Amazon hides how it scores you. Walmart hands you the rubric, and most sellers still fail it, which is why a well-built listing can outrank a bigger competitor there in a way it can't on Amazon.

Carrie Miller of Helium 10 and Michael Lebhar of Sellcord (the agency behind more than $6 billion in Walmart revenue) laid out the scorecard on a recent BDSC call.

Set expectations first: a healthy Amazon brand with basic effort should see roughly 10 to 15% of its Amazon revenue on Walmart. If you're struggling on Amazon, Walmart won't rescue you

And the categories are lopsided. Home and hard lines (fitness, furniture, décor, bath) are wide open because brand loyalty is thin. Food, consumables, and health are brutal, since shoppers are buying the same national brands they've bought in-store for years. Carrie's storage products did well. Her socks never had a chance against Hanes at rock-bottom prices.

Clear the bar and you become eligible for the Pro Seller badge (a set number of orders in 90 days plus strong quality scores). Shoppers filter for it, so it's a real visibility jump.

The launch sequence

Put your most important keyword first in the title, right after the brand name. Michael called it the single biggest ranking lever on the platform. Then stop. No stuffing.

Check your right to win before you spend a dollar. Pull the Search Insights report from Seller Center and look at the top three to five converting items for your keyword. If they look like your product in price and type, go. If they're $4.99 national brands with one-hour delivery and you're a $19.99 specialty item, pick a different keyword.

Understand the algorithm. Walmart ranks on conversion rate more than raw volume, so a relevant, well-priced item can beat a bigger seller. Search is also increasingly personalized, which makes keyword rank tracking unreliable. Track sales rank within your product type instead (it's in Search Insights when you click your product).

Advertise from day one. Most top positions are ads, same as Amazon. Auto campaigns have improved a lot and are where many sellers win early. Walmart's auction rewards relevance over bid size, so a relevant item with a lower bid can still take the spot.

Drive outside traffic. Generate a URL with your target keyword in it. Set up a publisher account through Impact for trackable affiliate links. Walmart discounts your commission when you run Google ads through their platform.

Reviews, the fast way

Syndicate the reviews from your own Shopify site to Walmart on day one. It's allowed, it's built in, and it's the quickest way to stop looking new. Then use Walmart's post-purchase review request program, which runs about $10 a review, and the sample program for early volume.

Why some sellers net more here

Fewer incremental fees than Amazon keeps adding, commission incentive programs for deals, and less aggressive competition in many categories. One Helium 10 product manager makes more profit on Walmart than on Amazon on lower revenue.

If you're already set up: fix the title, turn on WFS, syndicate your reviews. That's an afternoon.

The full call also covered the path from marketplace to Walmart's 4,600 stores, packaging for shelf, and financing the purchase orders. It's inside the Billion Dollar Sellers Club with plenty more like it. Try it for $9 at billiondollarsellers.club.

What happens when you build a hyper-growth digital marketing agency from $0 to $56M in two years, only to wake up one morning and find your bank accounts frozen by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)?

This episode of the Marketing Misfits podcast features Mary Dee, a high-level business advisor and self-proclaimed "Chief Fun Officer."

Mary shares her harrowing journey of losing millions of dollars to an FTC civil lawsuit, and battling breast cancer at the exact same time. She breaks down the "shades of gray" in digital marketing compliance, why scaling too fast puts a massive target on your back, and how shifting your definition of "retirement" can save you from entrepreneurial burnout.

If you sell information products, operate multiple LLC entities, or struggle to delegate control to your team, this episode is a wake-up call you cannot afford to miss.

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Google just gave merchants visibility into something they've never been able to see before: how your products actually show up when shoppers ask AI questions instead of typing search terms.

A new tab inside Google Merchant Center that shows your product visibility across AI Mode, the Gemini app, and AI Overviews. This is organic AI visibility only, no paid ads or click data involved.

Where to find it: Merchant Center → Analytics tab → Products → AI performance tab

Availability: English-language queries only, in the US, Australia, Canada, India, and New Zealand.

What it tracks:

Why this matters: shoppers are increasingly asking AI "what's the best waterproof hiking boot" instead of searching "waterproof hiking boots." This report shows you if you're even in that conversation.

The actual fix: rewrite your feed for conversation, not keywords

AI shopping doesn't match keywords, it matches context. Three moves:

Before/after, so you can see the pattern:

Three rules to apply across your whole catalog:

Do this today: pull your top 10 SKUs and rewrite the descriptions using the before/after pattern above. Then check back in the AI performance tab in a few weeks to see if your Share of Voice moves.

One seller watched their daily sales drop from $1,400 to $800 in a single day. Conversion rate fell to 14.77%. They found the cause, fixed it in 30 minutes, and the next day conversion hit 28% with sales back up to $1,575.

The cause: Amazon pulled their brand name out of the title in search results, and their brand name was also their main keyword.

This isn't new, but it's getting worse

Amazon has been quietly testing this for a few years. Sellers have reported it in the Seller Central forums going back to 2022 and 2023, with Amazon representatives confirming they were "testing a new approach to display product titles that removes less recognizable brand names" to bring "key customer search terms to the forefront."

What's changed recently is the mechanism doing the damage got a lot bigger. On July 27, 2026, Amazon rolled out a hard 75-character title limit across every category except media, and started using AI to auto-rewrite any title that goes over.

A new "Item Highlights" field now absorbs the overflow (up to 125 characters of specs and use cases), but the AI decides what survives in the title itself. Reporting since the rollout shows listings that ranked page one for buyer-intent keywords falling off the first page entirely once Amazon's AI rewrote the title, because the AI has no visibility into which specific words were actually driving your sales.

Put those two things together, an algorithm that already strips brand names it doesn't "recognize," now paired with an AI actively rewriting titles for length, and you have more ways than ever for a keyword to disappear from your listing without you touching anything.

Why you won't see it coming

Your backend title never changes. Seller Central still shows your full title exactly as you wrote it. The only place the missing word shows up is the live search results page and sponsored ad placements, which most sellers never screenshot or check side by side with their backend listing.

If you built your main keyword into your brand name on purpose, the way a seller like InMotion Hemp did with "hemp," Amazon can drop the brand and the keyword together, and nothing in your dashboard flags it.

Check this today (5 minutes)

If your brand name and best keyword are the same word, this is worth five minutes of your day, because it cost that seller a full day of sales before they caught it.

✌🏼 Have a great weekend.

See you again on Monday.

The answer to today’s STUMP BEZOS is
33% of shoppers do holiday research before October 21