The number of China-based sellers on Walmart’s third-party marketplace has skyrocketed
In 2021, Walmart took a page out of Amazon’s playbook by allowing foreign sellers onto its third-party marketplace, previously only available to those in the U.S.
Notably, that included sellers based in China. More than half of the top sellers on Amazon are based in China, per Marketplace Pulse, which collects data from e-commerce websites through web scraping and APIs. Over the past few years, Walmart’s seller population has similarly shifted: From 2023-2024, the number of China-based Walmart marketplace sellers grew from fewer than 25,000 to 50,000, according to new data from Marketplace Pulse.
Walmart has been working to emulate various aspects of the Amazon flywheel. More sellers means more product pages on which to sell advertising. “They are trying to replicate as many of the routes to growth as Amazon has modeled,” Ben Donovan, insights lead for Marketplace Pulse, told Modern Retail. “That was a big part of [Amazon’s] strategy to open up the selection, to really court Chinese sellers and invite them to be a main part of the platform.”
According to Marketplace Pulse, Chinese sellers represented 28% of all active sellers on Walmart in 2024, up from 20% at the end of 2023. The firm pegs the total number of Walmart sellers at around 160,000 — the company does not disclose an official number publicly. This could mean heavier competition for U.S.-based sellers on the fast-growing e-commerce platform and more risk of low-quality products or counterfeits. In 2021, for example, Amazon started removing some of its top sellers — many of whom were based in China — after it started cracking down on fake reviews.
In August, Walmart’s senior director of cross-border imports, Scott Humanek, said on LinkedIn that Walmart marketplace sellers could begin shipping from China into the U.S. Walmart fulfillment services network, which could incentivize future Chinese sellers to join the platform. “Our pilot exceeded our expectations in terms of feedback and volumes,” he wrote. Walmart did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Rising platform fees on Amazon have increasingly squeezed margins for sellers globally. Chinese sellers are no exception, according to Sky Canaves, principal retail and e-commerce analyst for eMarketer.
“When you add up the commissions plus advertising and fulfillment expenses [on Amazon], it often totals more than half of a seller’s revenue, so sellers have been looking for other options,” she said. “What the Chinese sellers really want is access to customers at scale, so they’re really following the traffic and they’re willing to pay for that and try it out.”
This creates more pressure on pricing for U.S. sellers at a time of still-high inflation. Additionally, increased tariffs on imported goods from China impact both U.S.- and China-based sellers, both of which may source from Chinese factories. “Manufacturers can sell directly on the platform, and so, there’s no need to establish a margin for an end seller; they are the seller,” Donovan said. “Sellers should be expecting more margin compression and need to develop strategies to overcome that.”
Canaves said branding will be essential for U.S. sellers in competing with Chinese sellers, who may not invest as much on marketing or advertising and use unrecognizable, hard-to-pronounce names unfamiliar to U.S. customers.
“A lot of the Chinese sellers you see on Amazon are not brands — they have brand names that they need in order to register as a seller,” Canaves said. “How [U.S. brands] stand out in the market is by emphasizing their quality and their customer service and the product, and then the brand and marketing and creating desirability around that can’t easily be copied.”