How to Optimize Walmart Listings: 10 Proven Methods for Better Sales in 2025

Selling on Walmart is no easy feat. After you've finally gotten approved to list, ensured that your listings are compliant, and conducted market research to make sure you're offering what buyers are looking for, you're faced with a seemingly endless barrage of competing sellers who are no less committed than you. On such a competitive marketplace, visibility is the name of the game; it determines more than anything else who gets sales and who doesn't. On Walmart, visibility directly affected by the quality of your product listing – put simply, better quality, more optimized listings get increased visibility and raise your chances of making a sale. But how do you optimize a Walmart listing? Like many things on Walmart, the answer encompasses more than just one thing, and depends heavily on the current state of your listings.

In this guide, we'll go over how to optimize a Walmart listing, explain how the Walmart algorithm works and how it determines a listing's visibility, and give you 10 expert tips for better listing performance on Walmart's highly competitive marketplace. Keep reading for a complete start-to-finish guide to improving your Walmart listing quality score, attaining the Walmart Buy Box, and getting more out of your listings on Walmart.

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How Does Walmart's Search Algorithm Work?

In order to successfully optimize a Walmart listing, we need to first understand the algorithm we're optimizing for. While the intricacies of Walmart's algorithm are not available to the public, there are several things we do know about what it considers important when determining what will be displayed in buyer searches and Buy Boxes.

• Title and Keywords: Like the all of search algorithms, Walmart's algorithm looks at the relevance of a listing to a given search query by assessing which keywords are present in its title. Listings that have their main keyword towards the beginning will be assessed as more relevant, and have a higher chance of ranking highly in searches. ‍
• Ratings and Reviews: The aim of Walmart's algorithm is to match buyers with listings that are likely to result in a positive purchase experience, which is why relevance is only half the battle. As a seller, you need to provide a positive shopping experience for your buyers, and one way that Walmart assess this is the customer feedback you receive. The better your customer reviews are, the better fulfillment options you make available, and the lower your Order Defect Rate, the better your listing will perform.  ‍
• Pricing and Discounts: Another determining factor of a listing's performance is how good of a deal it offers in relation to its competitors. Listings with competitive pricing, attractive discounts, or free shipping have a much better chance of attaining the Buy Box and getting more visibility. ‍
• Sponsored Product Ads: Sometimes, when optimization fails to get sufficient visibility for a listing to gain traction, paid promotion strategies are the next best thing. Sponsored ads can get a listing in front of buyers, and can be the kickstart it needs to help it gain more traffic organically.

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10 Proven Strategies: How to Optimize Your Walmart Listing

Per Walmart, the quality of a listing and its performance on the marketplace are determined by three factors: the content of the listing, the quality of customer experience a given seller provides, and how competitive the price of the item is. These three factors are the backbone of Walmart listing optimization, and serve as a way to help sellers create better listings that get more visibility and result in more sales.

Now, with a general grasp of Walmart's search algorithm in hand, plus a solid understanding of the factors that Walmart uses to determine a listing's quality score, we'll take a look at the practical side of how to optimize a Walmart listing through 10 proven listing optimization strategies.

1. Use Relevant Keywords in Your Title and Description

When determining whether or not to display a listing to a buyer, whether in a search or in a sponsored ad placement, Walmart's algorithm needs to know what product the listing is for. After the required product identifiers, the listing's title will be the first place the algorithm looks. When the algorithm scans a product listing title, it gives more weight to the keyword placed at the beginning of the title rather than the keywords that follow. As such, it's important to structure your listing title in such a way that places the main keyword right at the start, so the algorithm prioritizes it when determining your listing's visibility and ranking.

2. Utilize Product Reviews to Boost Ranking

Like on many ecommerce marketplaces, a product listing with positive reviews will be selected for more preferential ranking in buyer searches and receive better visibility overall on Walmart. Getting reviews, however, is easier said than done – how can you get reviews to boost your listing's visibility if your listing isn't visible to buyers in the first place?

Luckily, what sets Walmart apart from the vast majority of ecommerce marketplaces is that it not only doesn't forbid sellers to incentivize buyer reviews, but actually encourages sellers to do so via the Review Accelerator Program. Walmart determines which items are eligible to enroll in the Review Accelerator Program on a weekly basis, and allows sellers to enroll eligible items they feel need a boost. Items will be enrolled for the duration of time it takes them to get a predetermined number of reviews. Sellers can then select the monetary compensation they wish to give buyers who proceed to leave a review, with a minimum incentive of $5 and a maximum of $25 per review. In total, the cost for each review is the $5 fee paid to Walmart, plus the incentive paid to the buyer. One important thing to note, however, is that you cannot incentivize a specifically positive review, so it's important to only enroll items that you're confident will result in good reviews.

3. Optimize Your Pricing Strategy

Lower prices are not only attractive to buyers that see your listing, they increase the chances of them seeing your listing in the first place. They boost your chances of attaining the Buy Box, thereby increasing your visibility and chances of making a sale. But simply telling you to lower prices is not particularly helpful; after all, lowering prices across the board will result in nothing more than a hit to your profits. Instead, consider the following pricing tactics for improving your offers in the eyes of Walmart's algorithm:

• Lower the price on select items to gain more visibility. Items that have a higher profit margin (or, alternatively, those whose cost and profits are low enough to forgo) are ideal candidates for markdowns. Lower prices are a key factor in increasing your likelihood of attaining the Buy Box.
• Recoup profits on high-turnover items to offer discounts on items that need a boost. Another way to improve your offer on items that need help gaining visibility is lowering their price across the board, then recouping the lost profits by increasing the price on high-turnover items.
• Maintain realistic yet competitive prices. No matter where you sell, your prices need to be realistic in relation to the demands of the market, and in comparison to prices offered by other sellers on Walmart. You want to keep prices reasonable, and avoid pricing items too high above what other sellers are selling. This will require you to conduct regular market research to ensure your prices are competitive enough to increase your listing quality score and boost your visibility.

Walmart takes competitive pricing so seriously that if Walmart's algorithm deems your price too high, Walmart will remove your listing from its platform altogether and give you an error message: "Reasonable price not satisfied." Only once you've lowered your price to a number that Walmart deems reasonable will your listing become eligible for publishing.  

4. Use High-Quality Images

Walmart Marketplace works on a catalog system, which means that it gets images from each seller, but can choose to publish images only from a certain seller at their discretion. Usually, however, the first seller to create a listing for a given product is the one whose images will remain in the listing, even if they no longer have the Buy Box.

While many things go into determining a Walmart listing's quality, providing the maximum number of product images at a high quality will go a long way towards optimizing your Walmart listing. There are several key factors that go into creating an optimized set of product images:

1. Ensure images have a compliant background. Walmart requires main product images to have a plain white background, with several category-specific exceptions for secondary images. Make sure that the background of your main image is free of any props or extras, accompanying text, watermarks, etc., and that the color is plain white (255/255/255 RGB)
2. Provide images from multiple angles. Like all ecommerce platforms, Walmart relies heavily on product images. Since buyers cannot interact with items like they would in a physical store, providing plenty of informative and illustrative product images from multiple angles is the next best thing. Take photos from multiple angles so buyers know what they'll get when they order from you, and avoid unnecessary returns while also increasing conversions.
3. Showcase details and textures. No matter what you sell, the small details matter to your buyers. Use close up product images to showcase detail and textures, and ensure that all your product images are at a high enough resolution to provide a worthwhile zoom in.

Walmart provides a full breakdown of its product image recommendations and requirements, and we highly recommend you familiarize yourself with them before setting out photographing your catalog. In our experience, it's far easier to do things right the first time instead of going back and correcting mistakes, especially when it comes to a labor-intensive task like product photography.

5. Utilize Enhanced Content Features

Product listings on Walmart offer more than just a selection of product images and descriptive text. In an effort to provide more engaging listings that attract buyers and drive conversion, Walmart gives sellers the option of including what's known as rich media content in their item listings. There are three types of rich media content you can add to a Walmart listing:

1. 360-Spin Images
   ‍An interactive way to displaying products, the 360-spin feature allows buyers to rotate the product to view it from multiple angles. This feature uses several product images from multiple angles stitched together, which give the illusion of a 3-dimensional object that can be moved.
2. Product Videos
   Videos provide a more immersive way to showcase your product, while highlighting key features. Product videos can also include aspirational content to more effectively market the item and entice shoppers to make a purchase.
3. Below-the-Fold Content
   Additional content added to the secondary section of an item listing, below the Buy Box section at the top. This content can include product comparison tables, additional photos, feature checklists, and more.

Additionally, including a warranty for your item can help give buyers peace of mind when purchasing from you, and could very well be the deciding factor between you and the competition.

6. Utilize Walmart's Sponsored Products Advertising

Walmart gives sellers a way to promote themselves, their brand, and their items in several ways. For product-specific promotion, Walmart has the Sponsored Products program, a CPC (cost per click) model of product promotion that helps sellers give select products a leg up over the competition. When you promote a Walmart listing with Sponsored Products, the listing receives preferential placement in search results, and can appear on the homepage, browse, and stock up pages for buyers who are actively searching for an item like the one you're promoting. Before you can promote an item with Walmart Sponsored Products, however, you must first ensure that it's not only eligible for enrollment, but that you've taken care to optimize its Walmart listing in order to get the best possible results from your CPC campaign.

If you're not familiar with how CPC (also known as PPC, "pay per click") advertising works, the concept is simple: sellers place a maximum bid, which determines the maximum amount they're willing to pay for a click on their sponsored listing. The higher the bid, the higher the likelihood that their listing will be featured. To ensure that the sponsored listing is displayed to a relevant buyer (you wouldn't want your product listing for a KitchenAid stand mixer to be displayed to a shopper looking for a garden hose), sellers need to select which keywords they wish to target in their campaign. Keeping with our KitchenAid example, a seller could choose to target keywords like "stand mixer" and "kitchen mixer" for their listing, and with a sufficiently high bid, get their listing shown to interested buyers. But how do you know which keywords are worth bidding on?

To help sellers find the best keywords, Walmart's Sponsored Products platform has a built in tool for finding relevant keywords for each listing they wish to promote. It works by analyzing the product listing and suggesting which keywords to target in order to get the best results from a CPC advertising campaign. This is where Walmart listing optimization comes in – the more optimized your listing, the better keyword targeting suggestions Walmart will be able to give you. In other words, the more information you provide the algorithm, the better your campaign targeting will be, and the better your conversion rate will be when you pay for a click on the sponsored product.

7. Play to Win the Walmart Buy Box

We've touched on winning the Buy Box several times in this guide, but we've not gone into what that means in detail. In case you're not familiar with the term, a Buy Box is the main section of the listing, the first thing that buyers see when they click into it. For every listing, there is a seller who's offer is featured in the Buy Box, and that seller has said to have "won the Buy Box." Which seller is featured in the Buy Box can change at any given time, with

Walmart's algorithm determining which offer wins the Buy Box based on its Walmart listing quality score. Winning the Buy Box, therefore, is simply a matter of optimizing a Walmart listing in order increase its quality score and win out over the competition. That can be easier said than done, however, if you don't know how to optimize a Walmart listing.

Walmart uses three criteria to determine a listing's quality score, and therefore it's eligibility for winning the Buy Box:

• The quality of the content of the listing. How informative is your listing? Does it include a well-written, keyword-optimized description? Does is have an array of product attributes? Do you provide plenty of compliant and high-quality listing photos?
• Your performance as a seller. Do you consistently provide a positive buying experience to your customers? Are your shipping times fast, and do you offer free shipping? Do you respond to customers promptly?
• The competitiveness of your offer. How competitive is the price you're asking in comparison to the price other sellers are asking?

In our experience, however, meeting these requirements isn't always enough in order to win the Buy Box. In addition to these, we recommend maintaining steady inventory through smart inventory management strategies that create a high in-stock rate while keeping your true inventory private from Walmart. This, along with many other Walmart listing optimizations, can be done easily and automatically with EasyChannel. Walmart prefers to give the Buy Box to sellers who can keep it, and sellers who keep items in stock are far more likely to get the Buy Box than those who can only keep it for a handful of sales.

8. Offer Free Shipping and Fast Delivery Options

Shipping is an integral part of a customer's shopping experience, which is why Walmart places such heavy emphasis on free and fast shipping. The shipping experience you offer will be analyzed by Walmart, alongside factors such as order defect rate and response times, to determine the quality of your customer experience. This, in turn, will factor into your listing quality score, and have a direct effect on your listings' visibility. A good shipping experience means free shipping and delivery within 2 business days, at least in the lower 48 states. Make sure you meet these marketplace standards, either via WFS or your own 3PL provider, and ensure that your shipping experience is up to Walmart's standards.

9. Keep Your Inventory Accurate and Up-to-Date

Walmart takes great care to ensure that the sellers on its marketplace are able to provide the standard that customers expect from Walmart itself, and one major factor when assessing a seller is their in-stock rate. Stockouts are not well tolerated, of course, but neither is an ever-changing catalog indicative of dropshipping or arbitrage. Walmart wants to know that its sellers have the stock they say they have, on hand and ready to ship out at a moment's notice, and that they're consistently able to maintain this level of commitment.

There are two ways to achieve this: by sending your stock over to Walmart and using Walmart Fulfillment Services to fulfill all your orders, or by fulfilling orders with a 3PL service while limiting Walmart's access to inventory. If you plan to sell on more channels than just Walmart, we recommend opting for the latter, and keeping your stock private from Walmart with the help of EasyChannel's Up-To Inventory feature. Additionally, if you sell on multiple channels, EasyChannel will ensure that stock is kept in sync across all your selling channels, so you never have to worry about overselling or stockouts, on Walmart or anywhere else.

10. Check on Your Walmart Listing Quality Score

We've mentioned the Walmart listing quality score many times in this guide, but we've not yet explained exactly how you can find it, monitor it, and improve it on a listing-by-listing level. As its name implies, a Walmart listing quality score is a score assigned to your offers by Walmart. There are actually two listing quality scores: one score is assigned to your catalog as a whole, and one assigned to every listing. It's a dynamic score, and changes as you get more sales, gain product reviews, add or remove items from your catalog, and change your fulfillment methods.

You can find your listings quality score in the Listings Quality Dashboard, which you can find by logging into your Walmart selling account, and selecting Listing Quality under the Growth tab in Seller Center.

There, you'll be able to see the Walmart listing quality score assigned to your catalog. The score is expressed as a percentage; in this example, the Listing Quality Score is 50%. You can also view the listing quality score, as assigned to each listing, in the table view of your catalog below. To raise a listing's quality score, you can click on "Details" in the Action column for insights and actions you can take to improve that listing. Recommended actions can include anything from adding product attributes to pricing optimization, and depend heavily on the individual listing's current state, as well as things like its product category, seasonal demand, and more.

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Bonus Tip: Make Sure Your Listing Title Contains Your Product Type

Uploading products to Walmart is notoriously finicky, with the platform seemingly reinventing the wheel when it comes to several industry standards. One of these is Walmart's method of categorizing products.

When you upload a product to Walmart, you'll usually only be able to assign it one main product category (i.e. clothing). The rest of the information and specific subcategorization is determined by Walmart on its own based on the information provided by the seller in the product listing, starting with the listing's title. Therefore, when creating a title for your Walmart listing, it's important to include the product type (i.e. "T-shirt") in the title, so that Walmart categorizes it correctly. While your listing will be published if you don't add a specific product type, it will likely not be visible to buyers in their searches or in category navigation, making it virtually impossible for the listing to get any sales.

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Final Thoughts: Optimizing Your Walmart Listing for Success

Walmart is a demanding marketplace, one that takes great care to ensure all its sellers are up to par before they're even allowed to publish a listing on the marketplace. From getting your foot in the door to learning how to optimize a Walmart listing for better visibility, selling on Walmart is challenging. But if you're willing to go through the effort of getting approved to sell on Walmart, ensuring that your listings are optimized and ready to win the Buy Box is essential to your success.

Walmart listing optimization is not a one-and-done thing. There are many factors that go into optimizing a listening on Walmart – from creating a keyword-optimized title that also includes the item type, to ensuring your pricing and service outcompete other sellers vying for the Buy Box – and it's an ongoing process that will change and evolve with the needs of your store, the offers in your catalog, the Order Defect Rate from your past sales, and more. Ultimately, ensuring that your Walmart listings are optimized is simply easier when you manage your catalog with a product data management software like EasyChannel, which allows you optimize your products for each sales platform you list on, whether it's Walmart, Amazon, TikTok, or Shopify and more, while also allowing you to diversify your sales channels and mitigate risks associated with selling on Walmart.