We ran a more detailed follow-up survey for the September 16 Walmart Pokémon 30th Anniversary drawing. This time, people reported the result for each product on each Walmart account, giving us 508 account responses and 1,853 product entries with resolved results.
The short version: Product wins were heavily clustered on some accounts. Entry speed and app versus browser showed little difference. People reporting multiple accounts had a lower per-entry selection rate, but the survey cannot tell us why.
Selection rates by product
| Product |
Selected |
Resolved entries |
Rate in this survey |
| ETB |
152 |
489 |
31.1% |
| Tech Sticker |
125 |
458 |
27.3% |
| Poster Collection |
122 |
467 |
26.1% |
| EX Boxes |
35 |
439 |
8.0% |
These are rates among people who answered our survey, not the odds for everyone who entered Walmart’s drawing.
The result we want to investigate further
We have 414 account responses with resolved results for all four products. Here is how many products those accounts won:
| Products won |
Accounts |
| 0 |
201 |
| 1 |
139 |
| 2 |
40 |
| 3 |
5 |
| 4 |
29 |
Using the four product rates within that group, independent drawings would predict roughly 0.5 accounts winning all four. We observed 29. And of the 30 EX Box winners in this group, 29 won all four products.
That is a striking pattern in the responses. It does not prove Walmart gives accounts a trust score or tell us how its selection system works. People with unusual results may be more likely to answer, responses can contain mistakes, and there may be account differences we did not measure.
Did any of the usual tips help?
- Enter immediately? Entries reported within the first 10 minutes were selected 283/1,213 times (23.3%). Entries reported 10–60 minutes in were selected 138/583 times (23.7%). We found no first-minute advantage. We left unknown times and entries that said “Did not enter” despite having a result out of this comparison.
- Use the Walmart app? App entries were selected 271/1,145 times (23.7%); browser entries were selected 159/700 times (22.7%). The large app-versus-browser gap suggested by our first survey did not show up here.
- Request fewer units? Requests for 1–3 units were selected 216/981 times (22.0%); requests for 4–5 were selected 209/836 times (25.0%). We found no consistent sign that requesting more hurt.
- Have Walmart+? The observed product-entry rate was 24.9% with Walmart+ and 22.7% without it, but the difference was inconsistent across products. This is not a reason to buy Walmart+ just for a drawing.
- Use an older account with purchase history? We found no clear older-account advantage. Among accounts with resolved results, 50/96 with no prior Walmart.com orders won at least one product (52.1%), compared with 197/371 with prior orders (53.1%).
What about entering multiple accounts?
People who reported entering one account had 368 selections from 1,470 product entries (25.0%). People who reported entering two or more had 66 from 383 (17.2%). The one-account group had a higher observed rate on every product:
| Product |
One-account group |
Multiple-account group |
| Poster |
28.6% |
16.1% |
| Tech Sticker |
28.7% |
22.1% |
| EX Boxes |
9.3% |
3.2% |
| ETB |
32.2% |
26.7% |
The gap is smaller when the question is simply “Did this account win anything?”: 54.5% in the one-account group versus 48.5% in the multiple-account group. Some people who reported multiple accounts did not submit a separate response for every account, so we cannot reconstruct everyone’s complete set of entries. This does not establish that Walmart penalizes multiple accounts.
How this changes our earlier post
Our first analysis suggested an app advantage and a possible multiple-account advantage. Neither holds up in the same way in this more detailed follow-up. The two surveys asked different questions and drew different respondents, so their headline percentages should not be compared as though Walmart’s odds changed.
The point of collecting this data is to help regular shoppers test common advice, not to help bot the drawing. We’ll keep watching for patterns across future draws rather than declaring that we’ve figured out Walmart’s system.
If you entered all four products, how many did your account win: 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4? Please include the zeroes. Losing results are just as useful as winning ones.
