In other words, China predominates in the new international sellers on the Walmart marketplace with a proportion of over ninety percent. Moreover, Chinese sellers share nearly half of the overall new sellers.
Over the past decade, Walmart's e-commerce business has undergone a major digital transformation. It expanded from a small online retailer with less than 10 million products for sale to a large online retailer with more than 100 million products for sale. And now, it is a cross-border platform with hundreds of millions of products.
Walmart has made several big steps to expand its business. On March 25th, 2021, Walmart announced the expansion to allow international sellers at a Summit in Shenzhen, China. By the end of 2021, Chinese new sellers had risen to 20% from 6%. In 2022, it continued to increase to reach 40%.
There were few sellers from Europe or other countries selling on Walmart at that time. That’s an area Walmart is likely yet to expand. Thus, in April, 2022, Walmart held a similar event in India. At the Walmart Global Seller Summit in New Delhi, the company presented to hundreds of Indian sellers to get them to sell on the marketplace.
Since then, Walmart has expanded its cross-border e-commerce business to more countries, including Europe and Canada. It has also implemented several strategies to attract more sellers. For example, Walmart lowered its entry barrier for Chinese sellers from GMV over 2 million to GMV over 300 thousand in 2021, and eliminated the threshold in 2022.
Furthermore, the launch of Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS) allows Walmart Marketplace sellers to handle other aspects of their business while having Walmart’s extensive fulfillment network handle picking, packing, and shipping out orders. And the opening to international sellers, and the increasing presence of advertising in search results have brought the Walmart marketplace close to resembling Amazon.