Walmart Affiliate Program Review (2023)
Walmart is the world's largest brick-and-mortar retailer, and the company's growth is not slowing down.
Not surprisingly, Walmart has an affiliate program. In this review, you will learn everything about the Walmart affiliate program and how to become a successful Walmart affiliate.
You will also learn how the program stands in comparison to Amazon Associates and Target affiliate program.
Walmart Affiliate Program Overview
Commission: 1-4%
Cookie Duration: 3 days
Where to Join: Impact
Payment Options: PayPal, Electronic Funds Transfer
Walmart Affiliate Program
To become a Walmart affiliate, you first need to get accepted to the Walmart affiliate program.
The program is currently hosted on the Impact Radius affiliate network (until June 2019, it was hosted on Rakuten Advertising).
To be accepted to the Walmart affiliate program, you should fulfill the following requirements:
- Your website traffic should primarily be from the USA
- Your website must be active
- Your website must have family-friendly content
Even though Walmart operates in more than 10 countries, the Walmart affiliate program targets the US market.
I am not exactly sure what they mean by "active website." I suppose they are not mentioning the obvious that your website should be live but that it should have some recent content.
Family-friendly oriented means that your website should not have any sexually explicit content, content about alcohol, gambling, violence, etc., you get the point. This is a requirement for almost all affiliate programs. Maybe what's interesting is that Walmart explicitly forbids anything related to crypto.
Currently, the acceptance rate on Impact is just 60%.
It is alarming that the response rate on Impact is just 20%. I always look at the response rate as it indicates how good the support for affiliates is. Preferably it should be 80-100%. For example, the Target affiliate program currently has around 70%, and the Bluehost affiliate program has a response rate close to 100%.
Brands should care about their affiliates, and that does not seem to be the case with the Walmart affiliate program.
Walmart affiliates get a 3-day cookie duration, and the program has the "last click credit" policy.
This means that if a visitor to your website clicks on your affiliate link but does not make a purchase and then clicks on another website's affiliate link and makes a purchase, you will not be eligible for a commission. Under this policy, only the last click that leads to a purchase receives credit.
Walmart Affiliate Program Commission
The Walmart affiliate program commission ranges between 1-4% depending on the category.
As you can see in the table below, there are many categories for which you earn nothing.
If you click on "SKU exclusions", you will see a list of 2500 products that are not eligible for commission even if they fall under a category that has a commission. Most of them are Apple products.
Before you start promoting Walmart products, always double-check that the products are eligible for commission. Just like Target, Walmart's affiliate program does not support all categories.
The Walmart affiliate commissions are lower compared to both Target and Amazon Associates.
Target has a 1-8% commission and a cookie duration of 7 days. You can see the commission and supported categories below.
Amazon Associates' commission ranges from 1-20%, but the cookie period is just 24 hours.
Nevertheless, Amazon prolongs the cookie duration to 90 days if people add a product to their cart but don't buy immediately.
The minimal payout threshold is $10.
Since the Walmart affiliate program is hosted on Impact, you can withdraw with PayPal and electronic funds transfer.
When will you get paid? According to the program's terms, you are able to withdraw 2 months after a sale.
Can You Make $1000 a Month as a Walmart Affiliate?
Walmart affiliate program does not pay much. You can still earn a lot of money with the program, but your website needs decent traffic.
Preferably, you should focus on products that fall into the 4% commission rate category.
Let’s try to calculate how much you could earn promoting this product.
This product, which sells for $105, claims to help create clean and clear skin and falls into the beauty category with a 4% commission.
4% of $105 = $4.2
To earn $1,000 a month on this specific Walmart product, 238 people would have to buy it.
How much traffic would you need to reach 238 buyers? It’s obviously impossible to calculate a precise number, but let's try a rough estimate.
Let's assume you have a nice 2% conversion.
With a 2% conversation rate, you would need around 12.000 people to read your product review to make $1.000.
Would it be possible to achieve it with this product? It would, but it would be extremely difficult. Even though acne treatment is a huge niche with a lot of search volume and various keywords, it’s also very competitive.
Let’s try one more hypothetical example. This time, with a product from the electronics category, which only has a 1% commission rate.
1% of $1000 = $10
With this product, you would need 100 buyers to earn $1,000
With a product that costs $1000, you would have a lower conversion rate. Let's assume 1%
To get 100 buyers with a 1% conversion rate, you would need 10.000 visitors.
How to Make Money with the Walmart Affiliate Program?
After reading the previous section, you may feel that the Walmart Affiliate Program is not worth your time.
However, don’t get discouraged.
You will need to have a website with more than 10.000 monthly visitors to make a decent income, but that's achievable with the right approach.
Niche Websites
Walmart has a lot of products across many categories. Even though you cannot promote all the categories with the Walmart affiliate program, you still have a lot to choose from.
The fastest and easiest way to start making money with affiliate marketing is to have a niche website.
Most affiliates start with a generic website and promote products across multiple categories.
If you have a generic website, you cannot achieve topical authority. To achieve topical authority, you need to produce a lot of content around the same topic and keywords.
If you have 20 long posts about baby strollers, Google will perceive your website as a trusted source for information about strollers.
This allows you to rank your content on Google faster.
When selecting your niche, do proper keyword research first. Your niche should have a lot of keywords with lower ranking difficulty and a decent search volume.
You might find a very narrow niche with many keywords that would be easy to rank for, but what's the point in ranking for them if nobody is searching the keywords.
Your website should also have a space to grow. This means that you should select a category with many subcategories.
Let's say you would select the Baby category that has a 3% commission rate. At first, you would focus on the "Strollers" subcategory. You would create keyword clusters and target keywords related to strollers. You would first write a lot of informational content and then also transactional content (content with a purchase intent like product reviews).
Once you would start earning money with the "Stroller" subcategory and felt there is not much room to grow, you could expand to other "Baby" subcategories. For example, besides strollers, you could start writing content about baby toys.
It is good to have a generic domain so that it does not interfere with your expansion. The domain would be a little misleading if you registered a domain strollersparadise.com and later decided to expand to other subcategories. It would not be a dealbreaker, but definitely better to have a more generic domain if you cover more topics. Unless you are sure your subcategory is big enough and you will not expand in the future.
Generic Websites
As mentioned earlier, earning with a generic website is much harder than with a niche website.
I would not recommend it to anyone new to affiliate marketing.
Unlike with a niche website, you cannot establish a topical authority, and it is harder to find keyword opportunities.
Let’s say that you create an affiliate website on which you showcase interesting presents for men.
You will have a website with a lot of different products and will have to target more generic keywords.
Generic keywords are very competitive. Most of the generic keywords don’t have purchase intent and the ones that have are very hard to rank for.
If you manage to rank well for a generic keyword such as "cool things to buy", you have won the jackpot and can make a lot of money with affiliate marketing.
However, the chances of achieving that are very slim. Especially, if you don’t have any experience with growing websites.
Go the easier route and build a niche website instead.
With a niche website, you can start earning decent money even with a completely new website within a year.
With a generic one, it is almost impossible.
Walmart Affiliate Tools
Walmart affiliates can use various affiliate tools.
On Impact, you can create a deep link to any Walmart page you like and access a gallery of banners.
Currently, not all tools can be accessed from the Walmart affiliate page on Impact.
Strangely, some can only be accessed through the Walmart affiliate portal here.
To access the portal, you first have to create an account.
If you found Walmart on Impact, you would not know that there is some in-house Walmart affiliate program that you can join to get access to more tools.
Besides the tools, there is no other benefit of joining the in-house program. Since you cannot create affiliate links there, you will always have to join the program on Impact.
Walmart SDK
Walmart SDK allows you to embed a "Buy Now" button in your content
This is one of the tools you cannot find on Impact.
What’s great about the "Buy Now" button is that it can be configured to directly add the product to the cart on Walmart.com. This can increase conversion rates as it shortens the buying process of the customer.
The Walmart WordPress Plugin
Walmart has developed a WordPress plugin that provides banners and links to Walmart products. The plugin also lets you create links to search pages which can be helpful if you want to promote a specific product.
Links and banners can be added while composing your articles on WordPress, which can be very convenient if you add many products.
However, it seems that Walmart has stopped updating the plugin, as it hasn’t been updated in years. Plugins that are not regularly updated can be a security threat to your website.
I take the security of my websites seriously and never install abandoned plugins.
Walmart Chrome Extension
Walmart used to have a Chrome extension that made it possible to generate affiliate links directly from the browser while browsing Walmart website.
Unfortunately, Walmart removed the extension from the Chrome store, and I have not found any information that they plan to return it.
Walmart Affiliate Program vs. Amazon Associates
The Walmart affiliate program is often compared with Amazon Associates.
If you've been reading this review from top to bottom, you probably have an idea of what I'm going to say.
Amazon Associates is a clear winner.
Amazon Associates has a higher commission:
Amazon: 1-20%
Walmart: 1-4%
It also allows you to promote products in more categories.
Moreover, Amazon has excellent support, and it is clear that they take their affiliate program seriously.
The same can't be said about the Walmart affiliate program. People managing their program on Impact don't always reply to messages. Strangely, Walmart affiliates cannot access all the tools on Impact and have to also create an account for the Walmart in-house affiliate program as well.
Some of the tools are very outdated. Instead of updating them, Walmart instead removes them completely. That happened to the Walmart Google Chrome extension.
Walmart has better cookie duration:
Amazon: 24 hours
Walmart: 3 days
Nevertheless, Amazon extends the cookie duration to 90 days when people add a product to their cart, while Walmart does not.
I think Walmart still wins as having a default 3 days cookie period is better and will lead to more sales.
But besides this, Walmart falls behind in everything.
Summary: Pros & Cons
Below, you can find a quick summary of the biggest pros and cons of the program.
Pros
- Walmart is a well-known and trusted brand
- Compared to Amazon Associates, the program offers a decent cookie duration of 3 days
- The Walmart SDK tool is useful and can increase conversions
- The program is hosted on Impact and PayPal can be used for withdrawals
Cons
- The 1-4% affiliate commission is low compared to Amazon and Target
- Bad support
- The SDK tool is not accessible on Impact
- Outdated WordPress plugin
Should You Join the Walmart Affiliate Program?
Even if Amazon Associates didn’t exist and we could not make any comparison, I would still not recommend joining the Walmart affiliate program.
The affiliate commission is low, and Walmart has clearly lost interest in its affiliate program.
Creating quality content takes time. You don’t want to be a part of an affiliate program you don’t know will still exist tomorrow.
Join Amazon Associates, and don’t waste your time with the Walmart affiliate program.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes, Walmart has an affiliate program hosted on Impact.
The commission ranges between 1-4% depending on the category.
The highest 4% commission is currently for these categories: Mens Apparel, Baby/Toddler/Boys/Girls Apparel, Shoes, Intimate Apparel/Womens Apparel, Accessories, Jewelry
To join the Walmart Affiliate program, you need to have a website that has:
- Traffic primarily from the USA
- Recent content
- Family-friendly content
