E-commerce tie-up aims to aid vendors

Ex-Walmart buyers acquire N.Y. firm

A Rogers e-commerce firm's acquisition of a company founded by former Walmart Inc. buyers will help them better serve the retailer's e-commerce suppliers, both companies say.

Digital marketing firm SKU Ninja + WhyteSpyder acquired New York City's DotCom Partners earlier this month, said JS Bull, WhyteSpyder's chief executive and co-owner. Neither company disclosed the terms of the deal.

DotCom Partners was founded in late 2019 by Corey Hammond and Zach Toste, who wanted to work more closely with vendors and brands on Walmart.com. Both had previously worked as category managers or buyers for Walmart.com, Hammond said.

Seven of DotCom Partners' eight employees have worked at Walmart.com, in spans ranging from one to three years.

The company's collective experience in e-commerce allowed it to provide clients with a level of expertise unmatched by other agencies or Walmart.com consultants, Hammond said.

The company looks at the clients' Walmart.com business "through a merchandising lens," he said, including setting up items on Walmart.com, figuring out how well a product sells and managing their advertising on the site.

"Our goal is to help vendors diversify sales and improve profitability in these online, emerging, digital marketplaces," Hammond said.

"Walmart is one of the fastest-growing e-commerce platforms in the nation," Hammond said. "We're helping vendors and brands identify opportunities to leverage that growth for their own business."

DotCom's relationship with WhyteSpyder started last year when Bull and WhyteSpyder co-owner Eric Howerton approached the company to work on a project together.

"We all saw the opportunity to work with each other and expand our services onto Walmart.com for in-store suppliers as well as marketplace suppliers," Hammond said.

"The benefit for us is the software development piece is something that was always missing from Dotcom Partners," Hammond said, "and to be able to work even more closely with the development team at WhyteSpyder presents a huge opportunity for filling a demand gap in the Walmart software space."

WhyteSpyder, founded around 2010, works with suppliers large and small to help them improve their data and content on Walmart.com, Bull said, and is one of Walmart's handful of approved content service providers.

"WhyteSpyder has a lot of history of doing content creation and consulting," Bull said. "Then as part of the evolution of the company, we launched a software product that we named SKU Ninja." The software-as-a-service platform lets subscribing clients manage their product pages on Walmart.com.

"As we started moving in the direction of becoming a software company, it became the more focused of the two names," Bull said.

Once WhyteSpyder started working with DotCom Partners on a project last year, the relationship between the two companies just evolved, Bull said.

"We started working together more and more," he said. "It was a great experience in both directions."

Although WhyteSpyder's employees currently work remotely, the company will open an office in Rogers on Aug. 9.

All of DotCom's workers now work for WhyteSpyder. Hammond will work on the product development team and Toste will work on the sales team. With most employees in New York, all will continue working remotely for the time being.

"It's certainly still up in the air," Hammond said. "Maybe ultimately we'll all end up in Rogers, Ark., with our entire company."

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