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Rithum wins Walmart’s first Marketplace Solution Provider of the Year. Two sellers share where their time goes before holiday peak season
Walmart named Rithum its first-ever Marketplace Solution Provider of the Year this month at the Let’s Grow! 2026 Walmart Marketplace Seller Summit in San Diego, recognizing more than 14 years of work together on programs including Multichannel Solutions and Customer Favorites. Rithum Chief Revenue Officer Greg Banning pointed to the sellers behind it, calling them “the reason this partnership works.”
Sellers like Mary Beth Carson and Joe Caldwell joined Jenn Connally, a product manager at Rithum, for the session, “How specialty and industrial sellers are growing on Walmart through catalog and pricing.” Carson, director of ecommerce at Wood Expressions, manages about 1,000 board game SKUs across five marketplaces. Caldwell, director of ecommerce at SIM Supply, manages an industrial catalog of roughly 700,000 items across eight marketplaces. Connally works with sellers launching and growing on marketplaces, and she started the conversation by questioning a common assumption about what drives growth on Walmart.
When sellers talk about winning on Walmart, the conversation often jumps straight to advertising. While advertising is important, we’re finding that sellers are winning in less glamorous areas. Catalog and pricing tend to be the levers that decide whether you’re eligible to be seen and whether you convert.
– Jenn Connally, product manager, Rithum
Where the growth came from
- Wood Expressions paired Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS) with advertising. Ad spend and WFS that gives listings the Walmart+ badge lifted conversion in a way neither move managed alone.
- SIM Supply sets a floor and a ceiling, then lets Walmart price between them. Those boundaries are built in Rithum and passed to Walmart, which handles the repricing in between.
- Both sellers combined Walmart programs rather than betting on one. The results came from stacking programs and measuring what worked.
How Wood Expressions grew Walmart sales 88% by pairing WFS with advertising
Carson’s team measures every marketplace on whether it grows sales and whether it protects margin. WFS fees came in a dollar or two below the competing service the company was using, and roughly five dollars below what it cost to ship from her own warehouse. Walmart puts WFS rates at 15% below the competition on average.
WFS did not boost sales at first. Wood Expressions ran it for a stretch without much change in volume, and advertising had already solved the harder problem of shoppers finding the catalog at all. Conversion was the piece that stayed flat, until Carson’s team started putting ad spend behind WFS listings. WFS items display a badge on the listing, the signal Walmart+ members look for when deciding what to buy. Walmart says items with that tag and a two-day delivery promise average 50% GMV growth.
The WFS and advertising combination was one of the key drivers Carson shared onstage in September, when she detailed how her team achieved 88% year-over-year growth.
When we advertise a WFS product with that Walmart+ badge, our conversion rates have increased significantly. We feel that that combination of WFS and the advertising is the reason we’ve grown 88% year over year. We’ve never experienced that level of growth on Walmart, but Walmart is now our fastest-growing channel.
– Mary Beth Carson, director of ecommerce, Wood Expressions
Walmart’s holiday guidance pushes sellers to send inventory into its fulfillment centers well ahead of the October and Annual events, which is what puts the badge on a listing in time to matter for peak. Carson’s team runs the WFS fulfillment center inside Rithum, where it also gets restocking and sales data.
Wood Expressions protects wholesale relationships by holding prices steady across channels
Wood Expressions sells wholesale to accounts ranging from mom-and-pop shops to big box retailers, and those buyers watch what the company charges on marketplaces. As a premium brand, it needs them to trust that the price they buy at is not being undercut online, which is why Carson calls pricing integrity “everything to us.”
Her team is proactive about weeding out unauthorized sellers who undercut it. Pricing otherwise stays consistent across her marketplaces, with slight adjustments only when data shows an item resonating with one platform’s customers. Every one of those prices runs through a single system.
“Rithum is our source of truth,” Carson said. “Every image, every piece of product data, every price flows through there.”
That premium stance kept Wood Expressions out of coupons and promotions for years. Carson reconsidered once she saw her customers growing more price-conscious, and rather than commit the holidays to an untested idea, she ran promotions during Walmart’s summer deals first. The results were strong enough to change her Q4 plan, and board games sell heavily enough in the fourth quarter that she wanted the data in hand before Walmart’s October event.
“We are a premium brand, and in the past we didn’t offer discounts or coupons or promotions. But we know that our customers are more budget-minded now. We tested that theory during summer deals, and we did see the impact. We are going to lean into that in Q4, especially for October deals and Black Friday and Cyber Monday.”
– Mary Beth Carson, director of ecommerce, Wood Expressions
SIM Supply builds its Walmart price floors and ceilings inside Rithum
Caldwell tests every new Walmart program by asking whether it lowers the referral fee. The Walmart incentive program does, and SIM Supply forwards those savings to its customers instead of keeping the difference.
“It’s what we do with those incentives that really counts,” Caldwell said. “Rather than just use it as margin and pocket it, we reduce the price of the product. It makes it quite a bit more competitive.”
Caldwell calls Walmart his number two channel by volume and his number one focus by time spent, and pricing is where most of that time goes. SIM Supply treats shipping, commission and every other cost as a variable, then runs those variables through Rithum business rules that set a minimum and maximum price on every item and pass them to Walmart.
“Rithum is our data warehouse. It’s where we keep all of our pricing and all of our special deals,” Caldwell said.
SIM Supply removes manual steps from its order process ahead of peak
“Automation is the number one priority across our whole ecommerce group right now,” Caldwell said. Damaged shipments were an obvious place to start, since each one generates a service ticket and a replacement order somebody has to place by hand. His team flags those orders and reships automatically where it can, so a replacement is often already moving before the customer sees a damage notification. Caldwell described the approach as designing the manual work away, and his team applies it anywhere someone has to place, track or fix an order by hand.
Service reps also sit in SIM Supply’s ecommerce technical meetings, where a problem with a vendor, a carrier or a single item reaches the technical team directly. They can change carriers or swap out an item on the spot.
Better product data is how SIM Supply keeps expanding its Walmart catalog
SIM Supply lists 263,000 of its 700,000 items on Walmart. Caldwell points to product information as the big reason more are not live yet. That data comes from vendors and sometimes lacks certain attributes, so his team uses Rithum’s Catalog Assist to fill those gaps and skip the manual data entry.
“There’s a lot of other programs out there which we like. The incentive program is great,” Caldwell said. “But catalog is always going to be our focus, because if it’s not out there, it won’t sell.”
What both sellers are investing in next
Carson is sending more inventory into WFS so the Walmart+ badge reaches more of her listings. Advertising is the bigger shift. Her team held back for years over weak returns and is now spending more with Walmart Connect, conservatively and with margin in view, and she is testing Walmart’s listing AI recommendations to help shoppers find the catalog.
“Walmart+, faster shipping, a cleaner Seller Center,” she said. “The platform just keeps getting stronger.”
Caldwell is staying with catalog, the answer he gives every year. Walmart Business is the Walmart program he said he is most looking forward to.
Walmart’s marketplace posted its fastest growth in two and a half years
Both sellers built their Walmart growth by combining programs rather than betting on one, and both treat catalog work as ongoing maintenance rather than a launch project. One does it across 1,000 SKUs, the other across 700,000. Caldwell has been selling on the marketplace for 14 years, about as long as Rithum has been partnered with it. “We’ve watched it grow up,” he said, “and we’ve grown with it.”
Walmart’s third-party marketplace grew nearly 50% year over year in the quarter ending April 30, 2026, its strongest pace since the channel opened to international sellers.
See how Rithum helps sellers scale on Walmart, or read how sellers prepare for the Walmart holiday season.
Quotes from the session have been lightly edited for clarity.
