CommerceHub extends Walmart partnership to third-party marketplace (WMT)
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E-commerce integration and fulfillment provider CommerceHub has expanded its partnership with Walmart beyond managing its drop-ship fulfillment, reports Chain Store Age.
The new agreement allows CommerceHub retail clients to seamlessly integrate with Walmart to sell goods on its third-party e-commerce site, Walmart Marketplace. CommerceHub boasts over 9,000 retail clients, including major players like Sears, Costco, and Best Buy. This partnership makes it easy for retailers like these to sell via Walmart and leverage its expansive online platform.
Walmart's e-commerce business is growing and adding new third-party retailers will likely boost it further. During Q2 2016, global online sales on Walmart's e-commerce sites grew nearly 12% YoY. CEO Doug McMillan pointed out the growth of Walmart Marketplace on the earnings call, noting that since the start of the year, it has added nearly 7 million new items available for purchase. This was likely partially driven by a partnership with marketing firm ChannelAdvisor in April to easily onboard merchants to Walmart Marketplace. Adding CommerceHub retailers will only lend more strength to Walmart Marketplace, which currently counts about 550 total merchants.
However, Walmart still has a long way to go before it can catch up to other third-party sites. Most notably, Amazon has nearly 2 million third-party merchants, which offer close to 365 million products online, greatly outnumbering those on Walmart Marketplace. There is also a longer vetting process for Walmart merchants than for those on other platforms. On average, it takes six weeks for Walmart to accept a third-party vendor, compared to only one day for competitors Amazon and eBay. Should Walmart fail to keep up with competitors in the third-party marketplace arena, we expect that the company's focus would shift instead to growing sales on Jet.com, which the company acquired earlier this month for $3 billion.
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