What we heard at Let’s Grow! 2026 about visibility, faster fulfillment, and the next phase of Marketplace growth.
A single word on a slide told us more about Walmart’s direction than any standalone feature: Visibility.
Our own Keegan Loyd attended Let’s Grow! 2026, Walmart’s Marketplace Seller Summit in San Diego. She came back with plenty of announcements, conversations, and notes for our team to unpack. As we compared them, visibility kept emerging as the idea that connected everything else.
During the general session, Walmart introduced Visibility as an additional pillar of seller success, placing it alongside assortment, pricing, and fulfillment. Discoverability and retail media are moving closer to the center of the commercial strategy, where decisions about products, pricing, and inventory are already being made.
In Q2 FY27, U.S. Marketplace sales grew 52%, Walmart U.S. eCommerce grew 24%, and Walmart Connect grew 43%. Nearly half of Marketplace volume now flows through Walmart Fulfillment Services. Walmart has momentum across commerce, media, and fulfillment, and the next opportunity is making those capabilities work together more deliberately for sellers.
Here is what stood out to us and what we think brands should be paying attention to.
Visibility now needs a seat at the table earlier
Most brands already understand that they need advertising to grow on a marketplace. The more interesting question is when media enters the planning process.
Too often, a brand decides which products to sell, sets its pricing, sends inventory, and then asks the media team to generate demand. By that point, the media team may be working with a product that has weak content, limited reviews, an uncompetitive offer, or inconsistent availability. More traffic simply brings more shoppers to the same unresolved problems.
Walmart’s decision to elevate Visibility within its seller-success framework suggests a more connected approach. Media decisions should be made alongside assortment and inventory decisions. Brands need to know which products deserve disproportionate support, where they have a genuine reason to be chosen, and whether the product page and fulfillment experience can convert the demand they create.
Visibility also includes more than paid placement. Search relevance, content quality, ratings, reviews, price, and availability all influence whether an item gets found and whether a shopper feels confident enough to buy it. Walmart Connect may create the introduction, but the rest of the business still has to carry the conversation forward.
Walmart is building more ways to close the gap between interest and purchase
Two announcements from the Summit belong together.
First, Walmart Connect is piloting re-engagement campaigns that can reach shoppers who previously interacted with a brand or product but did not purchase. Second, Walmart discussed the rollout of Brand Highlights, which gives Marketplace sellers more space below the fold to use branded imagery, video, and text on product detail pages.
Both capabilities address a familiar problem: shoppers often show interest without finding enough confidence to complete the purchase.
Re-engagement gives the brand another opportunity to reach that shopper. Brand Highlights gives the PDP more room to answer the questions that may have stopped them the first time. Used together, these capabilities could help brands create a more useful path from initial discovery to eventual conversion.
A shopper who has already encountered the product does not need the same introduction again. They may need stronger proof, a clearer explanation of the benefit, a comparison between options, or reassurance from reviews and product demonstrations.
Brands can start preparing before every detail of the pilots is finalized. Look at search terms, customer questions, reviews, return reasons, and competitive PDPs. Where are shoppers hesitating? What information would help them make a decision? Those answers should shape both the Brand Highlights content and the messages used for re-engagement.
Thirty-minute fulfillment creates a more interesting assortment question
Walmart also announced the expansion of its Forward Deployed Inventory program to Marketplace sellers. The pilot is placing in-demand products closer to customers within Walmart’s fulfillment network, including satellite locations. Walmart’s long-term vision is to fulfill some Marketplace orders in as little as 30 minutes.
The 30-minute promise will get attention. The more useful question for brands is which products become meaningfully more valuable when they can arrive that quickly.
For some categories, speed may have a real effect on the decision. A replacement item, an urgent household need, or a product connected to an immediate occasion could benefit significantly from being available nearby. Other products may gain very little from arriving in 30 minutes instead of tomorrow.
Walmart reports that Marketplace items with the Fulfilled by Walmart tag and a delivery promise of two days or less see 50% GMV growth on average. That gives brands a reason to take faster fulfillment seriously, while still doing the work to understand where additional speed will actually change shopper behavior.
The most important takeaway is how everything connects
Walmart is bringing Marketplace closer to the capabilities that make its broader ecosystem distinctive: first-party shopper data, a rapidly growing media business, and a physical network that can put inventory remarkably close to the customer. Sellers are gaining more ways to create demand, improve the product experience, and deliver quickly.
That creates a stronger growth engine, but it also raises the execution bar. Media performs better when the offer is competitive. Rich PDP content performs better when the item is available. Faster fulfillment becomes more valuable when it is attached to the right product and shopping occasion.
As brands plan for Q4 and 2027, we would bring commerce, media, content, and operations into the same conversation and ask:
- Which Marketplace products have earned greater visibility?
- Where are shoppers dropping out between discovery and purchase?
- Does the PDP answer the questions that are keeping them from converting?
- Which products become more compelling when delivery shifts from days to hours or minutes?
- Are the teams managing media, content, and inventory working from the same priorities?
Walmart Marketplace is becoming more connected to Walmart’s media, data, and fulfillment advantages. The opportunity for brands is substantial, especially for teams that can connect those pieces around a clear set of products and customer needs.
At Bluebird, that is where we spend much of our time: helping brands bring retail strategy, Marketplace operations, content, and Walmart Connect together so the entire business is working toward the same growth priorities.