Dec 23, 2020

Content on Amazon vs. Walmart: What's the Difference?

Marketplace Sellers

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Amazon and Walmart are without a doubt the largest online retailers out there—maybe you’ve heard of them! For anyone wanting to sell items online, these two ecommerce giants are the natural place to look first.

Due to its low barrier to entry and online-first nature, many brands start their ecommerce journey on Amazon. But with Walmart’s ecommerce sales skyrocketing in 2020, and more people than ever using their Online Pickup & Delivery service, Amazon sellers are currently flocking to Walmart to put their items in front of this growing market. When these sellers make the jump to Walmart.com, we often see them taking the content they have on Amazon and adding that same content to their Walmart pages.

Simply syndicating your content made for Amazon or another retailer may seem easiest, but it’s more than likely that this content is in violation of Walmart’s Style Guide requirements. You may be able to get your items live on Walmart.com with hand-me-down content, but without optimizing your item pages for Walmart’s unique platform, your pages won’t be nearly as discoverable.

That’s because the content you add to your item pages on Walmart and Amazon isn’t just for shoppers to read—retailers use a page’s content to determine what search results it shows up in and how highly it ranks for those searches.

The thing is, Amazon and Walmart’s search algorithms just work differently. Even content that’s optimized for Amazon’s search engine will most likely fall short on some metrics specific to Walmart’s.

If you want your pages to rank highly in search results on both retailers, it’s essential to set up your pages differently to follow their unique rules correctly. Let’s take a look at a few specific ways that best practices for content on Amazon and Walmart differ:

Content & Search Engines: Amazon vs. Walmart

Amazon’s A9 search engine ranks pages based on relevance to the search, with specific content requirements for a few unique categories. Content has more of a one-size-fits-all approach at Amazon, with different recommendations only when necessary. Amazon also encourages sellers to add enhanced content through its internal tools (more on that later).

Walmart’s Content Quality Scores measure a page’s content, images, and back-end attributes, and score requirements differ by category. Content Quality Scores are Walmart’s measure of how optimized a page is for search on their platform. You can get your score from your Walmart merchant, or by using SKU Ninja’s Walmart Search Boost tool.

Walmart’s recently released style guides shook up their recommendations for basic content. Best practices for Walmart content now vary greatly depending on the product type and/or category the item belongs to. Click here to read more!

Both retailers’ search engines also use an item’s availability and sales to populate search results. Even with the best content out there, it’s still unlikely either of these retailers will show your page to shoppers if it’s out of stock. The retailers also use sales data to push items up in search results that shoppers are more likely to ultimately buy. That’s why it’s so important to include content that converts shoppers on your pages, your sales & search rank depends on it!

Both retailers also offer “Sponsored Product” positions as a notable exception to the usual functions of both search engines. These items are placed at the top of search results outside of the search engine’s usual algorithms directly by or through the retailer, as advertisements or special promotions.

Want to learn how to take advantage of these Sponsored Product positions on Walmart? Email info@whytespyder.com to learn more about our Ad Manager & Ad Sensei solutions!

Title Length: Amazon vs. Walmart

On Amazon, long titles rule. The more keywords you can fit into your title, the more searches your item is eligible to show up in. The first 100 characters are checked by Amazon’s search engine, with a total character limit of 200.

On Walmart, your title should not exceed 52-69 characters. Walmart’s algorithms prioritize short, readable titles with standardized capitalization of brand names and abbreviation of units like weight or volume. For mobile shoppers (49% of all ecommerce sales and growing, according to Statista!), only the first 36-52 characters in your title will appear before being cut off by the screen’s size. That’s why it’s important to put the most important descriptors of your product at the beginning of the title so they remain visible. For both, it’s still important to make your title easily readable and recognizable to shoppers. It’s often the first thing seen in search results and an essential tool for getting a shopper to click on your item.

Enhanced Content: Amazon vs. Walmart

Item page experts know that titles, descriptions, and images are the fundamentals of ecommerce content, but enhanced content is crucial for keeping your pages competitive and converting more shoppers.

Also called rich media, enhanced brand content, or A+ content, enhanced content is anything on your item page that goes beyond traditional descriptions and photography. This includes video, interactive elements, comparison tables, and parts of an item page that combine photography and text (called A+ Content on Amazon, or Feature Sets on Walmart).

Unlike Amazon, Walmart does not currently have a first-party tool for uploading all the different kinds of enhanced brand content on Amazon to Walmart.com.

So, how do you move your enhanced content from Amazon to Walmart? Very few Walmart suppliers are able to upload videos through their merchant or first-party platform, but the majority of enhanced content on Walmart.com is hosted by Walmart’s Connected Content Partners (CCPs) like SKU Ninja + WhyteSpyder.

SKU Ninja’s Rich Media Hosting lets you upload videos and create feature sets (A+ content on Amazon) to submit to your Walmart item pages. You can submit enhanced content to Walmart items using SKU Ninja starting at just $5 a month!

Need Help Navigating Amazon & Walmart? SKU Ninja Can Help!

SKU Ninja is ecommerce software built to make working with the world’s largest retailers easy, automated, and efficient. SKU Ninja + WhyteSpyder also offers consulting and managed services by our team of experts, perfect for any brand or businesses looking to take their ecommerce to the next level.

Want to know more? Fill out the contact form below or email info@whytespyder.com to get in touch with us immediately! Check out our Belt Subscription Packages, starting at $5 per item, per month.

About SKU Ninja + WhyteSpyder: SKU Ninja + WhyteSpyder is a digital merchandising company and Walmart Connected Content Partner with more than a decade of experience helping brands win online. We combine innovative and precise software with ecommerce expertise to solve the unique problems of omnichannel professionals.

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