Goldman Sachs, Walmart Partner for Online Merchant Credit Line

Need to Know

• Medium-sized businesses that sell via Walmart’s online Marketplace can now apply for a business line of credit from Goldman Sachs’ consumer banking offshoot, Marcus.
• Sellers will initially have access to lines of credit between $10,000 and $75,000; Marcus hopes to increase the amount to $1 million.
• Goldman Sachs has offered a similar line of credit program to Amazon merchants.
• Walmart’s Marketplace now hosts 75 million items.

Analysis

Walmart and Goldman Sachs have teamed up to help sellers who list on Walmart’s online Marketplace, offering those vendors the opportunity to apply for a business line of credit from Marcus, Goldman Sachs’ online digital consumer bank.

Starting on September 22, merchants who sell on Marketplace, which is Walmart’s third-party e-commerce platform, can apply for a line of credit between $10,000 and $75,000 from Marcus. Goldman Sachs is hoping to eventually increase the amount of credit available to merchant applicants to $1 million. Merchants will see the invitation to apply for the Marcus line of credit within their Seller Center dashboard, and credit lines will have a fixed annual interest rate between 6.99% and 20.99%, depending on the business’s own financials.

“Access to affordable capital is more important than ever as businesses large and small work to adapt and evolve to serve customers and grow their businesses,” Jeff Clementz, vice president of Walmart Marketplace, said in a blog post announcing the new initiative. “Lines of credit offer businesses the flexibility to access money when they need, which could help them move fast and meet during customer demand. It could also help fund innovation as we’re all working to adapt to changing customer behavior and preferences.”

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Walmart’s online sales have boomed: digital sales overall for the company have increased by 97% year-over-year during the second quarter of 2020, with Marketplace sales growing by triple digits over that period. Marketplace now boasts a total of 75 million items, and in June, Walmart revealed that Marketplace had doubled in size over the first six months of 2020, thanks in part to a new partnership with Shopify that allowed the platform to host goods from smaller companies and vendors.

With Marcus, Goldman Sachs has also been expanding its digital offerings, branching out into personal finance with money-management tools and an upcoming personal chequing account. Goldman Sachs also unveiled its installment-based program with Marcus, called MarcusPay, earlier this year. And the Walmart partnership is the second of its kind for Goldman Sachs, which announced in June that it would be offering small business owners who sell through Amazon the option to apply for credit lines with Marcus, via Amazon’s Seller Central vendor dashboard.