The world's largest retailer Walmart aims to add 1,200 Shopify sellers this year, executive Jeff Clementz said in an interview. The company's marketplace site, which already offers more than 75 million products, grew at a faster pace than Walmart's overall web business in the first quarter, and third-party sales are typically more profitable as the sellers pay a fee to list items and often shoulder the delivery costs. The collaboration is Walmart's latest attempt to expand the scale and profitability of its $21.5 billion US e-commerce business, which is gaining ground on market leader Amazon.com Inc. In recent years, Walmart has rolled out a fulfillment service for third-party sellers, allowing customers to return marketplace items in its physical stores and throwing away millions of third-party items that didn't meet quality standards. For Shopify, the deal provides its network of millions of merchants access to Walmart's customers, and follows a linkup with Facebook Inc. that allowed retailers to import Shopify product catalogs to the social-media giant's new Shops service.

Walmart partners with Shopify for expansion