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How to get approved, why Item Spec 5.0 decides whether shoppers can find you, how WFS and the Walmart+ badge work, what Walmart costs next to Amazon, and how to run Walmart Connect now that CPCs are rising.

To sell on Walmart Marketplace, apply through Walmart Seller Center with a Business Tax ID or business license (Walmart doesn’t accept a Social Security Number), pass Walmart’s review, set up payments and shipping, and build listings in Walmart’s structured Item Spec 5.0 format. Then give shoppers a two-day delivery option, through Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS) or a qualifying seller-fulfilled promise, so your items carry the Walmart+ badge. There are no setup or monthly fees. Walmart takes a referral fee on each sale, between 6% and 15% in most categories.

The timing is good for brands already selling on Amazon. Walmart’s U.S. marketplace sales grew 52% year over year in the quarter ending July 31, 2026, and the marketplace is still small enough that most categories have far less competition than Amazon. Treat Walmart as a second channel alongside Amazon. Most of what makes a brand work on Amazon transfers, as long as you adapt it to how Walmart’s catalog, pricing rules, and ad auction work.

Why Walmart Marketplace Is Worth It in 2026

Walmart’s marketplace is accelerating. U.S. marketplace sales grew about 20% in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026. By the quarter ending July 31, 2026, growth had reached 52%.

The bigger picture is a company that already owns the shopper. Walmart closed fiscal 2026 with $713.2 billion in revenue, ecommerce sales above $150 billion for the first time, and about 280 million customers and members visiting its stores and sites each week.

The number to plan around is the one Walmart doesn’t headline. Marketplace Pulse estimates Walmart’s marketplace GMV at roughly $15 billion, around 10% of its U.S. ecommerce business. On Amazon, third-party sellers account for an estimated 69% of about $440 billion in U.S. GMV. Walmart’s marketplace is growing fast because it’s early. A brand adding Walmart in 2026 gets real growth and thinner competition per category, and it shouldn’t expect Walmart to match its Amazon revenue in year one.

Walmart is also recruiting. The marketplace carries roughly half a billion SKUs, and Walmart is courting about 300 brands it considers must-haves, about half of which already sell there.

How to Get Approved and Set Up

Walmart runs a gated marketplace. You apply, Walmart reviews, and you sell only after approval. Walmart’s onboarding guide asks for:

• A Business Tax ID or Business License Number, with documents verifying your business name and address
• A history of marketplace or ecommerce success
• Products with GTIN or UPC numbers from a GS1 company prefix
• A catalog that complies with Walmart’s Prohibited Products Policy
• Fulfillment through WFS or a U.S.-based B2C warehouse that handles returns

Creating the account takes about a minute, and Walmart says onboarding takes about 10 days on average. Inside Seller Center, setup runs in three steps: business verification (anywhere from a few minutes to two business days), payment setup, and shipping configuration, where you choose from Walmart’s five shipping methods: Value, Standard, TwoDay, OneDay, and Freight.

The gate works in your favor once you’re through it. It keeps out the flood of undifferentiated sellers that makes some Amazon categories unwinnable, and Marketplace Pulse puts Walmart’s active seller count around 200,000. Plan for the full timeline, though. We start brands six to eight weeks before their target launch, because attribute mapping for a large catalog takes longer than the application. Our Amazon-to-Walmart expansion checklist lays out the first 90 days.

Item Spec 5.0: Why Copied Amazon Listings Underperform

This is the biggest difference between Walmart now and Walmart two years ago, and the reason Amazon listings pasted into Walmart disappear.

Walmart retired Item Spec 4.x on August 31, 2025. Item Spec 5.0 replaced freeform text with structured fields and predefined values. Walmart says the update removed 60% of generic attributes, increased attribute granularity by up to 65%, and improved content quality by up to 10%. Marketplace and WFS now share one spec, so you set a product up once.

The practical effect: a listing can be live and still missing the fields shoppers filter on, such as ingredients, materials, use cases, compatibility, and dimensions. When a shopper applies a filter, products missing that field drop out of the results. Our breakdown of why Walmart listings go invisible in filtered search shows how to find the gaps. Amazon’s bullet-and-description model doesn’t map onto Walmart’s taxonomy, so budget real time to map attributes field by field.

How Walmart Ranks Listings

Walmart doesn’t publish its ranking formula. In our experience, the things that move Amazon rank also move Walmart rank: titles that lead with the product type, complete attributes, strong images, fast shipping, and steady sales. Our guide to Walmart Marketplace SEO for Amazon sellers covers the details.

Price is where Walmart differs most. Walmart’s “Pricing rules” unpublish offers priced “egregiously higher than prices currently or recently offered,” and a separate rule takes offers priced substantially higher out of the Buy Box. This catches multi-channel brands that run an Amazon promotion without mirroring it on Walmart. Build one pricing calendar across both channels, or set guardrails so a promotion on one doesn’t suppress you on the other.

Sparky reads your attributes before a shopper does

Walmart launched Sparky, its AI shopping assistant, in June 2025. By August 2026, Walmart reported that the number of customers using Sparky was up 70% year over year, and that customers who shop with it spend 40% more per order. Walmart didn’t claim Sparky causes the bigger baskets. Shoppers who plan a week of meals with an assistant were probably already larger-basket shoppers. What the number shows is that a meaningful share of high-intent shopping now runs through a conversational surface.

Walmart hasn’t published how Sparky chooses products, so treat any Sparky ranking checklist with suspicion. What’s clear is the input: Sparky draws on Walmart’s structured catalog. A shopper asking for a fragrance-free lotion for sensitive skin rewards whoever filled in the ingredient and use-case fields. The Item Spec work and the AI visibility work are the same work. Walmart Connect tested its first ad formats inside Sparky in fall 2025 and announced them in January 2026, but paid placement won’t rescue a product the assistant can’t match to the question.

Fulfillment: WFS, Seller-Fulfilled, and the Walmart+ Badge

Walmart Fulfillment Services stores your inventory, picks, packs, ships, and handles customer service and returns, with no setup or monthly fees. Fulfillment fees are based on shipping weight. Standard items can be up to 150 lb, 108 inches long, and 165 inches in length plus girth, with big and bulky items accepted up to 500 lb. Temperature-controlled products aren’t accepted, and hazmat items carry a surcharge. Our guide to Walmart Fulfillment Services covers the operational details.

WFS matters to Walmart’s own numbers, too: sellers using it account for roughly half of marketplace GMV.

The Walmart+ badge is no longer WFS-only

WFS items get the Walmart+ badge automatically. Seller-fulfilled items can earn it too, under requirements that tightened in 2026. Walmart’s current badge guide requires:

• Items that ship in two calendar days or less (sellers reported the change from three days in late April 2026)
• At least 100 orders fulfilled in the past 90 days
• On-time delivery above 90% and cancellations under 2.5% over the last 14 days

Meet those and Walmart applies free shipping and the badge automatically. WFS remains the dependable path, because the badge comes with enrollment. If you already deliver in two days from your own warehouse, run the math before you hand inventory over. Our guide to Walmart’s seller-fulfilled shipping options covers the labels and protections that keep your on-time rate above the line.

Brands running both FBA and WFS need separate inventory plans for each. We’ve seen brands share one pool and run out of WFS stock during peak weeks because Amazon velocity drained it. Forecast each channel on its own demand.

Account-level performance earns a separate status. Walmart’s Pro Seller program has three tiers (Rising, Advanced, and Pro), and the Pro tier requires on-time delivery of at least 95%, cancellations of 1.5% or less, and a seller rating of 4.0 or higher. Benefits include faster payouts and discounts of up to 35% on two-day Ship with Walmart labels.

What Walmart Costs Compared With Amazon

Cost	Amazon (FBA)	Walmart (WFS)
Monthly fee	$39.99 Professional plan	None
Referral fee	Varies by category; most common categories are 8% or 15%	Varies by category; most categories 6% to 15%
Fulfillment fees	Based on size and weight	Based on shipping weight

Both marketplaces change rates, so check Seller Center and Seller Central before you model margins. Our guide to Walmart Marketplace fees breaks down the categories.

Walmart is also paying new sellers to join. Its New Seller Savings program covers sellers who go live after February 1, 2026, and runs until January 31, 2027 or until you hit the cap. You opt in after your store goes live. The program offers up to $75,000 in total savings:

• Referral fee discounts of up to $72,000: 20% off base referral fees on your first $50,000 in GMV, 30% from $50,000 to $500,000, and 40% above $500,000
• WFS: 10% off fulfillment fees, up to $2,000
• Walmart Connect: $500 in ad credits for new advertisers, with listing-quality and shipping-speed conditions
• Search engine marketing: a rebate of up to $1,000 for Brand Portal brand owners, or up to $250 for other sellers

Walmart Connect Advertising

Walmart Connect is Walmart’s ad business, and Walmart automatically onboards new Marketplace sellers to its self-serve ad platform. The formats sellers use most:

• Sponsored Products place your items in search results and on item pages.
• Sponsored Brands (formerly Search Brand Amplifier) put your logo and several products at the top of results.
• Sponsored Videos run video in search results.

Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Videos require registration in Walmart Brand Portal, which needs an active USPTO trademark registration for each brand. Brands that want reach beyond Walmart.com can buy display through Walmart DSP, which added a curated, CTV-focused marketplace called Connect Select in April 2026.

The mechanics will look familiar to anyone running Amazon PPC. Start with automatic campaigns to gather search data, move proven terms into manual campaigns, and prune what doesn’t convert. Walmart added negative keywords for Sponsored Products in July 2026; our breakdown of Walmart negative keywords covers what they block. Our tactical guide to Walmart Connect for Amazon PPC sellers walks through campaign setup.

Plan around rising costs. In our accounts, Walmart CPCs have run below Amazon’s in many categories, which is part of why brands expand. That gap is closing. Walmart Connect U.S. grew 41% in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026 and 43% in the second quarter of fiscal 2027, and that growth comes from advertisers bidding more.

Canopy’s analysis of what Walmart Connect’s growth means for your CPCs covers how to budget for it. Copying an Amazon campaign structure rarely works: Walmart’s auction is thinner, so single bids move position more, and our comparison of five advertising differences between Amazon and Walmart explains the rest.

The Case for Amazon Sellers

For a brand already on Amazon, Walmart is mostly an efficiency play. The catalog, creative, and operating habits already exist. What changes is the adaptation:

• Listings get remapped to Item Spec 5.0 and Walmart’s style guides.
• Pricing follows one calendar across both channels.
• Ads are built for Walmart’s auction rather than copied from Amazon.
• Fulfillment runs through WFS or a qualifying two-day network.

The other half of the case is risk. A brand that depends entirely on Amazon is exposed to every Amazon policy change, fee increase, and private-label push. Revenue spread across Amazon, Walmart, and TikTok Shop is a growth story and a resilience story at the same time. Canopy’s guides to Amazon account management and selling on TikTok Shop cover the other two channels.

Common Walmart Marketplace Mistakes

• Pasting Amazon listings into Walmart. Without Item Spec 5.0 attributes, products go live and stay invisible to filtered search.
• Pricing Walmart in isolation. An Amazon-only promotion can push your Walmart price into the range Walmart’s Pricing rules unpublish or pull from the Buy Box.
• Launching without a two-day path. Without WFS or a qualifying seller-fulfilled promise, you test the channel without the Walmart+ badge, and the results will understate what Walmart can do.
• Waiting to advertise. Early Walmart Connect spend builds the sales history organic rank depends on, the same as on Amazon.
• Underestimating the timeline. Start six to eight weeks before launch. Attribute mapping takes longer than the application.

What Weekly Walmart Management Looks Like

Walmart needs the same weekly rhythm as Amazon, with a few Walmart-specific checks:

• Advertising: search term reports, bid changes, and new negative keywords in Walmart Connect.
• Listings: conversion and rank on primary keywords, plus attribute gaps on new and changed items.
• Pricing: cross-channel price checks before Walmart’s systems flag a gap.
• Fulfillment: WFS stock against forecast, and seller-fulfilled on-time and cancellation rates against the badge thresholds.

Brands that hold Walmart performance over time are the ones with a steady cadence. Initial setup matters less than most expect.

How Canopy Helps

We manage Walmart for brands already performing on Amazon, which is a narrower problem than general marketplace management and a different one than launching from zero. That covers Item Spec 5.0 attribute mapping, Walmart-specific listing copy and imagery, Walmart Connect campaign management as a Walmart Connect partner, WFS planning, and cross-channel pricing. Our full-service Walmart management runs it alongside your Amazon account.

Canopy is a full-service omnichannel marketing agency covering Amazon, Walmart, TikTok Shop, Shopify, Meta, and Google. Every partner works with the same brand manager for the life of the account. Our partners have generated more than $3.3 billion in revenue, with an average 84% year-over-year profit increase and 99.1% partner retention.

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