Build and Scale Your Walmart.com Store With SellCord!

Michael Lebhar is the Co-founder and CEO of SellCord, a full-service agency specializing in launching and scaling brands on Walmart.com. As a serial entrepreneur, he is also the Co-founder and CMO of Engaging, where he develops marketing campaign strategies. Employing his in-depth knowledge for scaling and selling his own brands in the Walmart Marketplace, Michael has become a leading expert in online and in-store growth strategies. When working with clients, he collaborates closely with brands to understand their unique needs and goals to provide tailored solutions for thriving in the Walmart Marketplace.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [02:02] Michael Lebhar shares his background as an entrepreneur selling on Amazon and at Walmart
• [04:50] Can Walmart compete with Amazon — and why is SellCord’s focus solely on the Walmart Marketplace?
• [06:52] The common misconceptions and benefits of selling in the Walmart Marketplace
• [09:53] How SellCord starts the working relationship with clients
• [13:01] Considerations for those wanting to enter the Walmart Marketplace
• [14:56] Michael explains how SellCord helps clients open, manage, and monitor their Walmart accounts
• [16:35] SellCord advertising strategies for Walmart sellers

In this episode…

Entrepreneurs running e-commerce businesses on other marketplaces may not be aware of the potential for growth in Walmart’s Marketplace. As the world’s largest retailer, Walmart offers a valuable opportunity for those looking to expand their reach. However, launching and scaling brands at Walmart requires specialized expertise that many lack.

Mastering the Walmart Marketplace is complex due to its many intricacies, as noted by Walmart Marketplace professional Michael Lebhar. To succeed, businesses must manage and monitor accounts, adhere to style guidelines, navigate various processes and protocols, and execute persuasive advertising strategies. For those seeking sustainable growth and rapid success on Walmart.com, partnering with an agency that specializes in navigating this platform is wise. By partnering with industry experts, brands can streamline operations, optimize listings, and create effective marketing strategies, enabling them to stand out in a crowded marketplace, drive sales, and achieve long-term growth.

In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Pat Yates sits down with Michael Lebhar, Co-founder and CEO of SellCord, to discuss how e-commerce businesses can thrive in the Walmart Marketplace. Michael talks about the benefits and misconceptions of selling on Walmart.com, why SellCord focuses its expertise solely on the Walmart Marketplace, what brands should consider before deciding to expand to Walmart.com, and why working with an expert is crucial for scaling an e-commerce brand.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Michael Lebhar on LinkedIn
• Michael Lebhar’s email: [email protected]
• SellCord
• Quiet Light
• Quiet Light Podcast on YouTube
• Joe Valley on LinkedIn
• Pat Yates on LinkedIn
• Mark Daoust on LinkedIn
• Quiet Light Podcast email: [email protected]
• The EXITpreneur’s Playbook: How to Sell Your Online Business for Top Dollar by Reverse Engineering Your Pathway to Success by Joe Valley
• Walmart Connect

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Quiet Light, a brokerage firm that wants to help you successfully sell your online business.

There is no wrong reason for selling your business. However, there is a right time and a right way. The team of leading entrepreneurs at Quiet Light wants to help you discover the right time and strategy for selling your business. They provide trustworthy advice, effective strategies, and honest valuations. So, your Quiet Light advisors aren’t your everyday brokers — they’re your partner and friend through every phase of the exit planning process.

If you’re new to the prospect of buying and selling, Quiet Light is here to support you. Their plethora of top-notch resources will provide everything you need to know about when and how to buy or sell an online business. Quiet Light offers high-quality videos, articles, podcasts, and guides to help you make the best decision for your online business.

Not sure what your business is really worth? No worries. Quiet Light offers a free valuation and marketplace-ready assessment on its website. That’s right—this quick, easy, and free valuation has no strings attached. Knowing the true value of your business has never been easier!

What are you waiting for? Quiet Light offers the best experience, strategies, and advice to make your exit successful. To learn more, go to quietlight.com, email [email protected], or call 800.746.5034 today.

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:07

Hey folks, it’s the Quiet Light Podcast where we share relentlessly honest insights, actionable tips, and entrepreneurial stories that will help founders identify and reach their goals.

Pat Yates  0:32

Hello, and welcome again to the Quiet Light Podcast. I’m Pat Yates. Today we have a great conversation. It’s really exciting and one that we don’t get very often. Most of our buyers concentrate on Shopify, Amazon, I hear people mentioned that all the time. And the one word that I rarely hear people talk about passionately, is walmart.com. Now, it’s a great marketplace, huge, everyone knows that. But some people have decided not to go on there for whatever the reasons may be. Could be tons of reasons. But today, we have Michael Lebhar with sellcord.co. And I like Michael’s approach to this because the agency only works on Walmart, it’s not like, we’re gonna take the smaller one and we’re gonna gain Amazon and get a lot of revenue, they really concentrates, they can be good at one thing, which is to build you onboarding, to get your listings right to look at your PPC, basically anything you can screw blue, or tattoo to Walmart, these guys are going to try to help you. I think there’ll be some amazingly actionable tips and people will still be able to get information from Michael and sellcord.co, if they need to do it anyway. Or if they want to work on their Walmart store in the future. So I’m super excited to hear what he says about Walmart today. So let’s get right to it. Hello, Michael. Welcome to Quiet Light Podcast. It’s great to have you here today.

Michael Lebhar  1:40

Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be on.

Pat Yates  1:42

Me too. I know you and I sort of talked to we’re sort of really alive as entrepreneurs. We’re both excitable. We both like online businesses. I’m really curious today. I know you’ve got a lot of history in Amazon and Walmart at sellcord.co that’s your business. So what Michael, why don’t you tell the listeners all about you where you’re from, and maybe a little bit of an overview.

Michael Lebhar  2:02

For sure. Thank you. So I live in LA, I started selling online early in high school, built a couple brands online, a brand and fitness brand and supplements, started seeing good success. And Amazon allowed me to build like a strong brand, I was doing it in between classes in the morning at night, I was able to build that brand up a lot and expand into a lot of channels. From there, I kind of saw a lot of success with Walmart. So I decided to put a lot more focus there, put a lot of focus on Walmart eventually got one of my brands, the stores nationwide at Walmart and realized that there was a big opportunity with Walmart, it was growing so fast, fastest-growing marketplace, and a lot of people didn’t have a good understanding of it. And they were so busy with their Amazon business to properly address it. But it was such a good opportunity. So we launched our agency around three years ago, helping brands launch scale, manage their walmartbusiness.com, and get them help get them get in stores and kind of a full Walmart ecosystem. And yeah, we now work with over 400 brands manage everywhere from like Amazon brands that are new to kind of getting into some of the largest brands on Walmart.

Pat Yates  3:16

That’s really incredible. I mean, obviously, I think what’s interesting to a lot of people, sometimes you never know where someone’s going until you know where they’ve been. But you were also an e-comm entrepreneur for a long time you said you started with your high school, maybe give us an overview of some of the things you’ve done maybe in your other lives. I mean, there’s some cool businesses people want to know about.

Michael Lebhar  3:34

So because I started so really most of it was e-comm, like I tried other things early on, like everything from a car washing business to like a lawn mowing business. So like all the classics. But once I, because it was so early, it was in 10th grade that I really learned about e-comm and really dove right in, I just like became fully obsessed with it. I started first like reselling products for a few months, and then pretty quickly, I’m like, okay, private label is a great opportunity. And me and my brother were really into fitness at the time. So we’re like, we started looking at fitness products. And we started with that we had like a workout glove that didn’t really well. And from there, we kind of just went down that path.

Pat Yates  4:20

Wow, that’s really incredible. Sometimes it’s interesting because I was an athlete as well. It’s funny how being around athletics and teams, other people sort of motivate you in many directions. That’s amazing. So let’s jump into SellCord a little bit. Again, we’re with my Michael Lebhar with SellCord, you really kind of are interesting, you concentrate a lot. Most of your site is focused on Walmart. And that’s weird for an agency because a lot of people lead with Amazon and then follow with Amazon then they follow up with Amazon and then they go to Walmart like seven. Tell us a little bit about why you’re so passionate about walmart.com.

Michael Lebhar  4:50

Yeah, so our agency is actually exclusively focused on walmart.com, which is cool. We don’t do any other platform right now. And it’s been really interesting because, I noticed that it’s the fastest-growing marketplace in the US. It’s second largest marketplace in the US, and the largest retailer in the world. And obviously, it’s hard to compete with Amazon. But Walmart’s, the only company in my opinion that’s really wants to do it and putting their investment to do it. So they’ve been moving so quickly and really investing so many resources and doing it. And because they have their own philosophies, no one I ologies, how they want things done. So they created an environment that if you just plug and play your Amazon business, it just doesn’t work as well. There’s a lot of things that are very unique and specific to Walmart and learn to be really successful on it. There’s so many unique components to it. And most brands and entrepreneurs don’t have the time to handle it. And building up the resources to manage a channel is really difficult, just because it’s so new, and it’s changing so quickly. And kind of realizing that it’s like a massive opportunity, it’s growing super quickly. But where it is right now, for a lot of sellers isn’t enough sales sometimes to kind of justify that. So realizing a really interesting opportunity there. We built kind of our resources around there. And we’re close partners of Walmart, we’re one of their approved partners, and we’ve worked very closely with them. And we’ve been able to see like so much like awesome success. And it’s been really cool, and just been building around that. And now we’ve been building tools that help support those sellers. So it’s been really cool.

Pat Yates  6:22

Yeah, and it’s really amazing to do that exclusively, a lot of people would try to diversify, I think sometimes concentrating may be the biggest thing. And it’s really amazing, because it’s not the easiest platform. Some people a lot of people really understand Amazon or Shopify, but they don’t really get Walmart, what are some of the biggest, I don’t know, maybe misconceptions about Walmart. So I hear a lot of people say they will go on there, which kind of doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. So if they don’t have a lot of bandwidth, maybe they shouldn’t have time to build it. But is there a reason a lot of people don’t go on there?

Michael Lebhar  6:52

Yeah, so a few different things, something I hear a lot of times, it’s like, it’s not good for my brand. Now, that’s wrong, because it’s a marketplace, right. So if you don’t list your products on there, somebody else is gonna list your products on there, oftentimes, and anybody else couldn’t list your products there and you’re not going to own the content, they’re going to put whatever they want up there. So, number two is on Walmart has extremely high domain authority. So when people shop your brand or products on Google, oftentimes a Walmart link is going to come up and you’re just capitalizing on free Google traffic, right. Walmart also spends a lot with Google ads to drive to those listings. So like, there’s a ton of traffic from there. So that’s like another kind of misconception. And then I think it’s just what people have to realize is like, Walmart is a full ecosystem. And especially now online, there’s like 60 million products that they have, there’s way less sellers, for a ton of opportunity, there’s around 120 million active monthly uniques, on walmart.com. There’s only 100,000 sellers compared to 10 plus million on Amazon. So you’re competing with a way smaller portion for pretty big pie still. And I always like to thing I really, I think it’s really important as it’s like the platform is established enough where you can make enough off of it now where it could be pretty significant. But not only that, you’re setting yourself up building a real estate on this platform that’s growing extremely fast, and is going to keep growing extremely fast. So I think that’s where it’s interesting, like when you’re valuing the opportunity, like to keep those things in mind because they make a big difference. Now, if you want to get your products into stores with Walmart or any of that, like then it’s a no brainer, the best way is you have to launch on .com first, if you go to a meeting 99.9% of the time, and you’re not on walmart.com yet to get into stores like they’re going to tell you first launch on .com. So like that’s a no-brainer, if that’s a path you want to go down. But even without that, if you don’t have any interest of being in stores eventually, it’s just for all those other reasons, it’s just a no-brainer from what we’ve seen for almost all category some categories are much harder than others some there’s just so much opportunity to scale like extremely fast, especially if you’re in really competitive items and trying to launch new really competitive items on Amazon could be really hard on Walmart essential competition on some of these that it’s a lot of very effective ways to do it.

Pat Yates  9:15

So let’s turn to another thing. I know that I sort of as an entrepreneur, when I was first building some e-commerce businesses to be able to do expansion in other marketplaces and things and even to expand to do anything in the business, you had to have a lot of bandwidth and time. I hear a lot of people that sometimes I’ve said and I had one client say this one time, I sell so much on Amazon, I have to restart and just basically be at zero starting out at Walmart. I don’t have the time to mess with that if it’s small ball, which I think is a short-sighted view of it because it takes time to build anything. So let’s assume there’s some monitors out there that really only do Amazon or Shopify. How do they get started with you? What’s the easiest process to begin working with SellCord?

Michael Lebhar  9:53

So it’s pretty straightforward. What’s it called? It’s pretty simple. You go on our site, you could fill out a form with some questions, what we realized about Walmart, every business is different. And every business has different goals. And it’s really for our team to kind of understand like, what are your goals from Walmart, some brands are looking to get into store, some brands are looking to make 100 grand a month, some brands are looking to make a million dollars a month and go really aggressive, there’s a wide range of some brands just want to add in an extra $10,000 in revenue, there’s a wide range of goals. So for us, you fill out the form, we take a deeper understanding of your business, understanding it, get on a discovery call, kind of understand your business and give you more context of the opportunity with Walmart and how would fit into your business. So you can evaluate if it’s the right move for us, we’ll help everywhere from actually full management, so like restructuring your whole catalog, getting it all live on Walmart, managing everything A to Z and acting as an extension of your team at like, a pretty affordable agency cost and month by month, so not like a standard agency, more as like a partner. So we have a lot of things where we do that. And then we could also just plug in the certain parts of your business, if you just want to plug in on the optimization, or on the advertising side, or on the logistics side. Like there’s a lot of different components we have, we also have software tools that can help the seller. So now we have very extensive relationships with Walmart. The biggest difference, I would say, with Walmart and Amazon is Walmart’s a relationship-based company. So it’s like Walmart, the Omni channel, people power. Like it’s very centered around people. And it’s like, so there’s just those relationships within Walmart. So important, we have a lot of those deep relationships within Walmart, every category is owned by merchants, and owned by category leads, and has a lot of people responsible for those and they can help a lot. We’re just coming off Black Friday, Cyber Monday, one of our clients, we got their item and promotion on Walmart, that actually, it was a pretty new item, it was doing definitely like 10 to 20,000 in sales a month. And over the weekend, it did $1.4 million in sales, just because of the power of like a merchant, putting it on promo, giving him more visibility, putting it on another big deal shelf. So Walmart’s interacting a lot with their sellers. And building those relationships. So yeah, we also help as that glue, act as that glue.

Pat Yates  12:26

Also one thing I think about, there’s a reason why you guys are so good at what you do. I would think that if someone’s out there thinking about starting a Walmart store, so they’ve done Shopify, they’ve done Amazon in the past, and they’re a little intimidated to go to Amazon, isn’t it better to come to someone like SellCord so you can make sure you start right first, like in case you make mistakes, it’s garbage in garbage out on listing sometimes, do you see an advantage if people came to you start to finish to have you build from day one will that help them more than them setting it up and you helping along the way.

Michael Lebhar  13:01

So, most of the time, that is the case, most of the time when we go in for clean, like when we onboard an account, and we have to go for cleanup. Because there’s just so many intricacies to Walmart, it’s very rare that it’s done kind of the right way. And I don’t expect sellers to do it the right way. There’s so many intricacies and to figure it all out, there’s pages and hundreds of pages of Walmart style guides that need to be followed. And so when we started off, a lot of times, it’s cheaper when we start from the beginning, because just we have a lot of times the cleanup works much easier. So yeah, and we’re able to start off on the right foot, give the right momentum, use that initial momentum period to actually get a really good launch. And yeah, like we’re able to kind of scale a ton from there. If you got the right products on Walmart, also, it will make the journey a lot better. Like if you’re I would say this if you’re a seller in home Heartlines one of those categories. So if you sell patio furniture, home accessories, kitchen accessories, all those sorts of items, like there are so much white space on Walmart, and you can make so much money to volume. They’re ridiculous. If you’re in health and wellness, beauty, like there’s definitely a lot of volume to be made there. And there’s a lot of money being made there. But it’s very difficult, because you’re competing a lot with nationwide brands and there’s, you know, less volume on some of those categories. But they’re just all categories have a lot of potential, it’s just some are much stronger than others sporting fitness, like fitness is just extremely strong. So depends a lot on your categories, like how much success you could get at least in the short term, obviously, all those categories will grow. But yeah.

Pat Yates  14:35

Now see on your site, one thing is kind of interesting. And a lot of people talk about this, anytime you get dings in your account, or why always go back to Amazon and just focus is there like A to Z claims, things like that account health that they need to be paying attention to. It looks as if you help people navigate that process and maybe something that at Walmart that you could have some pitfalls that you really don’t know about. Tell us a little bit about how you guys help with that.

Michael Lebhar  14:56

Yeah, for sure. So I guess the first stage of that is like accounts acceptance. On Walmart and like not everybody can account you have to get accepted. So we can help with that process of getting your account accepted. When you’re applying for a Walmart account, it’s best to reach out to us and do it through our link, we have our own link, maybe we could put it in the podcast, like, option, because if you apply through our link, and there’s any issue with you getting accepted, we could work through our partnership team at Walmart to help kind of escalate and take another look at it. So that’s kind of a big thing. But then, Account Health, like we’ll monitor all those things that actually cause Walmart accounts to get suspended, there is a lot of suspension on Walmart, but very different than Amazon, it’s almost never based on like, rank manipulation review manipulations, I’ve never seen any suspensions for those, it’s usually based on customer experience. So like not shipping your products on time, not uploading tracking time, things like that. So we’ll help with some of that, monitoring listings, making sure that there’s just as any marketplace that can be hijackers or anything like that. So we’ll help with monitoring those and handling those concerns as well.

Pat Yates  15:24

That’s amazing. So one thing I do want to turn to, because a lot of people wonder about this, because I think one of the biggest advantages of come someone like you, especially as in PPC management that maybe you get them off to a better start. So instead of wasting money for five weeks, and they lose 10,000 $15,000 advertising in bad areas, you may have information that helps them get off to a faster start. Now maybe jumping off as a lead there. And it may not be the case, but maybe you can explain how you guys manage PPC and if that can help them get off to a better start.

Michael Lebhar  16:35

For sure. So we see this often misconception that it’s like, let’s just run it the same way as Amazon. It’s very different. The things that work well, for Walmart very different than the things that work well for Amazon. For advertising, a lot of it’s tied to small listing details that have to be adjusted for the list to advertising to work properly. And we see that all the time. I think the biggest thing is by the 10s of millions of dollars that we spend with Walmart Connect, which is Walmart’s advertising arm, we have a lot of insight into the things that work well the things that don’t how to spend the money so that you actually build product rank and build ranking. And then instead of just spending money to drive just sales off those ads, but how to really grow that. So there’s so much that we do within that context that like once we jump into an advertising and we create the strategy from scratch, like we’re able to create, like a well-defined strategy for like what the goals are like, are we trying to rank for certain items for certain keywords, creating ad management strategies that kind of aligned with that. And just using insights of like the type of campaign setups that work, the type of bid adjustments that work the type of automations that work well, like, a lot of on Walmart, it has to be done a little bit more manually than some of the automations and things that could be done in Amazon. But as long as just paying a lot of attention to those things. There’s so much levers that can be pulled within advertising. They’re just it’s growing so much advertising ecosystem on Walmart, now they’ve just launched video ads display self-serve, headline search ads, now they’re also just launched brand shops, which people been waiting for a while. So it’s evolving like crazy and extremely quickly.

Pat Yates  17:32

That’s amazing. So again, we’re with Michael Lebhar with SellCord, obviously one of the biggest influence of people to be able to get you into walmart.com and sell. So, Michael, we’ve touched on a lot of things today and obviously, there’s a lot of printers out there that struggle decide what marketplaces and stuff to go onto. And obviously people that I think anyone thinking about Walmart should reach out to Michael and SellCord Is there anything that we haven’t touched on that you think people need to know about SellCord or you or the company of how you can help?

Michael Lebhar  18:08

Yeah, so if you’re already on Walmart and doing well on Walmart, I would still suggest kind of reaching out we have certain tools that like are pretty cool. So on Walmart, there’s enhanced content similar to Amazon A plus content, but you need to use a provider to host it. So you could use us to host that we actually just launched the only complete p&l tool for Walmart where we integrate with your ad account and your Marketplace account and pull out data to help you with profit analytics and insights so that’s pretty cool. So yeah, we have ad management portal now so there’s some cool products we have if you are selling well on Walmart we have different services to help with ranking as well and kind of one-off services for Walmart so that’s kind of one thing to know and another thing is like if you are interested and you think your brands are right fit for in-store and you want expand to in-store like we do have some services we can help with that and my own brand is sold in-stores and work with implants and getting them in-store so there’s definitely some interesting things there.

Pat Yates  19:36

That’s amazing. So obviously the website is sellcord.co, how can they get in touch with you Michael or maybe LinkedIn and email what’s the best way to reach out?

Michael Lebhar  19:43

Yeah, so best way to get in touch with me is email [email protected] or even .com now, we just were able to finally get the .com So [email protected] or .com and then you could just email me, I’ll be sure to kind of reach out or you can fill out the form on this site. If you Want to speak to me specifically, you could just mention in the form that you want rather, you want to speak to Michael. And that will get routed to me as well. And then yeah, I can answer any questions even if you’re not ready for services. Like if you just have questions about Walmart or anything like that. And you could connect with me on LinkedIn as well, just Michael Lebhar. I try to answer my messages there as well.

Pat Yates  20:19

That’s amazing. And again, folks, if you guys are interested in setting up a walmart.com account, it’s a way to create a channel. I mean, everyone talks about how you can increase your current sales, how you can definitely increase it, but I’m doing another channel, and there’s an opportunity to be able to grow it. These guys are experts, they’re going to make sure you understand it. And obviously you said it’s something affordable that you could go in and get the right expertise to do your Walmart store ahead of time, Michael, we appreciate you coming on the Quiet Light Podcast today. You’re a great partner with us. We love having you around. And if there’s anything we can do for you let us know too.

Michael Lebhar  20:48

Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.

Pat Yates  20:49

Appreciate you being here.

Outro  20:53

Today’s podcast was produced by Rise25 and the Quiet Light content team. If you have a suggestion for a future podcast, subject or guest, email us at podcast at quietlight.com. Be sure to follow us on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram, and subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week.