There was a time that I turned to buying from walmart.com as alternative to amazon, precisely because it wasn't taking the 3rd-party seller approach; but then they decided they had to imitate Amazon. Well, no thanks.
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.
So no, ordering from Walmart does not guarantee anything is going through their supply chain.
I’m not exactly sure how they make money as the prices are often nearly identical.
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.
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.
I dont like third party sellers either but obviously it makes financial sense for these companies to do this.
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.
As far as I'm aware they don't comingle 3rd party inventory like "Sold and shipped by Amazon.com" does.
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.