, and items stored beyond 12 months incur a long-term storage fee — the same dynamics you’re already managing with FBA.

If you’re using FBA on Amazon, setting up WFS for your Walmart catalog should be the first operational decision you make. The two-day badge does for Walmart visibility what Prime does on Amazon. Starting with merchant-fulfilled and planning to add WFS later means you’re competing for Buy Box during your most critical traffic-building period with a structural disadvantage.

For sellers who prefer merchant fulfillment, Walmart still requires a U.S. warehouse with returns capability and the ability to meet Seller Performance Standards for on-time delivery and order defect rates.

Don’t import your Amazon listings directly

Walmart has its own attribute schema, its own category-specific style guides, and its own search algorithm. An Amazon listing pasted into Walmart’s catalog will be technically live but poorly optimized for how Walmart surfaces and ranks products.

The Listing Quality Score (LQS) is Walmart’s 0-to-100 metric that measures how complete and competitive your listings are. It factors in content (titles, descriptions, attributes, images), offer quality (pricing competitiveness, fulfillment method), and seller performance metrics. A low LQS suppresses your visibility in search and directly limits where your ads can appear when you eventually start advertising.

Build your Walmart listings from scratch against Walmart’s format requirements. Titles should follow Walmart’s recommended formula: Brand plus key features plus product type plus attributes. Images should meet Walmart’s resolution requirements. Every relevant attribute field for your category should be filled in — not just the obvious ones. Walmart’s algorithm uses attribute completeness to filter and rank products, and incomplete attributes reduce discoverability in ways that don’t show up as obvious failures.

Register your brand through the Walmart Brand Portal

If you’re a brand owner with a registered trademark, submit your application to the Walmart Brand Portal during the first two weeks. Brand Portal registration is required to access Sponsored Brands ads and Onsite Display, and it gives you tools to manage IP protection, report unauthorized sellers, and maintain listing control. Approval takes time. Starting the process in week one means it’s likely resolved before you need it in weeks six or eight.

Days 31 to 60: Build Your Baseline

Set pricing deliberately

Walmart’s algorithm prioritizes the lowest price in search and Buy Box allocation. This doesn’t mean racing to the bottom — it means being deliberate about where you price relative to the market from day one.

Check what your products are selling for on Walmart already, whether through existing sellers, Walmart’s own inventory, or other third parties. If you’re significantly above prevailing prices, you won’t win the Buy Box, which means you can’t access top ad placements and your organic visibility is limited.

Walmart doesn’t charge monthly subscription fees. You pay referral fees on each sale, with the percentage varying by product category. Factor this into your margin calculations before you finalize pricing, and compare it against your Amazon referral fees — the difference by category can be meaningful in either direction.

Launch your first advertising campaigns

Once your top ASINs have solid Listing Quality Scores and Buy Box eligibility, begin with automatic Sponsored Products campaigns. The auto-to-manual workflow that works on Amazon works the same way here. Let Walmart’s algorithm surface converting search terms for three to four weeks before building manual campaigns from that data.

Start with three to five of your best-performing Amazon SKUs, not your full catalog. These should be products with competitive pricing, strong listing completion, and WFS enrollment if possible. Running ads on listings that don’t have the infrastructure dialed in is a reliable way to generate data that doesn’t tell you anything useful.

Keep early daily budgets modest. The goal in weeks four through eight is to generate enough click and conversion data to make informed decisions, not to scale aggressively on unproven performance.

Monitor Seller Performance Standards weekly

Walmart tracks on-time delivery rate, order defect rate, cancellation rate, and return rate. Accounts that fall below Walmart’s minimum thresholds on these metrics risk listing suppression or account suspension. If you’re merchant-fulfilling, these metrics require active management from day one. WFS offloads most of this operational risk.

Check your Seller Scorecard in Seller Center at least once a week during the first 60 days. Problems that develop here are easier to reverse early than after they’ve compounded.

Days 61 to 90: Identify What Works, Then Scale It

Pull your search term reports and build manual campaigns

By the end of week eight, your automatic campaigns should have accumulated enough data to identify converting search terms. Pull the search term report, move high-performers into manual campaigns with controlled bids and match types, and start building your negative keyword list aggressively. Any search term generating clicks without conversions gets negated.

This is the same discipline that improves Amazon PPC, and it matters just as much on Walmart. The sellers generating the best ACoS in accounts we manage are consistently the ones treating negative keyword hygiene as a weekly process rather than a quarterly task.

Audit your Listing Quality Scores by product

By day 60, you have enough data to see which products are performing and which aren’t. For underperformers, pull the Listing Quality Score for each and identify where points are being lost. Missing attributes, suboptimal images, and pricing issues are the most common culprits. Fix these before spending more on ads for those products.

Walmart provides recommendations directly in the Listing Quality Dashboard. Most of the quick wins are straightforward: fill in a missing attribute, add an additional image, complete a specification field you skipped. Small improvements to LQS have a disproportionate impact on visibility because Walmart’s algorithm uses the score to determine placement eligibility, not just ranking.

Evaluate your WFS penetration and plan your catalog expansion

WFS sellers who route a significant portion of their GMV through WFS become eligible for discounts on fulfillment and storage fees. As your catalog and volume grow on Walmart, this penetration rate becomes a meaningful cost lever. The first 90 days are also the right time to identify which additional SKUs are worth expanding to Walmart — and which should wait until your foundation accounts are fully optimized.

The benchmark for a healthy Walmart expansion at 90 days: your top five SKUs are Buy Box eligible, your LQS scores are above 80 for all active products, you have a functioning auto-campaign structure with a growing negative keyword list, and you’ve submitted at least one manual campaign built from real Walmart search term data.

If you’re hitting that benchmark, you’re not just set up on Walmart. You’re set up to grow there.

Canopy Management delivers end-to-end eCommerce growth, leading the industry in Amazon marketplace strategy while powering expansion through Shopify, Meta, and Google. Our full-funnel approach — from marketplace optimization to customer acquisition — has generated over $3.3 billion in partner revenue and made us the trusted growth engine for brands worldwide.

Schedule a strategy session with our team to discover exactly how our proven frameworks can accelerate your growth.

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