In order to keep your ODR (order defect rate) as low as possible on the Walmart marketplace, you need to be aware of Walmart's policies on returns. One major factor used to calculate your ODR is your return rate percentages. Walmart has a very unique approach regarding return disputes and their marketplace sellers. By simply disputing returns on your Walmart marketplace sellers account you can keep both your return percentages and ODR low and healthy. Below is the procedure we have implemented internally that works for us and is by no means a requirement of the RealArb Walmart program. All clients are encouraged to implement what ever operational procedures work best for them. 


Why dispute returns?

All ecommerce marketplaces keep track of account health and performance metrics for their 3rd party sellers. This is done to ensure that their customers are having positive experiences on their marketplace. Walmart marketplace does this as well. One major account health metric you will want to keep an eye on is your ODR or order defect rate. To view this for your Walmart sellers account please see the following link: https://seller.walmart.com/analytics/seller-scorecard/my-performance.


As you can see there are four factors that make up your Walmart sellers accounts ODR. One of which is "return defects." In our experience this simply means return rate. Walmart allows you to dispute any returned order. Any return dispute you are successful in disputing will be removed from the calculations used to create this percentage. 


How do I dispute?


Step one - Go to your "returns & refunds page" on your Walmart sellers account (https://seller.walmart.com/order-management/returns). 


Step two - You will see 3 views at the top of this page. Initialed, Received and Completed. Walmart only allows you to dispute returns in the completed status. Click the "View Returns" option under the "Completed" section. 


Step three - On this page you will see a list of orders below. In each order line item you will see an arrow to the far right. Click this and you may see the option to dispute this return (You will only have this option if the order is in the appropriate time window Walmart requires).


By clicking the "Dispute this return" button in the drop down you will be prompted to fill out information regarding the dispute.


Our internal operations from here (NOT A REQUIREMENT) 

After step three stated above our internal operations are to select the option "Something not listed." Then in the description section enter that the customer selected an incorrect return reason. We win the vast majority of these after this step and this keep our returns metric very healthy.


For some of the disputes you will receive an email from Walmart asking for more information. Internally we do not reply to these emails.