Unauthorized Sellers on Walmart Marketplace: How to Protect Your Brand Beyond Amazon

Brands that clean up their Amazon listing often notice something a few months later: the same resellers have moved to Walmart. Same product, same low price, different marketplace.

That’s not a coincidence. Resellers go where the enforcement is weakest. If you’ve tightened Amazon and ignored Walmart, Walmart is where the pressure goes.

How Walmart is different

Walmart Marketplace works a lot like Amazon in one key way: multiple sellers can sell the same item on a single product page, and they compete for the featured offer (Walmart’s version of the Buy Box). A reseller undercutting your price can win that featured spot on your own product.

A few things make Walmart its own problem:

• Fewer brands are watching it. Many established brands don’t monitor Walmart at all, so resellers face less resistance.
• Item pages can be messier. Content from multiple sellers can end up on one page, and duplicate pages for the same product are common.
• Price comparisons happen across platforms. Walmart and Amazon both look at prices elsewhere. A low price on Walmart can create pressure on your Amazon price and vice versa.

What brand owners can use on Walmart

Walmart Brand Portal. Walmart’s brand program lets you register your brand, report intellectual property violations (trademark, copyright, counterfeit) and manage some content. Like Amazon Brand Registry, it’s built for IP problems, not for removing sellers of genuine product.

Content control through your own seller account. If you sell on Walmart yourself, you have more standing to correct item page content than if you’re absent.

The same supply chain tools you use for Amazon. Test buys, lot codes, reseller agreements and a consistent MAP policy. The source of Walmart resellers is almost always the same as the source of Amazon resellers: your own distribution. See distributor diversion.

Why Walmart is the easier place to win

Walmart isn’t harder to clean up than Amazon. In many cases it’s easier, for two reasons:

1. There are usually fewer sellers. A product with eight sellers on Amazon might have two or three on Walmart.
2. The same fix covers both. When your reseller agreements explicitly name every online marketplace, not just Amazon, one enforcement effort handles both channels.

That second point catches brands out. We regularly see dealer agreements that say “no selling on Amazon” and nothing else. A dealer who wants to keep selling online just moves to Walmart and technically hasn’t broken anything. Name the marketplaces, or better, require written approval for any third-party marketplace. Our guide to authorized reseller agreements covers the language to discuss with your attorney.

Should you sell on Walmart yourself?

If you have a stable Amazon business, there’s a good case for opening Walmart under your own account:

• You control the featured offer on your own product.
• You stop leaving that channel to resellers by default.
• You can usually reuse much of your Amazon content and operations.

But open it once Amazon is stable, not before. Running two messy channels is worse than one clean one. We compare the options in Walmart, TikTok Shop or Shopify: which channel to open after Amazon, and we run Walmart for clients through our Walmart Marketplace agency service.

A simple Walmart check you can run today

1. Search Walmart for your brand name.
2. Open each of your top products and look at “more seller options” or the equivalent.
3. Note the seller names and prices.
4. Compare against your authorized dealer list.

If you find sellers you don’t recognize, you have the same problem you have on Amazon, just less visible. Our free channel scan maps sellers across your channels and tells you roughly what it’s costing you.

Frequently asked questions

Written by

Troy Marchand, CEO

Read bio →