A great illustration of this comes from the playbook that SellCord CEO Michael Lebhar shared on The Smartest Amazon Seller. His agency is one of the biggest players in the Walmart marketplace space, and their process for launching a brand doesn't start with advertising at all. It starts with obsession over the fundamentals of the product listing itself, which is the single biggest difference between Walmart and other platforms.
Before spending a dollar on Walmart Connect, Lebhar’s team focuses entirely on listing optimization. He explained that Walmart's algorithm is far more dependent on the raw data of your listing than Amazon's A9 is. This means getting your title, keywords, and especially your product category and attributes perfect isn't just a box to check, it's the foundation of your entire strategy. On the Serious Sellers Podcast, Ryan King stressed this same point, noting how optimizing your product type can dramatically increase the number of keywords you're eligible to rank for. The first step in effective advertising is to build a listing that the algorithm can clearly understand. This is also where fulfillment comes in. Matthew Smith from Walmart HQ said it plainly: using Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS) is one of the fastest ways to
