A group of sellers were brutally banned by Walmart in a “rogue” manner!

As the trend of "multi-platform layout" becomes stronger and stronger, Walmart is favored by everyone due to its favorable investment policy and large market size. Many sellers have entered the market to enjoy a wave of dividends. But unfortunately, before they can enjoy the dividends, a series of outrageous operations by the platform have made them sad.

Walmart banned accounts for no reason, sellers were only told "violation of policy"

Recently, a group of Walmart sellers "complained" to Yien.com that their accounts were blocked without reason by the platform. When they asked the staff about it, they received no positive response and were kicked out of the group.

Take one of the whistleblower sellers, Zhang Wei, as an example. In March this year, Zhang Wei received an investment email from Walmart, claiming that the threshold for entering Walmart is very low and there is no monthly rent .

As the market conditions were not satisfactory and he wanted to expand his sales platform, Zhang Wei decided to join. The application process was smooth, and within a month, Zhang Wei had a Walmart store account and was able to quickly place orders. According to Zhang Wei, his Walmart store had normal orders in April, with more than 60 orders in 20 days . Although the order volume was not large, Zhang Wei thought there would be hope.

On April 25, Zhang Wei removed the 10 listings that he had previously used to activate his account (the inventory of these listings had been automatically adjusted to 0 ). As a result, the next day Walmart’s backend showed that his account was frozen , he was unable to withdraw money , and the listings were also removed .

Generally speaking, e-commerce platforms block accounts simply because of product problems or non-compliant behaviors such as fake orders. However, Zhang Wei said that the information he registered for the Walmart store was completely true, and he had never faked orders. He also used Walmart 's self-operated delivery service ( WFS ) and burned advertisements for half a month . Based on these operations, Zhang Wei can be said to be the seller who makes the platform "less worried", but his account was suddenly frozen, and the platform does not accept complaints.

Zhang Wei felt very wronged because he was not informed of the specific reason for the freeze and did not even receive any in-site letter or email notification. Only the background displayed "Code of Conduct, Policy Violation".

Zhang Wei speculated that Walmart previously officially recommended that sellers upload at least 10 products in the store backend, and this time the seller removed other listings and did not meet Walmart's "suggestions", which led to the account being blocked.

Therefore, Zhang Wei tried to ask the official staff in the seller group what operation triggered the violation mechanism, but he only got a reply that "there is no way to appeal for a frozen account." He wanted to find out the reason for the account closure with other sellers in the group who had the same experience, but was eventually kicked out of the group by the staff. The investment manager who initially contacted Zhang Wei only told him how to remove the inventory, and there was no further news.

A group of sellers said they were "terribly cheated by Walmart"

This is not an isolated case.

In this revelation, three Walmart accounts managed by a seller were frozen overnight , another original product seller was also banned , and many sellers experienced delayed payments .

It is understood that on Walmart, new accounts are generally delayed for 20 days, but now it has become 41 days, and even old sellers are delayed for no reason. A seller who is deeply troubled by this said, "Now everyone is being cheated by Walmart, suspending payments, deducting money randomly, and delaying payments on a large scale... There is nothing Walmart dare not do except what you can't think of."

There are even many sellers who have not received any payment since December last year. They said, "The store is normal and the products are on sale, but the payment has been suspended and delayed indefinitely. When I filed a case, the reply was that the performance was abnormal. I don't know what is abnormal."

According to sellers, Walmart will not pay for products with a refund rate of more than 10%. However, for clothing categories with high return rates, this standard is "unreasonable".

Are the criteria for determining return rates too general? If the return rate is not due to product problems but to logistics time, is it too unfair to sellers?

In response to this, the seller stated that returns caused by WFS are not counted in the return rate, but self-shipping accounts are. Moreover, compared with accounts using WFS, self-shipping accounts are very easy to be blocked .

It's not just these problems. For sellers, Walmart's e-commerce business also has many shortcomings.

For example, the traffic issue that sellers care about most is, " Although Walmart has a large market in the United States, it is far inferior to Amazon in e-commerce. The platform traffic is less than one-tenth of Amazon, and promotions cannot attract consumers. "

There is also the issue of seller experience. "Walmart's system seems to have gone through 81 trials and tribulations before being thrown onto the market at random. There are so many loopholes that it's outrageous. Not only is the process not smooth, but inventory and links often go missing . "

In addition, the advertising function and copycat penalty system on the Walmart platform also made sellers quite dissatisfied.

What also gives sellers a headache is the business handling ability and attitude of Walmart staff. The experience of the seller Zhang Wei mentioned above can illustrate this point. There are also sellers who say, "Walmart staff have no ability to handle problems, but they are good at kicking people out in seconds . "

Previously, when Yien.com was reporting on Walmart-related news, a seller left a message jokingly, " Welcome to Walmart, you will unlock all kinds of weird reasons for account suspension. "

The e-commerce business is still in its infancy. Why is Walmart so tough on sellers?

In February this year , Walmart completely removed the annual GMV investment threshold to attract more Chinese sellers. Since then, Ennet has noticed that many sellers have already started to join Walmart.

In the cross-border e-commerce field, Amazon is a strong rival to almost all platforms. For Walmart , it has already missed the opportunity to defeat it in this field. Although the two started at almost the same time, Walmart did not pay much attention to this sector in the early days. It has only started to invest continuously and open up restrictions on third-party sellers in recent years.

Compared with other platforms, Walmart has a very large scale in the US market due to the popularity of offline supermarkets, so its e-commerce business is also optimistic.

According to the financial report data, Walmart's e-commerce business revenue reached US$ 47.8 billion in 2022, with a remarkable growth rate. In the fourth quarter alone, Walmart's US e-commerce business net sales reached US$ 21.3 billion , a year-on-year increase of 17%, accounting for 13% of Walmart's global total sales .

In terms of e-commerce investment, this year Walmart followed Amazon's example and made major upgrades to its e-commerce website and app , spending a lot of time on user page design and content production in order to stimulate more purchasing behavior; in addition, it announced that it would establish a new, more connected and automated supply chain.

As for third-party sellers, Walmart's seller growth rate was extremely fast in 2022, reaching more than 1,000 new sellers per week, which was 4 times higher than before , and almost the same as the speed of new sellers on Amazon's US site . Among them , Chinese sellers accounted for more than 90% of Walmart's new international sellers , accounting for nearly half of all new sellers.

Walmart has gradually gained a dominant position and has shown that it attaches great importance to Chinese sellers. However, based on a series of previous operations, sellers have already generated a lot of dissatisfaction. Walmart, which is still in the initial development stage of e-commerce, has failed to attract more buyers. Will it "offend" more sellers?

( The seller interviewed in the article, “Zhang Wei”, is a pseudonym)

Walmart

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