Transforming The Walking Company’s Amazon business with market-leading feed management

Since its inception more than three decades ago, The Walking Company has carved out a strong niche for itself in the orthopedic, comfort, and casual footwear space.

At one point, The Walking Company had more than 200 brick-and-mortar stores across the U.S., but like many retailers, found itself needing to adapt its D2C strategy during the pandemic. Michael Scavuzzo, Director of Merchandising at The Walking Company, was tasked with expanding the brand’s marketplace presence.

However, when it came to listing the brand’s 10,000-plus SKUs on Amazon, he ran into issues with The Walking Company’s feed management service at the time—ChannelAdvisor, now called Rithum.

The Walking Company didn’t receive the optimization, order management, synchronization, and support that a business of its size needed, leading to a huge spike in A-to-z Guarantee claims, a rising order defect rate (ODR), and suppressed listings.

After The Walking Company found its account status in a state of near-suspension, Scavuzzo decided a change was needed.

“It was something that was holding us back tremendously,” he said. “Not only from a volume perspective but also from the way I like to do listing optimization, to content, to really everything.”

In January 2024, The Walking Company switched to Feedonomics, and over a short period of just three months, the brand experienced some of its greatest gains ever on Amazon: sales increased by 150% year-over-year (YoY), traffic tripled, order volume increased tenfold, and the company is now projected to gain $4 million in revenue YoY from the marketplace alone.

“To pick up a few million and have this be a greater than $5 million business [on Amazon] very, very quickly is something I’m proud of, and I don’t think it would have happened without Feedonomics,” Scavuzzo said.

Optimizing a 10,000-plus SKU catalog to increase listing traffic, conversions, and sales

With such a wide range of products, each with its own size and color variants, The Walking Company needed a reliable way to optimize its catalog for Amazon.

Its previous feed management solution frequently wiped changes Scavuzzo applied to the brand’s listings and incorrectly mapped child-to-parent SKUs. This meant that a lot of his team’s valuable time was wasted redoing tasks, and unoptimized listings were frequently exported to the marketplace.

With Feedonomics, The Walking Company has a dedicated feed manager that sets up the transformers needed to change raw product data into optimized titles, bullet points, images, and other attributes.

“The titles look exactly how I need them to, each bullet point has between two and 500 characters, and the first piece is all capitalized,” Scavuzzo said. “I mean it’s really exactly how it should be if you want to be an expert Amazon seller.”

Along with importing data from The Walking Company’s Shopify store, Scavuzzo said his dedicated feed manager at Feedonomics also set up a custom script to pull additional product attributes from a shared document. This ensured each listing was accurate and included more search-relevant information.

“Everything seems to be mapped to the correct parent [variation] all the time,” he said. “We have very little split listings, orphaned ASINs, anything like that.”

Scavuzzo also wanted to sync up product images that his team creates—like infographics explaining the value of the footwear—to the right listings. For those, the Feedonomics script pulls image links from a shared drive and automatically sends them to Amazon.

Overall, Scavuzzo said using Feedonomics for optimization has produced concrete results and helped him realize his vision for the company’s marketplace expansion—all while giving him more control and peace of mind over the process.

“I mean we’re on track to pick up over four million dollars year-over-year,” he said. “Our traffic has tripled. We’ve increased like a full point of conversion. All of the things that go into selling more, and selling more profitably. That’s all happening right now, and I don’t think it would have happened without using Feedonomics.”

Reliable order management and data synchronization no matter the volume

Prior to using Feedonomics, The Walking Company also faced significant issues syncing orders, as well as updating prices and inventory between Shopify and Amazon.

“There were times when orders would flow into the system and they wouldn’t be dumped into our system properly—meaning we would miss orders,” Scavuzzo said. “Then our cancellation rate would go up.

“There was this glitch with pass-through that was collecting the orders and dropping it into our system, which led to almost 200 A-to-z Guarantee claims. Those claims then led to us being in listing suppression and almost having our account deactivated, and that was just really kind of the end of that for me.”

Customer complaints often trigger A-to-z Guarantee claims regarding order fulfillment issues, such as late delivery or non-receipt of items. Since pricing was mismatched between its selling channels and Amazon, The Walking Company’s listings were also suppressed due to non-competitive offers.

“We have three different channels of business, and they all mostly carry the same type of price, but the prices are dynamic,” Scavuzzo said. “There were so many different times when the feed wouldn’t pick up the pricing, and then we would have a higher price on Amazon and a lower price on our native channels. Then our listings would get suppressed on Amazon because there’s a non-competitive offer.”

In addition to these issues, unreliable synchronization across selling channels led to The Walking Company selling out-of-stock products on Amazon.

“A lot of times we were taking orders for products that we didn’t have inventory on anymore because the inventory wasn’t getting uploaded efficiently. It was just a nightmare,” Scavuzzo said.

With Feedonomics, any pricing changes are quickly synchronized to Amazon. Automated order management technology also ensures that order and inventory data is shared between Shopify and Amazon so that data remains accurate across the company’s tech stack.

“We’ve built in such a good buffer that our order defect rate from a merchant-fulfilled perspective is actually better than ours that we sell through Amazon,” Savuzzo said. “So, our FBA order defect rate is higher than our seller-fulfilled one, and I do think a lot of that comes from how quickly Feedonomics integrates the data, how we pass through orders, and really everything. So it’s been tremendous, and our sales have followed.”

Today, The Walking Company is launching even more of its brands with Feedonomics due to the success it’s seen so far.

“I’ve got to say, if we weren’t seeing the success that I’m seeing with our number one house brand, I wouldn’t have considered launching this with you guys,” Scavuzzo said. “But the fact is that we went from maybe 200 orders a month at our worst to over 4,000 a month—I’m talking big, big volume—and you guys have handled it flawlessly.”

A world-class platform backed by dedicated feed experts

Before Feedonomics, Scavuzzo said The Walking Company didn’t receive the responsive or effective support it needed, which hampered its ability to resolve feed issues quickly and caused critical issues that directly impacted sales and customer satisfaction.

“That’s a huge problem for someone like me,” Scavuzzo said. “I have to report sales all the time, and [the rest of the company doesn’t] want to hear, ‘Well, our feed management service couldn’t help me sell my best-selling products.’”

In addition to a dedicated feed manager, Feedonomics supports The Walking Company with a team of channel experts who understand the ins and outs of selling on Amazon. Having access to responsive specialists who can quickly address complex issues was a game changer for the company.

“One of our top sellers is shoe insert orthotics, and we just couldn’t figure out a way to fix the errors that were happening,” he said. “They were getting marked like they had pesticide in them when they didn’t.”

Scavuzzo said when he presented the pesticide problem to Rithum, it took multiple months to fix. However, when presenting the same raw data issue to Feedonomics, he was pleased to find the team was already aware of the situation and had a quick solution in place.

“Every time I find issues I submit them to your team, and very, very few times is there ever an issue that really has stumped you guys or takes longer than a few hours—or even a day—to fix. So it’s been pretty world-class,” Scavuzzo said.

In Scavuzzo’s mind, Feedonomics’ dedicated, hands-on approach to service is what every business needs to have lasting success on a competitive marketplace like Amazon.

“Having almost a decade of Amazon experience, and now doing Seller Central-specific stuff, If you want to be a serious Amazon business, you’ve got to have some type of support like this, or you’re just going to be in for a world of hurt, especially if you have a big catalog,” Scavuzzo said. ”If you have three or four items, sure. But when you start looking at like 8,000-12,000 SKUs, you’re going to lose and you’re going to lose quickly.”