In April, three-quarters of new sellers on Walmart's Marketplace platform came from China, a figure that surpassed the record set a month earlier. Walmart wants to sell the same items as Temu.
According to Market Pulse research, 73% of the new active sellers on Walmart's Marketplace platform were from China in April, breaking the record of 67% in March. Tens of thousands of new sellers apply each month, but Walmart only approves registration applications between 10% and 20%. The statistics include only approved and active sellers on Walmart.com.
Walmart added the same number of U.S. sellers in April 2023 and April 2024, but while they accounted for 91% of the total in 2023, they are down to 23% this year.This decline is due to a large number of new sellers from China - in April, the number of Chinese sellers was nearly the same number of Chinese sellers in April as in all of 2023. Walmart began allowing international sellers in March 2021, but with the exception of a handful of sellers from India, Canada, the U.K. and Vietnam, all sellers are from China.
"Two-thirds of the U.S. products we sell are made or grown in the U.S.," Wal-Mart CEO Doug McMillon said in an interview with Stratechery. Walmart's online business will be different. Amazon started down a similar path nearly a decade ago - Chinese sellers make up nearly 50% of Amazon's top sellers - and this year, for the first time, Amazon admitted that the percentage of Chinese sellers on its marketplace platform was "significant.
In March, Walmart hosted its first Seller Summit in Shenzhen, and in February, it launched a Chinese version of its Seller Central dashboard and began allowing sellers to submit support cases in Chinese. It is also running a pilot project to streamline the import process for its logistics service, WFS.
Walmart and Temu - the emerging disruptors that have caught everyone's eye - are becoming more similar than opposite. Walmart and Amazon allow sellers to stock imported goods through their warehouses for quick shipment from China. Alibaba, Shein and Temu allow goods to be bought from China, but without fast shipping and at lower prices. But typically, it's the same seller behind each marketplace, and the overlap between Temu and Amazon is already significant, and now Walmart is starting to catch up.
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