It has always been surprising that Walmart has not actively participated in the sports card market. Sure, they sold cards and all that.
To start selling on the Walmart Marketplace, you can register here.
But as the world’s largest company by revenue and a go-to for retail cards, you would expect them to use some of that muscle to get a more significant share of what has become a multi-billion-dollar business.
Instead, there was something very random and haphazard about their participation in the hobby. However, that is about to change with the introduction of Walmart Marketplace.
Or at least that is what they hope. Will it work? We look at the announcement of the creation of this venue for card sales and its significance for the hobby. What does the announcement of Walmart Marketplace mean?
The newly announced marketplace will operate in the following categories:
Currently, the marketplace is actively seeking sellers to join their platform.
Their website is designed to pique your interest: “As a trusted Walmart seller specializing in collectors’ items, your business could be an excellent fit for our new Collectibles Experience. Sellers who take advantage of this limited-time referral fee offer will enjoy 0% referral fees from July 1, 2024, to September 30, 2024, and additional perks!
As the largest retail chain in America and the largest seller of sports cards, Walmart already plays a significant role in the hobby. More Americans buy sports cards in person from the company than anywhere else.
There are 4,623 Walmart locations and 1,956 Target stores, so there is no comparison. There are only a few hundred local sports card stores in the country. Therefore, for many people in the country, Walmart is their primary source of cards, and this dominance in the physical retail space bodes well for their entry into the online market.
But that doesn’t quite translate to the retail giant’s status in the online space. In the e-commerce space, Walmart is a huge player but nowhere near as significant. Walmart currently accounts for 6.5% of all online sales activity in the United States.
That places them second behind Amazon, but a distant second, with $867.58 billion of sales for Amazon versus $387.72 billion for Walmart.
The short answer is that we don’t know. As they are now just trying to get a lineup of stores to work with, Walmart has not yet begun to perform outreach to customers. That means we are not yet sure what their selling practices and policies will be. It is quite possible that they do not have all those details worked out yet.
However, they are entering a space already wholly dominated by eBay. Therefore, it is unlikely that a corporate giant like Walmart would enter into this competition haphazardly.
But the competition will be tough to beat. eBay offers services like its vault and the ability to grade purchases directly through PSA, the largest grading company on the market; they have breaks performed on the platform. In addition, eBay has an authenticity guarantee for significant sales. They have covered the most conceivable angles of sports card sales.
It will be easier for Walmart to waltz into this highly competitive space with an excellent plan and offering a competitive set of services. In addition, buyers are very used to working with eBay, and previous efforts to move them to other sellers have failed.
But, of course, none of those alternatives had the muscle of Walmart.
The best evidence that Walmart intends to get serious about taking on eBay is the man they appointed to spearhead this move. We are talking about Bob Means, the former director of trading cards at eBay.
He worked for eBay for several years and was employed there until early 2024. Indeed, he is credited with keeping the e-commerce giant at the forefront of the sports card world during his time there.
Means wrote about the new initiative on LinkedIn: ” I am excited to be part of bringing collectibles to Walmart. The home for your everyday needs will soon be the center of your everyday wants. Understanding the passion collectors have, I am eager to connect customers to the best sellers and manufacturers in the business.”
If anyone knows where the bodies are buried at eBay and what their weaknesses are, it is Bob Means. But that also means he knows exactly how the odds are.
His former employee, partly thanks to Bob’s efforts, has built up a significant lead in the hobby. For example, Means instituted the authenticity guarantee and the vault at eBay.
However, whether he succeeds or not, the appointment of Means shows that Walmart is very serious about becoming a significant player in this space after years of not taking advantage of their muscle in the hobby.
Walmart has launched an advertising campaign to attract sellers, knowing that may be the most challenging step. This is how they are trying to get the concession of sellers.
You do not have to pay a selling fee when you set up, though confusingly, the Walmart advertisements refer to that as a referral fee. That offer is only from July 1, 2024, to September 30, 2024. Therefore, it is not a permanent policy but a perk for early adopters.
Aside from that, Walmart is offering:
None of these are particularly dramatic differences with eBay. I’m not sure this will be enough to differentiate between this platform and existing ones.
You may be wondering what is new about this. You can currently go to Walmart and buy cards from third-party sellers. We have all seen it: You go on their website hoping to get new card drops for the retail price and instead find some annoying, overpriced version available from a third-party seller.
The new platform will essentially build on that existing base. However, the current state of selling sports cards on the platform could be better. This would have to be a significant improvement to have credibility, and with Bob Means at the helm, you have to assume it will be.
Because Walmart appears to be targeting only licensed businesses with a tax I.D., the new marketplace will remain closer to the current setup than eBay. One of the best (and worst) things about eBay is that anyone can go there and sell their stuff. Here, that is not the case.
But while the existing platform is pretty bad, it has advantages. Walmart is the second biggest online seller in America. If you search the website for a product, the sellers from Walmart Marketplace will come up.
You don’t have to go to the Marketplace website to get it. That means that sellers using the platform will be able to get much action from people outside the hobby buying cards for the first time, or their kids, etc.
We are still determining whether Walmart will be selling raw cards. The application mentions explicitly graded cards but not raw ones. That would be very limiting if they have any ambition to compete with eBay.
On a more macro level, how much money will Walmart throw at this? They have far deeper pockets than any of their competitors. Fanatics was last estimated to hold a $31 billion value.
Meanwhile, eBay is believed to be worth $26.41 Billion. However, Walmart is worth about ten times as much as both, valued at $548.89 billion.
The most likely answer is no. We have already seen that retail giants could be better at leveraging their market share and resources in this space. Amazon and Fanatics need to do better at selling singles on their platforms.
The likely scenario for Walmart is that they remain in the category of places where you can buy cards that no one who understands the hobby would ever use.
There is a significant feeling that the hobby needs to be clamoring for another marketplace. When a company heavily dominates a space, there are barriers to entry.
A catch-22 develops in these situations. It takes time and effort for sellers to put their shops up on a new platform, especially when it has yet to establish an established customer base.
Meanwhile, new customers are less likely to use the new platform if fewer sellers are involved. That standoff has often stopped new and promising products from taking off.
The targeted sellers are different. On eBay, it is easy for anyone to step up and start selling.
Even if Walmart takes the collectibles space incredibly seriously, and they might, considering they hired one of the best people available, there is a strong sense that they have entered the market several years too late.
One way that Walmart can take a significant bite out of eBay is by lowering the fees significantly. There is a reason eBay is unaffectionately known as “feeBay” among collectors.
Selling there can be a pain; it feels like you are nickel and dimed by them. The best thing about competition in the capitalist market is that it forces companies to provide better services at lower prices. If that happens, Walmart will benefit in the short term by attracting more volume, and the sellers and customers will enjoy lower fee prices.
Still, eBay’s moves have entrenched them into the hobby so much that overcoming it seems almost impossible. The interlocking system they have created, with grading, vaulting, and selling in the same place, creates a self-contained ecosystem.
It stops people from disrupting that system to sell elsewhere. Why would they? So, wax is the most natural product in Walmart’s marketplace. And they may get a share of that. However, if they do not get a share of singles, eBay will remain far above its potential competitors.
Two significant things are working in favor of Walmart’s bid to enter the sports card science. First, the company has massive deep pockets.
They have cash reserves that no one in the hobby can match. The second is the expertise of Bob Means. This man took eBay from being a haphazard card marketplace into the absolute center of gravity for cards. He is a collector himself and clearly understands the hobby and marketing.
Therefore, we cannot dismiss Walmart’s effort to become a significant player in the hobby out of hand. It is not impossible.
However, the irony of the situation is that Means created such a tight infrastructure for card sales at eBay that it seems hard to beat. But is this a case of knowing the one weakness of the Death Star because he designed it?
Or did he make it so well that even Luke Skywalker can’t hit that spot? Or are my metaphors now entirely out of control?
To start selling on the Walmart Marketplace, you can register here.
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