The most comprehensive data for Walmart Marketplace
DataSpark helps brands and sellers scale their business with the data they need for the Walmart Marketplace. Our API empowers solution providers to develop apps, dashboards, and reports to create their own SAAS products.
Building a startup seems to be a lot like building a pyramid (not that I have a lot of experience with that, but I can imagine). Those first layers of the pyramid take a lot of work, but they become the foundation for your continued goal of building up. Day by day, month by month you press forward and each layer become a bit easier and you find yourself building up a faster. Each layer also seems to accelerate your customer growth. We just hit 400 paid subscribers and the momentum seems to be increasing.
Our latest push was a WFS (Walmart's FBA equivalent) opportunity finder. It builds on top of all the item level information we have, but aggregates the information by brand so that wholesale sellers can quickly find the biggest brands that don't have WFS. When I was at Amazon 10 years ago, this was the name of the game. It was a land grab to be the first to offer a brand on FBA and you were nearly guaranteed all of the sales. We are betting it will be the same for Walmart WFS and we are the first to provide this view of the data. It seems to be bringing in several new customers and helped us hit the 400 milestone.
We wanted to make it very easy for our customers to get Walmart.com data on pricing, keywords, buy box, category best sellers and more, right at their fingertips. We looked at a lot of different solutions, but ultimately decided that Google Sheets is where so many users are already add, it makes custom dashboard/report/app development a synch, and it significantly speeds up our ability to deliver rich data to our customers.
It is also a great demonstration of what our API can do. We have several companies who want to build their own app or integrate our data into their own solution. This highlights how that can be done as the add-on is fully built on top of our API.
We had our 1000th user sign up today! It has been a crazy journey so far. Some of the things we have learned.
We were able to use our various data sources to calculate a solid sales estimate for over 10 million products on walmart.com. This allows us to give specific guidance on how much demand a particular items get so sellers and brands know what they might expect. It also allows us to rollup those sales to get brand size, category size, and even market segment share.
You never know if your MVP is going to be good enough or note, but thankfully, after less than a month after launching, we got to 100 users of DataSpark. Some things that we learned along the way:
-Be "inspired" what is already working: Because Amazon is so well established, we were able to find the closest Amazon solution provider that we wanted to mirror and use their solutions to inspire what we did for Walmart. It took away a lot of the guess work
-Early research led to early users: We reached on several Facebook groups before we ever started coding anything to see if there would be interest in a tool like we envisioned. We got a resounding YES! Not surprisingly, these same users were the first to sign up when we came back and told them it was ready. Plus, we avoided any self promotion perceptions since we just asked if they were interested in something not yet built (no self promotion there) and then told them we had delivered what we said we would.
-Facetime is key: we have really prioritized giving facetime to any customer who wants it. At this early stage, the feedback has been priceless.
We are able to get the initial product developed to show item level price history, best seller rank (BSR) history, and buy box analysis. We also have the category best seller view so that brands and sellers can do product research, explore what sells well on Walmart, and see the demand, competition, and potential profit for item.
I left Amazon in 2019 to work on various ventures. However, some friends approached me about the idea of focusing on providing data solutions for Walmart sellers and brands. The seller count was growing to over 70k sellers, plus there are millions of Amazon sellers wondering when is the time to pay attention to the Walmart Marketplace. Walmart has surpassed ebay to be the #2 retailer. And yet, there are very limited solution providers for Walmart seller and brands. Is that because it is still too small or because it is underserved. After some customer research, we decided to give it a go!
DataSpark helps brands and sellers scale their business with the data they need for the Walmart Marketplace. Our API empowers solution providers to develop apps, dashboards, and reports to create their own SAAS products.