By Lyndee Riggs

Aug

24

Walmart has a name for the items shoppers on Walmart.com search for and buy frequently: Customer Favorites. The list is generated from Walmart’s own demand signals plus outside market data, and it’s refreshed monthly.

Right now Walmart is paying sellers to list them — not with a credit, but with a discount on the referral fees you’d otherwise owe. Up to 100% off, for 90 days, if you meet the pricing and shipping conditions. It’s a real offer with real conditions, and one of those conditions will quietly disqualify items if you don’t know about it in advance.

Below is the whole program: what it pays, what it demands, and where it bites. Then the part Walmart leaves entirely to you — working out which items to list, getting them live inside the window, and holding the conditions long enough to keep the discount. That second part is the work, and it’s what Listing Mirror is for.

Why Walmart is paying for this

Walmart knows what its customers are looking for and can see where its catalog comes up short. Customer Favorites are the items where demand is established and the shelf is thin. Discounting referral fees is a cheap way to get those items on the site fast, from sellers who are already there.

Walmart publishes two figures for how these items perform. Customer Favorites can deliver up to 12x higher sales per item compared with non-Customer Favorite items, and up to 5x greater page view visibility. Both are footnoted to FY26 performance data, and both are measured against non-Customer Favorite items that are already competitively priced and shipping in two days or less. That comparison basis is the part worth holding onto: it isn’t demand-driven items versus neglected ones. It’s demand-driven items versus other items that are also doing the pricing and shipping properly.

“Up to” is Walmart’s word, and it’s doing work in both figures.

The two tiers

There are two levels of referral fee discount, and each one is attached to a condition. The condition is the whole deal.

25% off referral fees for 90 days — for a new Customer Favorite listing that meets or beats competitor pricing. Per the terms, the discount is applied upon the first transaction for the qualifying item.

100% off referral fees for 90 days — for the same competitive pricing plus fast, free shipping. There are two ways to satisfy the shipping half:

  • Fulfill it yourself. You must enable free shipping and a two-day delivery promise on the item. The discount begins on the item’s first transaction.
  • Fulfill through Walmart Fulfillment Services. Eligible inventory has to be received by WFS, and the discount applies once the item is fulfilled through WFS. Going the WFS route also gets you 100% off storage fees and 15% off fulfillment fees per item, for 90 days after the first unit of inventory is received — provided the first transaction for that item happens within 45 days of the referral fee incentive start date. Preparation services and unplanned fees for non-compliant inbound items are not discounted, and only WFS-eligible items get the WFS discounts.

The two tiers don’t stack, and neither stacks with Walmart’s other incentives. Only one referral fee incentive applies to a transaction at a time, and Walmart’s system automatically applies whichever discount is deepest. You don’t choose, and you can’t combine.

One more wrinkle worth knowing if you start seller-fulfilled and change your mind: an item already receiving one of these discounts that you convert to WFS may qualify for a fresh 90-day 100% referral fee discount period — the competitive pricing requirement still applies — starting when the item is first fulfilled through WFS. The first WFS transaction still has to fall within 45 days of the original incentive start date, and the total incentive period is capped at 135 days from that start date. Nothing is discounted past it.

What that looks like in fees

An illustration, with deliberately round numbers — not a projection, and not a claim about what any item will sell:

Take an item in a category with a 15% referral fee that does $10,000 in sales during its 90-day window. The referral fees on that are $1,500. At the 25% tier — competitive pricing only — you keep $375 of it. At the 100% tier — competitive pricing plus free two-day shipping — you keep all $1,500. Referral fee rates vary by category, so run your own numbers against your own rate.

The gap between the tiers is the price of a shipping commitment. Whether that commitment costs you more than $1,125 on a $10,000 item is arithmetic only you can do.

The seven-day window

This is the detail most likely to cost you money, so it gets its own section.

You have seven days from the date an item is listed to opt in. Opt in after that window and the item is never eligible. Not eligible later, not eligible on appeal — the terms say items are not eligible if the seller opts in after the seven-day window, and that discounts cannot be applied retroactively to items optimized before the incentive start date or before opting in.

The failure mode writes itself. A seller finds the Customer Favorites list, gets excited, spends two weeks building and publishing forty new listings, then goes back and opts into the program. Every one of those listings is past its window. The work is done, the items are live, and the discount is gone permanently.

Opt in first. Then list. If you already have items live and inside their seven days, opt in today rather than tomorrow.

Who qualifies

Eligibility is Walmart’s call, and it rests on account standing rather than on your catalog. Under the terms, sellers must meet all of the following at enrollment and maintain them for the whole incentive period:

  • Active on Walmart Marketplace for a minimum required period
  • An acceptable loss rate, as determined by Walmart
  • No recent account suspensions within the applicable lookback period
  • A satisfactory risk score, which can vary by seller segment and location
  • No more than the permitted number of flagged offers, at enrollment and throughout
  • A clean Risk Operations history, with no more than the permitted number of warning communications in the review period

Walmart doesn’t publish the numeric thresholds for any of these. The terms say they’re established and evaluated by Walmart in its sole discretion, subject to change without notice, and that failing to maintain them can mean disqualification and reversal of discounts already applied. You also have to be in good performance standing against the Seller Performance Standards — cancellation rate, on-time delivery, valid tracking, and the rest.

Two item-level exclusions are easy to miss: items whose meet-or-beat pricing is driven by Walmart-funded incentives don’t qualify, and neither do items with no price coverage — that is, items where Walmart has no competitor price to compare yours against.

The conditions don’t stop at enrollment

Three things about how the discount behaves once you have it:

  • Discounts apply only on days the item actually meets the pricing and shipping criteria. Drift above competitor pricing for a week and you don’t get those days back.
  • Customer Favorite items are subject to change monthly, without notice. Walmart reserves the right to stop a discount if an item is no longer in demand.
  • Discounts run 90 days from the date the item becomes active and transactable on Walmart.com, or until January 31, 2027, whichever comes first. List something in December and the calendar, not the 90 days, is what ends your discount.

Running the play

Walmart supplies the demand data and the discount. Everything between those two things is yours: pick the right items, get them live fast, price them competitively, ship them in two days, and hold all of it for 90 days. Here’s what each of those actually demands — and how Listing Mirror handles it.

Work out which Customer Favorites you already stock

Walmart shows you Customer Favorites recommendations in Seller Center. The useful question is narrower: which of them can you ship this week? That means matching Walmart’s demand data against your own catalog, item by item, and separating “I already stock this” from “I already sell this on Walmart” from “I’d have to go source it.”

Listing Mirror does that match by barcode. We compare Walmart’s demand data against your product catalog and report the in-demand items you already stock but haven’t listed on Walmart. It’s the same shortlist you could build by hand from two exports and an afternoon in a spreadsheet — it just stays current as Walmart’s monthly refresh moves items on and off the list.

Sort the shortlist before you spend the seven days

A list of matches isn’t the same as a plan. Two hundred Customer Favorites in your warehouse is only useful if you know which twenty to list first, and the ranking that matters is demand against competition.

The Growth Opportunities report is built around that question, one Walmart store at a time. It tells you how many Customer Favorites match your catalog at all, how many of those sit in low-competition territory, the average number of offers you’d be listing against, and your own current price next to each item. The offer count is the number to watch: an in-demand item with a handful of sellers is a different proposition from the same item with forty, and the fee discount is identical on both. Filter it down, export the shortlist, work it in order.

Once items are live, Listing Mirror flags which of your Walmart listings are currently Customer Favorites, so you can see what’s in demand while you’re working on the product rather than in a separate report. Walmart’s list changes monthly and so do the flags — which also means you’ll notice when something drops off, and Walmart’s right to withdraw a discount on an item that’s no longer in demand stops being a surprise.

Get them live before the clock runs out

Seven days per item is not a lot of runway if every listing is built by hand, and the items worth listing usually arrive in batches, not one at a time.

If your products already live on Amazon, eBay, Shopify, or anywhere else, you don’t need to rekey them. Listing Mirror imports that product data and builds Walmart-compliant listings from it in bulk — attributes, categories, variations and all. The seven-day window stops being the constraint, because publishing forty listings takes about as long as publishing one.

Hold the price on the days that count

Remember the clause: discounts apply only on days the item meets the pricing criteria. A week of drifting above competitor pricing is a week of full referral fees, and nobody sends you a warning.

Pricing rules are how you make that automatic rather than a daily chore. Set channel-specific rules so your Walmart price stays competitive without dragging down what you charge on your other channels, and let repricing keep the item where the incentive requires it — for all 90 days, not just the day you listed it.

Make a two-day promise you can actually keep

The jump from 25% off to 100% off referral fees is bought with free two-day delivery. That promise is only worth making if your stock numbers are honest, because Walmart’s performance standards are still running underneath — and cancellations and late shipments put your eligibility itself at risk, not just this quarter’s fees.

Real-time inventory sync across every channel you sell on is the floor: when something sells on Amazon, your Walmart quantity moves with it, so you’re not promising two-day delivery on units you no longer have. If you’re going the WFS route, Listing Mirror reads your WFS inventory levels directly — and can fulfill orders from other channels out of that same WFS stock, or use FBA inventory for Walmart orders, so a fulfillment decision made for this incentive doesn’t strand inventory everywhere else.

Know whether the discount actually paid

A 90-day fee holiday changes the margin math on every item it touches, and then it ends. The items worth keeping at full referral fees are not always the ones that looked best while fees were zero.

Listing Mirror’s sales and profitability reporting tracks profit and margin per item across every channel, using your real product costs and the fees that actually settled. When the 90 days are up, you’ll know which Customer Favorites earned their place in the catalog and which ones were only ever working because Walmart was paying the toll.

What this program is and isn’t

It’s a fee holiday on items with demonstrated demand, and that’s a genuinely good offer. Ninety days of zero referral fees is real margin at exactly the point where a new listing is least likely to be profitable — no reviews, no ranking, no history.

It isn’t a growth strategy. The discount doesn’t make an item sell; it makes an item cheaper to sell while you find out whether it sells. Notice what the qualifying conditions actually require: competitive pricing and two-day free delivery. Those are the same things that make an item work on Walmart with no incentive attached. Walmart is subsidizing behavior it wants anyway, on items it already knows customers want. If you can’t hold that price or hit that delivery promise profitably, the discount is only paying you to do something unprofitable for 90 days.

It also isn’t a sure thing. Eligibility is discretionary, thresholds are unpublished, items can drop off the list monthly, and the whole offer ends January 31, 2027 regardless of when you started.

If you’re already competitive on price and fast on shipping, this is a straightforward yes on any Customer Favorite you can source. If you’re not, fix that first — the fee discount will still be there, and it’s worth considerably more on an item you can actually sustain.

Start with the list

Opt in through Walmart Seller Center first — that’s the seven-day clock, and it’s the one thing nobody can do for you. Then find out how many Customer Favorites are already sitting in your warehouse.

Create an account to match your catalog against Walmart’s demand data, or schedule a call and we’ll walk through your catalog with you.

Sources

Lyndee Riggs