Product reviews on Walmart Canada by brand

When we were planning our imminent expansion into Canada, we decided to have a look at the online grocery landscape. That meant having a look at the online supermarket product ratings and reviews for CPG brands in Canada on the main retailers. We did look at Lowblaws, Sobey's (Voilá) and Metro but they don't currently carry shopper product reviews. So we focussed on Walmart as they do and have done for some time. 

To undertake the review of online product reviews in Canada within Walmart, the first step was to scrape the raw data, then attribute it to brand and manufacturer. Once this was done, the analysis could begin. A short summary of our observations is contained below together with Excel and PDF downloads of the brand level data.

A short summary of our observations is contained below together with Excel and PDF downloads of the category and brand level data. More data is available down to product level with many more measures, please contact us if you would like to know more.

Summary

Walmart is one of the major players in grocery in Canada and has been carrying product reviews on their site for some time. We found 6,032,129 reviews across a total of 29,332 products listed on the site or more than 200 per product on average. What this average hides is a massive discrepancy between the "have's and the have nots". 

Top of the brand list of reviews is Pampers from P&G with a whopping average of 31,883 reviews per item. Interestingly, each of their 3 Pampers Swaddlers skus has nearly 60,000 per item. It is difficult to imagine any shopper reading them all, never mind quite what they think of the credibility of so many. At the other end of the spectrum, we found 262 brands (40% of 622 with 10 or more items listed) that didn't have a single item with 30 or more reviews (the minimum we would recommend)

The good news for any brand manager or e-commerce National Account Manager reading this is you don't need thousands of reviews to make an impact. Our proprietary research here (Online Shopper ratings & Review research) shows that you just need 30 recent reviews to make a significant impact on shopper behaviour. We've seen increases in online rate of sale of 30-35% (Kellogg case study showing an increase in sales of 32% ongoing).

Conclusion

Only 25% of skus on Walmart Canada online store have 30 or more reviews (never mind how "fresh" they are ie we know shoppers value recent reviews much more than older ones). This is a great opportunity to get ahead of the competition by working with someone like CheckoutSmart who make it easy for any brand to get genuine, verified shopper, "permanent"* reviews, all delivered with no resource required on your side. 

* "Permanent" - As when you work with CheckoutSmart you don't have to pay every year just to keep your reviews on the retailer sites

See how we work and deliver reviews globally.

Download our Report

Our report is free to download as an Excel sheet or a pdf. Simply click on the links below. The report format is illustrated below, showing all brands with over 10 skus in the format below covering Baby, Beauty, Grocery, Health, Home, Household & Pantry, Outdoor Living, Personal Care and Toys:

Download files directly here: Excel and PDF

If you how found the report useful or would like more detail about how we help brands achieve their sales goals then please get in touch: