I agree.

One positive remains though: If you buy from Walmart you get it from Walmart and their supply chain. With Amazon because they "mingle" inventory from third parties, you can order shipped & sold by Amazon.com and still get a counterfeit product, because a third party slipped it in.

And, yes, that has happened to me personally by the way.

It has happened to me a few times that I order from Walmart, see a shipment notification, that shipment "arrives" but definitely did not. However that day or the next I receive an Amazon package which I did not order containing my product.

So no, ordering from Walmart does not guarantee anything is going through their supply chain.

Was that from Walmart the retailer or someone else selling on Walmart's marketplace? I would be very surprised if Walmart itself resold you something from Amazon, but that does happen with third party retailers on their marketplace.

This happens in more than just Walmart - there are arbitrage experts that list product on eBay, Walmart, etc and just order it for you from Amazon.

I’m not exactly sure how they make money as the prices are often nearly identical.

I use to do this successfully for many years. I could sell for a few cents less than Amazon. Due to buying gift cards at Kroger with a 5% Cashback card. In addition I would also get 1000 fuel points per $250 that I could sell for $20 easily. So each $1000 in sales would net minimum $130 margin. Accounting for selling fees of around 10%, I could clear around $30 per $1000 even at breakeven or below Amazon prices. I would also be able to sell many items for more than the Amazon cost.

It worked well for several years with millions in sales, all automated. It became untenable though as Cryptocurrency facilitated people buying Amazon gift cards with stolen credit cards and cashing them out at 30-50% of face value.

So the market became saturated with scammers selling considerably cheaper than Amazon. For a time maybe 6-4 years ago you could get pretty much anything from Amazon on eBay for around 20% less and shipped direct from Amazon via prime.

Amazon eventually shut it down though and if you meet some very strict gift card threshold they will just steal your balance. People still do it, but large scale automation isn't really worth it any longer.

I’ve often thought it was something like that, milking various rewards options.

There isn’t a clearly identifiable difference anymore.

There is. The retailer is listed.

Subtly. Most people aren’t going to notice.

Not anymore, I got a counterfeit control pad from walmart.com. Thankfully I was able to return it at the store.

Just what I was about to say. Guess I'll cross Walmart.com off my online retailer list.

Sorry Walmart, if you let your brand get polluted with 3rd parties selling garbage you will quickly start to lose whatever brand loyalty you have.

I never expected top end merchandise from Walmart. They are a discount retailer and that's fine. But I do expect to get genuine merchandise that is as advertised, not counterfeit or fradulent crap.

They have hosted third party sellers for... at least 3-5 years. If you didnt know this already you wernt a customer. They lost 0 in revenue from when they opened their site up to third party sellers and gained lots of revenue from those third party sellers.

I dont like third party sellers either but obviously it makes financial sense for these companies to do this.

I did know they had 3rd parties but thought they were somewhat better vetted than Amazon.

And regardless, I'm on walmart.com so it reflects on them when some third party seller sends me shit.

It is true that I am not a frequent shopper there.

I've never actually been able to order anything off Walmart. They always cancel my order after a day due to 'fraud' alerts on the seller. I guess that's good?

For others that are trying to avoid 3rd party sellers: look for Sold and shipped by Walmart.com

As far as I'm aware they don't comingle 3rd party inventory like "Sold and shipped by Amazon.com" does.

Sorry I am confused can’t you filter by Walmart sold vs third party?

You can, but they do hide it. And if the product you’re looking for isn’t currently in stock, you won’t see the filter at all.

The trick I do is “pickup today or ship to store” as that gets Walmart only items as far as I can tell.

Me too!

I've been doing this with the Walmart+ delivery service for $100 a year. I even applied for their 5% cash back credit card. It saves me a good amount of time and money, and I am overall very happy with it.

If Walmart ever starts mixing 3rd party reseller crap with their "in-store" inventories, they will ruin a fantastic product and lose me as a customer.

Target does this crap as well. When I search on these sites now I always check the box on items only fulfilled by the retailer. If there's no box like that, I won't shop there.