Walmart Updates APIs, Offers Advice for Marketplace Sellers - EcommerceBytes

Walmart offered encouragement to third-party marketplace sellers to kick off the New Year, encouraging them to become Pro Sellers and review changes to its APIs to become more efficient.

Marketplaces may hide or deactivate listings for a number of reasons, and it’s vital sellers know when that happens. Walmart announced updates to its APIs that allow sellers to be notified when it “unpublishes” their item.

Interestingly, one reason Walmart cited for unpublishing a merchant’s listing from Walmart.com was if the price was too high compared to other marketplaces.

By enabling push notifications, sellers can get important alerts about their business, such as when it unpublishes listings. Walmart explained its recently introduced webhooks trigger notifications also alert sellers about events including:

“If your published items win or lose the Buy Box, or if there’s a change in the Buy Box winner or winning price, you’ll automatically receive a notification. You’ll always know the latest price to beat.”
Order Status notifications appear whenever a new Purchase Order is created; “If you also subscribe to the Auto-Cancelled notifications, you’ll know when Walmart has auto-cancelled a Purchase Order, which also gives a refund to the customer.”

Walmart also called out its Trending Items API. “You can see which items are best sellers on Walmart.com at any given time and dig deeper by using the Utilities APIs to locate the specific department and category IDs.”

It said, “By taking the time to discover what shoppers are looking for, especially during seasonal peaks like the holidays, you can make changes to your catalog accordingly.”

Another change helps sellers update their product attributes. “You may have had your items listed on Walmart.com for a long time, but it’s not a bad idea to update your attributes for an even better performance this year. That just became even easier with the launch of Item Spec 4.0, a recent release that streamlines item setup and maintenance.”

In its announcement about the APIs, Walmart saved the best for last. It said one of the most exciting Walmart Marketplace launches was Shipping Templates that allow for custom configurations, flexible transit times, and granular delivery regions across the US, along with helpful reports. (The deadline for switching to Shipping Templates is April 30, 2021.)

Walmart also signaled its intention to support sellers, wrapping up a New Year’s post writing, “So, whether it is catalog effectiveness, shipping configurations or ways to stand out on Walmart.com, as a Marketplace seller you surely have a lot to take care of to start another e-Commerce year successfully. Get organized and stay tuned for more exciting programs launching for Marketplace sellers this year!”

Ina Steiner

Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com.

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