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Ask HN: How is it possible to shop on Walmart.com? Everything is out of stock

14 points by triyambakam ↗ HN
What am I missing? I am looking for a sofa and every item that looks nice shows that it is out of stock. Is it not possible to filter for out of stock items? I already selected "Show available items only"

30 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 68.4 ms ] thread
WheelsAtLarge
I've encountered the same with certain food items. My conclusion is that those items aren't profitable to deliver unless they come from the nearest physical store so unless they can deliver from there they classify the item as out of stock. In your case, I suspect that the furniture you want is not available near by so they show it as out of stock.

That's my guess. I hope someone that knows will comment.

triyambakam
That seems to make sense. I live in a very remote location and e.g. Amazon often restricts what can be shipped here.
TMWNN
Where are you? I sell on several marketplace platforms, and one of my niches is making products available to customers outside the 48 contiguous US states that Amazon and Walmart themselves don't fully serve.
ChumpGPT
If your shopping on Walmart.com you need to shop for things they would have in their stores everyday. Everything else is dropped shipped or fulfilled by a 3rd party I think.
schemescape
Anecdote time: I bought a “sold by Walmart” (on Walmart.com) product and what arrived was an Amazon return—with someone else’s return slip still in the package.

I complained and got some money back, except they credited the amount twice. When I contacted them about the double-credit, their system was down so they told me to contact them again later. Then later, they just told me to keep the money :/

What’s frustrating about avoiding Amazon is that every other big retailer is trying to be Amazon, so you have to deal with the same “marketplace” nonsense you wanted to get away from.

Edit: just needed to vent, thanks.

sumtechguy
I had the opposite. I ordered from amazon. Showed up from walmart... I left the review of 'you got me on the price arbitrage nice one!'
noodlesUK
I’ve had this with bulky purchases of items like cat litter (especially in the pandemic). It was pretty funny seeing the Walmart box show up and realising I’d been had (for a few bucks).
gumby
I don’t think you were had. You figured you could get what you wanted on Amazon and did so.

I feel this is no different from someone buying a wholesales box of something and then selling them individually. You could do that too, but you want the convenience of having only one can opener. So everybody wins.

This case seems analogous.

TMWNN
>I complained and got some money back, except they credited the amount twice. When I contacted them about the double-credit, their system was down so they told me to contact them again later. Then later, they just told me to keep the money :/

I sell on Walmart Marketplace. Overall, it's the clear #2 third-party marketplace after Amazon. While nothing compares to Amazon FBA in terms of sales velocity, for FBM Walmart in some categories can be better than Amazon.

That said, the Walmart Marketplace software platform is not great. A year ago, there was a good six months where the inventory system just did not work, causing many SKUs to incorrectly appear out of stock. I still strongly suspect that this happens often, just not so broadly.

WheelsAtLarge
There's a whole ecommerce subculture that profits on the price difference between ecommerce giants. Usually the items get posted on ebay but I guess it does not matter where it gets posted as long as someone can make a profit.

I've ordered from walmart 3rd party sellers and gotten the item from HomeDepot. I've ordered on ebay and have gotten stuff from Amazon and Walmart. It's a bit frustrating since I could have saved the middle man and gotten it for less. But ultimately, the mistake is on me for not double checking the price with other vendors.

schemescape
For the record: I did not purchase from a marketplace seller—they even confirmed this for me when I contacted support.

I just wanted to clarify, since most relies are about the marketplace, where something like this would obviously be fair game.

Edit: not to say I don’t find the replies interesting!

ShamelessC
How does HN decide which stories are on the front page? No offense to OP, but your issue was trivial (you live in a remote place, and shopping for things that Walmart doesn’t tend to carry in stores). Is there some sort of up weighting for “Ask HN” posts? I’m seeing it only has 5 votes, whereas others have hundreds…

Again just curious, hope this isn’t perceived as rude.

Edit: now it has even more votes but sits at the bottom of page 2?

Edit: and now appears to have disappeared completely.

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nfriedly
I think it's a ratio of votes to time. I think as little as 4 votes can get something on the homepage if they come in fairly quickly.

The source code for hn is available if you want to go and look up the specifics. I'm not sure if this is the most up-to-date mirror, but the site doesn't change that often: https://github.com/wting/hackernews

triyambakam
I don't know about the algorithm. I didn't know where else to ask and I figured that someone here would know. I had no idea the issue would be trivial.
bluedevil2k
Another anecdote: my son wanted Pokémon cards and ordered them from Walmart.com. What a mistake. What arrived were obviously counterfeit garbage. So I checked the website. What he ordered had 1.2 stars and nearly every comment was about the cards being counterfeit. Surely, Walmart and their billions and billions of dollars could write some code to flag these situations and remove the product, right? Nope…it had a nice “Walmart recommends” sticker on the listing.

Moral of the story, avoid Walmart.com like the plague.

generalizations
Or you/your son could just check the rating before buying?
stephenitis
Blaming the customer here doesn't seem like the right move and the problem is really with the seller.
generalizations
The seller provided a mechanism for letting buyers share notes about the quality of the product. This particular buyer chose to ignore those notes, and bought it despite warnings not to. That's definitely the buyer's problem.
WirelessGigabit
Why is that?

Why do we accept these company's to basically not do their jobs? It's shadow work. Just like their self-scan registries.