Walmart Marketplace Hits 1 Billion Active Listings as Seller Growth Accelerates

Walmart Marketplace quietly crossed a milestone that would have seemed improbable three years ago: the platform now hosts more than 1 billion active listings from third-party sellers, according to figures shared with Ecommerce Times by two sellers with direct access to Walmart’s partner portal data. The figure, which Walmart has not officially confirmed, represents a roughly 40% year-over-year increase and signals that Walmart’s sustained investment in seller tooling, Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS) capacity, and international onboarding is beginning to compound in a meaningful way.

The growth is not organic. Walmart has been running an aggressive, incentive-heavy recruitment campaign since Q4 2025, offering reduced referral fees in high-velocity categories, subsidized first-90-day WFS storage rates, and dedicated seller success managers for merchants generating more than $500,000 annually on competing platforms. The program, internally referred to as Project Northstar by Walmart’s marketplace team, is specifically targeting Amazon FBA sellers in home, sporting goods, and auto parts — three categories where Walmart’s supply-side gaps have historically cost it conversion.

Which seller segments are driving Walmart’s listing growth fastest?

The bulk of the new listing volume is coming from two cohorts: U.S.-based multichannel sellers migrating catalog from Amazon, and a wave of Southeast Asian manufacturers — particularly from Vietnam and Indonesia — that Walmart began onboarding through its expanded global seller program in late 2025. Walmart opened direct seller applications to Vietnam-based manufacturers in October 2025, following a similar move with Indonesian suppliers in August, as part of a broader supply chain diversification strategy that mirrors brand sentiment post-tariff escalation.

Casey Armstrong, former CMO of ShipBob and now an advisor to several mid-market DTC brands, says the shift in seller mix is real and accelerating.

“Two years ago, sellers asked me whether they should even bother with Walmart. Now I’m getting calls from eight-figure Amazon brands asking how fast they can get WFS set up. The fee structure change in February was the tipping point for a lot of them.” — Casey Armstrong, ecommerce advisor

💡 Article Summary

Key Insights

1

Which seller segments are driving Walmart’s listing growth fastest?

2

How is Walmart Fulfillment Services competing with Amazon FBA on throughput and reliability?

3

What is Walmart’s advertising business doing to attract seller ad spend?

4

How are agency partners and software vendors responding to Walmart’s growth?

5

What risks do sellers face as they expand to Walmart Marketplace?

Source: Ecommerce Times

The February fee structure Armstrong references was Walmart’s decision to cut referral fees in the furniture and outdoor categories from 15% to 10%, matching Amazon’s rates in those verticals while simultaneously offering WFS storage rates roughly 12% below Amazon FBA’s Q1 2026 pricing. For sellers moving bulky goods, the math shifted noticeably.

How is Walmart Fulfillment Services competing with Amazon FBA on throughput and reliability?

WFS has historically been Walmart’s weakest link in the seller value proposition — slower inbound receiving, fewer fulfillment nodes, and a returns infrastructure that merchants described as inconsistent as recently as mid-2024. That reputation is changing, at least among sellers operating in WFS’s core geographic strongholds.

Walmart added seven new fulfillment centers between January and April 2026, bringing its WFS network to 42 dedicated nodes, with the newest facilities in Columbus, Ohio; Memphis, Tennessee; and Reno, Nevada designed specifically for high-SKU-count sellers. Average inbound receiving time, which sat at 5.2 days in Q1 2025, has dropped to 3.1 days as of March 2026, according to data shared by logistics analytics platform Extensiv.

• WFS 2-day delivery coverage now reaches 88% of the U.S. population, up from 74% in January 2025
• Average WFS storage fee for standard-size items: $0.68 per cubic foot/month vs. Amazon FBA’s $0.78 (non-peak)
• WFS return processing time has dropped to 4.8 days on average, down from 8.1 days in Q2 2025
• Walmart’s seller NPS score, tracked by Jungle Scout’s quarterly survey, rose from 31 to 47 between Q3 2025 and Q1 2026

Rob Gonzalez, co-founder of Salsify, the product content syndication platform that powers catalog management for hundreds of large Walmart sellers, says infrastructure credibility is now Walmart’s strongest recruiting argument.

“Sellers who tried WFS in 2023 and had bad experiences are coming back and finding a genuinely different operation. The receiving speed improvement alone changes the inventory planning math for brands that turn their catalog four or five times a year.” — Rob Gonzalez, co-founder, Salsify

What is Walmart’s advertising business doing to attract seller ad spend?

Walmart Connect, the platform’s advertising arm, reported a 38% year-over-year increase in advertiser count in Q1 2026, with sponsored product CPCs averaging $0.54 — roughly one-third of Amazon Sponsored Products CPCs in comparable categories, according to agency benchmarks published by Tinuiti in April 2026. For sellers already dealing with compressed Amazon ad economics, the arbitrage opportunity is significant enough to justify catalog expansion just to capture cheaper traffic.

Walmart Connect has also rolled out two new ad formats in 2026: Shoppable Display placements that integrate with Walmart’s in-store digital signage network across 4,600 locations, and a video ad unit embedded in Walmart’s iOS and Android app search results. Both formats are in open beta as of May 2026, with early adopters reporting click-through rates 2.1x higher than standard sponsored product listings in A/B tests conducted by performance agency Cartograph.

The advertising momentum matters because it creates a flywheel that Amazon has long benefited from: sellers who spend on ads generate more data, which improves Walmart’s organic ranking algorithm, which attracts more sellers, which improves selection, which drives more consumer traffic. Walmart is still several years behind Amazon on this loop — but the loop is now visibly turning.

How are agency partners and software vendors responding to Walmart’s growth?

The agency ecosystem is mobilizing. At least a dozen Amazon-specialist PPC agencies — including Downstream, Acadia, and Bobsled Marketing — have added dedicated Walmart Connect practice teams in the past six months, according to agency leaders interviewed for this article. For most, Walmart now represents 15% to 25% of managed ad spend across their client base, up from under 5% in early 2025.

Software vendors are following seller attention. Helium 10 launched a Walmart keyword research module in March 2026, giving sellers search volume and competitive data for Walmart.com queries for the first time through a third-party tool. Jungle Scout expanded its Walmart sales estimator to cover 12 additional product categories in April. And Feedvisor, which built its reputation on Amazon algorithmic repricing, now offers Walmart repricing as a core feature rather than a beta add-on, after seeing Walmart-related usage grow 190% in the first quarter of 2026.

• Helium 10’s Walmart module hit 40,000 active users within 30 days of launch
• Feedvisor reports Walmart repricing jobs now account for 22% of total platform activity
• Linnworks added native WFS inventory sync in February 2026, citing seller demand as the primary driver
• Shopify’s Walmart sales channel integration has been updated three times in 2026, the most active update cycle since 2021

“We’ve gone from having zero Walmart-specific client engagements to running dedicated monthly Walmart strategy sessions for 60% of our top accounts. The platform is no longer a test — it’s a channel.” — Lauren Petrullo, founder, Mongoose Media

What risks do sellers face as they expand to Walmart Marketplace?

The opportunity is real, but operators who have been through Walmart’s seller program long enough to accumulate scar tissue are quick to flag the structural risks that haven’t disappeared with the platform’s improvements.

Walmart’s listing suppression algorithm remains more opaque and less predictable than Amazon’s, and sellers report longer resolution timelines when listings are incorrectly flagged. Walmart’s customer service handoff between the marketplace team and Walmart.com’s consumer-facing support is still inconsistent, creating situations where returns are processed against the seller before the item is confirmed defective. And Walmart’s brand registry equivalent — Brand Portal — still lacks several protections that Amazon Brand Registry offers, particularly around unauthorized reseller removal.

There’s also a category concentration risk. Walmart’s 1 billion listing milestone is heavily weighted toward a handful of categories — home and kitchen, sporting goods, and auto parts make up a disproportionate share of new listings — which means sellers in apparel, beauty, and grocery are still navigating a thinner competitive moat and a less developed consumer browse habit on the platform.

For DTC founders and multichannel operators, the calculus in mid-2026 is increasingly not whether to sell on Walmart, but how much operational bandwidth to allocate and which catalog to prioritize. With WFS infrastructure improving, advertising economics still favorable, and the platform’s consumer traffic growing — Walmart.com attracted 512 million monthly unique visitors in April 2026, per Similarweb — the window for sellers to establish early rank position before CPCs normalize may be narrower than it looks.

What does Walmart’s milestone mean for Amazon’s third-party seller dependency?

Amazon still dominates. Its third-party marketplace hosts an estimated 9.7 million active sellers globally and generates roughly 60% of total Amazon unit sales. No serious operator is treating Walmart as a replacement. But the framing is shifting: Walmart is increasingly a necessary second channel rather than an experimental one, and the sellers who established WFS infrastructure and catalog presence in 2024 and 2025 are now watching their Walmart revenue grow without proportional incremental effort.

That compounding dynamic — early catalog investment paying off as Walmart’s consumer traffic grows — is the clearest argument Walmart’s marketplace team makes to Amazon sellers still on the fence. The 1 billion listing milestone is less a victory lap than a signal that the platform has reached the selection density needed to drive meaningful organic consumer discovery. For sellers, that changes the expected return on catalog expansion investment in a way that quarterly fee discounts alone never could.