Walmart Marketplace’s Alleged Seller Poaching Program Is Rattling Amazon’s Top Tier

Something unusual has been landing in the inboxes of Amazon’s top-tier third-party sellers over the past six weeks — and it isn’t a routine Walmart Seller Center onboarding pitch. According to four people with direct knowledge of the outreach, Walmart’s marketplace business development team has been running what insiders are calling an “aggressive structured migration program,” reportedly offering ad credit packages ranging from $75,000 to $250,000, combined with referral fee waivers of up to 90 days, to sellers clearing more than $5 million annually on Amazon.

The alleged program, which sources close to the matter say is being coordinated out of Walmart’s Hoboken, New Jersey merchant success office, appears to be targeting specific seller categories: home goods, sporting goods, auto accessories, and pet supplies — all verticals where Walmart’s marketplace catalog is reportedly still thin relative to Amazon’s depth. The timing is not accidental. With Amazon’s latest FBA fee restructuring taking full effect in Q3 2026, margin pressure on mid-to-large sellers has intensified considerably, creating what one seller consultant described as a rare window of genuine seller discontent.

Who Is Allegedly Behind the Push at Walmart?

Multiple sources point to Walmart’s VP of Marketplace Growth, a role currently held by Manish Joneja — the former Amazon and Souq executive who joined Walmart in 2023 — as the executive sponsor of the effort. Joneja’s team has reportedly been working in coordination with Walmart Connect, the company’s retail media arm, to structure the credit packages in a way that ties incentives to ad spend commitments rather than flat subsidies, making the program harder to characterize as pure seller acquisition spending on Walmart’s books.

Joneja did not respond to a request for comment by press time. A Walmart spokesperson declined to confirm or deny the existence of a structured migration program, saying only that “Walmart Marketplace is always working to expand its seller base and provide competitive tools for growth.”

“I’ve had three separate calls from a Walmart account rep in the last month. The numbers they’re floating are real — we’re talking about enough ad credit to essentially run our first quarter on the platform for free. That changes the math.” — a $12M/year Amazon seller in the home organization category, who asked to remain anonymous

💡 Article Summary

Key Insights

1

Who Is Allegedly Behind the Push at Walmart?

2

What Are the Specific Terms Being Offered?

3

How Is Amazon Reportedly Responding Internally?

4

Is the Walmart Marketplace Actually Ready to Absorb a Volume Influx?

5

What Does This Mean for Multichannel Sellers Right Now?

Source: Ecommerce Times

What Are the Specific Terms Being Offered?

Based on details shared by two sellers who received the outreach and one agency owner whose clients were contacted, the alleged packages include:

• Walmart Connect ad credits between $75,000 and $250,000, tiered by the seller’s trailing twelve-month Amazon GMV
• Referral fee waivers of 60 to 90 days across all listed SKUs, reportedly available for sellers who commit to listing a minimum of 500 active ASINs on Walmart
• Dedicated seller success manager access for the first 12 months, a resource typically reserved for Walmart’s enterprise-tier vendors
• Priority placement consideration in Walmart’s “Top Picks” editorial slots during the holiday Q4 window — an unconfirmed but reportedly verbal commitment that several sellers said was the most compelling element of the pitch
• Expedited Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS) onboarding, with allegedly reduced inbound shipping rates for the first two shipment cycles

Kevin Weeks, founder of Seattle-based marketplace agency Lumi Commerce, told Ecommerce Times he has seen the pitch decks. “The structure is sophisticated. This isn’t the Walmart seller recruitment we saw in 2021 or 2022. They’ve clearly studied how Amazon retained sellers during its own early growth phase and they’re using a version of that playbook,” he said. “Whether the editorial placement promises hold up post-onboarding is the real question.”

How Is Amazon Reportedly Responding Internally?

Sources familiar with Amazon’s Seller Experience organization say the company’s marketplace retention team — a group that operates somewhat quietly within the broader Selling Partner Services division — has been briefed on the Walmart outreach and is reportedly escalating seller-specific retention offers of its own. The alleged countermeasures include proactive FBA fee credits for sellers who have flagged margin deterioration through Seller Central’s profitability dashboard, as well as early access to Amazon’s new “Accelerate” fulfillment speed tier, which promises next-day regional delivery windows for sellers using Amazon’s network of regional sort centers.

Amazon declined to comment on internal retention programs. But the timing of a quiet update to Seller Central’s account health dashboard last month — which now surfaces a “Your Growth Incentives” panel for eligible sellers — suggests the company is at minimum aware of the competitive dynamic.

“Amazon doesn’t panic, but they do respond. We’ve had three sellers get unsolicited FBA credit offers in the last 30 days after they started Walmart onboarding conversations. That is not a coincidence.” — Kevin Weeks, founder, Lumi Commerce

Is the Walmart Marketplace Actually Ready to Absorb a Volume Influx?

The skepticism among experienced operators centers less on the incentive packages and more on whether Walmart’s marketplace infrastructure can deliver the conversion rates and fulfillment reliability that Amazon sellers have been optimized around. Walmart’s Buy Box algorithm — now officially branded the “Featured Offer” system following a Q1 2026 rebrand — remains meaningfully less transparent than Amazon’s, and WFS’s inbound processing times still lag FBA by an estimated two to four days during peak periods, according to data shared by fulfillment consultancy Cahoot.

Jason Magee, who runs a $28M multi-brand operation across Amazon and Walmart under his holding company Apex Brand Group, told Ecommerce Times his team has been on Walmart for two years and still generates only about 11% of total marketplace revenue there despite comparable SKU counts. “The traffic is real. The conversion gap is also real. Walmart has a browser intent problem — shoppers come to price-check, not necessarily to buy. Until that changes, no amount of ad credit closes the revenue gap for a seller who’s been Amazon-native for five years,” he said.

Others are more bullish. Kiri Masters, founder of Bobsled Marketing and a longtime Amazon advertising strategist, noted that Walmart’s sponsored product ROAS benchmarks have improved materially since the platform rolled out its AI-powered bid optimization suite in early 2026. “The PPC efficiency story at Walmart is genuinely better than it was 18 months ago. If you’re in a category where Amazon CPC has gone from $1.20 to $2.80 in three years, Walmart’s CPCs look attractive almost regardless of the conversion differential,” Masters told Ecommerce Times.

“The PPC efficiency story at Walmart is genuinely better than it was 18 months ago. If you’re in a category where Amazon CPC has gone from $1.20 to $2.80 in three years, Walmart’s CPCs look attractive almost regardless of the conversion differential.” — Kiri Masters, founder, Bobsled Marketing

What Does This Mean for Multichannel Sellers Right Now?

For operators running multichannel strategies, the alleged Walmart program introduces a short-term arbitrage opportunity that several agency leaders say deserves serious evaluation — but with clear-eyed expectations about the platform’s limitations. The calculus looks most favorable for sellers in the following situations:

• High-velocity consumables or replenishment SKUs where Walmart’s grocery-adjacent shopper base overlaps with the product category
• Sellers with FBA fee structures that have deteriorated significantly under the 2026 fee stack, particularly those with low-ASP or heavy/bulky products
• Brands with existing brick-and-mortar Walmart shelf presence, where the marketplace listing reinforces physical retail availability
• Operators already using WFS who can absorb additional inbound volume without a new 3PL integration

The situation is less compelling for sellers whose Amazon flywheel is heavily dependent on review velocity and organic rank — assets that don’t transfer to Walmart and must be rebuilt from zero. Several Amazon-native brand founders told Ecommerce Times they are treating the Walmart outreach as a negotiating tool with Amazon’s retention team rather than a genuine platform migration signal.

Could This Escalate Into a Broader Marketplace Fee War?

That is the question several marketplace analysts are now asking. If Walmart’s alleged migration program gains traction and Amazon’s internal retention responses become more formalized, the structural economics of marketplace selling — which have trended steadily toward higher platform take rates since 2019 — could face genuine competitive pressure for the first time in years. Third-party seller fees on Amazon now average an effective take rate of approximately 34% when FBA, referral, and advertising costs are combined, according to modeling by Marketplace Pulse. Walmart’s equivalent blended rate sits closer to 24% for WFS sellers, a gap that is difficult to ignore at scale.

Whether Walmart can sustain the infrastructure investment required to close the traffic and conversion gap with Amazon remains the central open question. But the reported sophistication of the current outreach program — targeted by category, structured around ad spend commitments, and reportedly backed by executive sponsorship — suggests that Walmart is no longer content to wait for Amazon sellers to arrive organically. If even a fraction of the targeted sellers migrate meaningfully, the marketplace competitive landscape heading into Q4 2026 could look materially different from any prior holiday season.

Ecommerce Times has reached out to Walmart Marketplace, Amazon Selling Partner Services, and Manish Joneja directly. This story will be updated as additional information becomes available. Details of the alleged program remain unconfirmed by either company.