While Walmart continues to develop and update its Marketplace Seller APIs based on your feedback and changes in the market, we wanted a more concise way of communicating everything that’s been released recently and provide more insight as to what this means for you.

This month we are covering new API features and updates that will help you manage your API feeds more efficiently, improve conversion with our new expedited shipping option Walmart ThreeDay, gain more visibility into your performance with API reporting improvements, and setup and manage your catalog more effortlessly.

Here you’ll learn about how these enhancements can help you manage and grow your Walmart.com business. For technical information, continue referencing the Walmart Developer Center – our main source for everything API contains detailed documentation, SDKs, a robust sandbox environment for developers, and lots of other information for not just sellers but Drop Ship Vendors and Content Service Providers as well.

Walmart is heavily invested in improving existing features and building long term capabilities that are efficient and scalable, as well as providing a reliable source of insights for our partners to improve their assortment and performance.

Manage your APIs efficiently

We are introducing a few updates designed to help you increase operational efficiency and to provide you with more visibility around Walmart API usage. One of the enhancements includes a launch of a central area where developers could easily check on the status of all the available APIs (including those in testing). This way, if you’re experiencing issues or outages with a singular or particular group of APIs, this would be the first place to look. We use a standardized three-color indicator for each API: Operational (green), Service Degradation (yellow) and Service Outage (red).
Check out the status of all the Marketplace APIs here.

Another operational update is related to the throttling limits per API as well as the new throttling response headers for these APIs. Frequently sellers that make a lot of API calls were at times limited, or throttled, into how many calls they could make during a period of time. Each time you make an API call, it consumes a certain amount of resources, so if you make a lot of calls, the resource consumption skyrockets. Imposing a limit is important, these limits were never really evident to developers.

With this new documentation and API response headers, you will have a lot more visibility into throttling and know exactly how and when your account may meet a throttling threshold. This way you can manage your API usage better and not run into delays when you need to make an API call.

Increase conversions organically with Walmart ThreeDay

Customer conversion on products with the expedited shipping options increases dramatically over non-expedited options – up to 40%. For sellers who can’t quite meet the 2-day promise, we recently introduced a new expedited delivery option: Walmart ThreeDay. Just like Walmart TwoDay, enabling the ThreeDay fast delivery promise gets you Buy Box prominence and better chances at driving conversion upwards.

Our APIs have been updated to allow you to set up SKUs for ThreeDay and properly identify incoming ThreeDay orders. You’ll just need to continue setting up free expedited shipping and you’ll see options for ThreeDay.

Improve exposure with better product categorization and manage catalog effortlessly

We’re always looking to improve how sellers manage their items, making inventory operations a lot more efficient and giving sellers more information on the most optimal ways of setting up their catalog.

For instance, selecting the right category for your product is crucial for ensuring it gets categorized correctly, giving it the best visibility when customers browse and search Walmart.com. Selecting the best category also presents you with the relevant set of attributes for your products. However, API users haven’t had much visibility into the taxonomy of how categories are organized and selecting the proper one.  The New Item Taxonomy API provides you with the ability to specify an exact category for a product when using certain other APIs (such as Data feeds and various Special feeds).

Sellers who wanted to retire (deactivate and unpublish) items using the API were also limited to doing so just one at a time. We’ve heard your feedback that this has been a huge time sink for you, plus it was a major inconvenience to make an API call every time there was a need to retire an item. With the New Bulk Item Retire API, sellers can just bulk items together and retire them all at once, a huge time and resource savings. This also helps create a more accurate and timelier assortment in Marketplace for customers to browse.

We’ve also added a few additional updates to certain APIs to help sellers better manage their items when they look for status updates and time/date return parameters. This includes new filters for the GET ALL Items API and the GET Returns API.

Gain more insights about your performance, catalog and return rules

Without reports sellers would be in the dark about how they were performing and what they can do to make a customer’s shopping experience better on Walmart Marketplace.

How items perform is extremely important as you need to know what’s going on with your assortment, where to best improve your business, and what are some of the changes you need to make in order to convert sales. The Item Performance Report gives you a high-level daily snapshot of your catalog including a lot of metrics such as GMV, Commission, Authorized Orders, Authorized Sales, Item Conversion Rate, Total Product Visits and more.

When working with customer returns, how those returns get defined and what a seller decides to do with them helps a lot with inventory and return management and refines the overall customer experience. The Return Rules Override Report lets API users see item-level overrides that include: Keep It, Return Restricted, Restriction Reason, and Return Center (Alias).

Another update to the Reports API is for the MP Item Report, which includes a lot more useful item management information for sellers such as data on lag time, product tax code, MSRP and shipping weight.

We’ve also updated the Get Orders API for sellers that take advantage of Walmart Fulfillment Services to power their shipping, returns, and customer service. Now sellers will be able to use the API to segment by their own, 3PL or WFS orders.

The Walmart Developer Center Handy Resources:

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