6 Best Practices to Help Guide You Through the Holiday Season

Follow our list of best practices below to navigate through the holiday season with ease and to ensure your business remains uninterrupted during peak holiday traffic. For example, learn how to set up push notifications for cancelled orders or when an item gets unpublished, find out how to customize your fulfillment settings for non-working days using the Calendar Day API, and see which feeds you should use to avoid additional throttling.

 

DO anticipate additional throttling during unexpected peaks in API call volume and wait at least 90 minutes before re-submitting requests.	DON’T submit feeds in large batches if you begin to experience throttling errors.
DO subscribe to push notifications to receive an immediate alert when inventory is out of stock, when an item becomes unpublished, or when orders are cancelled.	DON’T risk losing out on sales by manually checking the status of your items.
DO use the Calendar Day API to define non-working days or shipping cut-off times for holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas Day.	DON’T wait until the last-minute to update your fulfillment settings and risk shipping delays.
DO submit feed files as part of the feed API call and check the progress using the Feed Status API when performing daily feed and bulk updates.	DON’T use other non-feed APIs such as the Update Inventory API or the Update Item Inventory per Ship Node API.
DO use the Bulk Inventory Update APIs for daily updates to inventory.	DON’T use the Single Item Inventory Update API, also known as the sync Inventory API, to make inventory updates.
DO visit the Marketplace API status page when you experience an outage.	DON’T open a Partner Support case for incidents that have been reported on the API status page.

 

Provide a Seamless Refund Experience for Customers this Holiday

Even though some gifts may not always be the perfect fit, you can still help keep customers happy by providing a seamless refund experience. For example, when handling refunds using the Refund Order Lines API, be sure to input the tax dollar amount to fully refund the customer. If you leave the tax amount empty, or with a zero value, the customer will not receive a full refund. Ensure a great customer experience this holiday and get a refresher on how to properly fetch the API below.

 

Get a refresher

Delight Customers with the Best Deals of the Year

Don’t forget to take advantage of heightened traffic on Walmart.com and offer promo pricing on your top-rated, must-have products. When setting up promo pricing, submit dates in ISO-8601 format with UTC offsets to avoid errors and submit feeds at least 24 hours before the promo start date. Also, make sure you frequently monitor your items to ensure your prices stay competitive and don’t become unpublished or lose the Buy Box. Read through the Promotions API guide below for more tips on how to implement promo pricing.

 

Read promo guide

Removal of Pre-Generated Item Report Version 2

As a reminder, on November 25 the Pre-generated Item Report Version 2 will no longer be available for use. Any attempts to download Version 2 of the report after this date, will return an HTTP code 404 error. Moving forward, sellers will need to use Version 3 to get the Pre-generated Item Report. Please update your integration with the new query parameters below to ensure a smooth transition to Version 3.

 

Update query

 

In the Developer Portal, we have listed all the fields that are present in Version 3 of the Item Report. Please handle the parsing logic with additional fields/columns to avoid breaking the consumer code.

Reserved Inventory Attribute Coming Soon

Soon, sellers will have a more accurate idea of how much inventory is available to sell and how much is reserved by viewing the reservedQty attribute in the Inventory APIs. The attribute will display the number of items that have been ordered by a customer but have not shipped from a fulfillment center–which will help you better determine when to replenish inventory on-hand and avoid shipping delays. Stay tuned for more updates.

You can reference the GET Single Item Inventory by Ship Node here, the GET Multiple Item Inventory for All Ship Nodes here.

Note for Solution Providers

Due to recent infrastructure maintenance, we have removed Pre-Generated Reports for terminated Marketplace sellers. In the future, we will preserve Pre-Generated Reports for terminated sellers and notify all Solution Providers before any scheduled maintenance.