Sukosaki

Looks like Wal-Mart.com might be the next best place to get the publicity that you are craving for your new product.  Can’t seem to get the amount of sales that you hoped for when you invented your first gadget?  Wal-Mart might be able to help with that as they announce today they are running a contest to help inventors and entrepreneurs get virtual shelf space at Walmart.com.

The contest, called “Get on the Shelf”, will be run similar to American Idol.  The top products will be voted on by the public, at GetontheShelf.com and the top voted product will get “shelf” space on the largest retailers website.  Having a contest like this is pretty much opposite of how Wal-Mart typically picks products for their stores.  Giving product owners just one hour to wow the Wal-Mart buyers and give reasons why their product would be bought by shoppers.

“For a long time, the ability to get a product into a retail store was at the sole discretion of the store buyer,” said Venky Harinarayan, senior vice president of Wal-Mart’s global e-commerce unit.  ”Today we are removing these barriers by giving anyone the chance to launch their product at Wal-Mart and reach millions of shoppers nationwide,” he said. [source]

Any resident of the United States that would like to get their product on the Walmart.com website should submit their product by Feb. 22nd.  The first round of public voting will go from March 7th to April 4th and will narrow the field down to 10 finalists.  The second round of voting will go from April 11th to April 24th to determine the top three winners.

From that point Wal-Mart will offer assistance that is needed with production, etc in order to get the amount of stocked merchandise the website could potentially sell.  After the initial offering, Wal-Mart will decide whether or not the product will be sold on the Wal-Mart website again.