We’re now well into the 2021 and with summer fast approaching, our Walmart Marketplace engineering team has focused on enhancing your overall API experience and improving the quality of your listings and inventory management to help you prepare for the coming holiday season.

We made quite a few changes to the feedback, error and reporting messages across multiple APIs, giving sellers better, more timely information. The brand-new API Analytics Dashboard has also been released, along with Item Spec v4.2. Sellers should also be aware of changes on how to set up items that are eligible for Walmart Fulfillment Services as well.

The biggest change however has been the addition of the Listing Quality API, which will allow sellers to view and alter the listing quality of their items and their catalog on a whole, all from the convenience of an API.

Read on for more on all the great API changes we’ve made to improve your Walmart Marketplace experience.

1. Monitor and enhance the listing quality of your entire catalog

Over the last year we’ve released several tools geared towards helping sellers make the most out of their listings, aiming to increase offer quality, content, and discoverability while addressing post-purchase issues and uncovering what’s trending and why.

“It helps sellers like us to navigate the complex maze of listing optimization to ensure better exposure to the customers, showing them the necessary information in the best possible format,” said Araz Sarchami from Mercier Kitchen. “Since using the platform we have been able to optimize our listings with to-the-point guidance and see immediate and significant increase both in our listing exposure and sales.”

Access to all of this great information has been available for free on the Listing Quality Dashboard, but up until now sellers have needed to go into Seller Center to make any and all changes manually to improve their listing quality and the holistic Listing Quality Score.

Now we’re happy to announce the release of several APIs built around getting you easy developer access to our Listing Quality system where you’ll be able to quickly find and diagnose listing quality issues with a series of quick API calls.

First, you can look at items filtered by their listing quality details using the Item Listing Quality Details API. Queries can be made to get a selection of items based on item quality score, content score, issues and item performance, using a set of filters like item title, product type, or SKU. You can even limit the number of items to return at any one time, just in case you know there will be quite a few.

Next is the Seller Listing Quality Score API, which gives you the ability to access several metrics that gauge the quality of your item listings in the form of a numerical score for: Offer, Content, Ratings and Reviews, and Post-Purchase Quality. You’ll also be able to exclude both trending items and (if you’re signed up) WFS-eligible items from your score queries.

Another new release is the Categories with Listing Quality Issues API, which you can use to find out how many of your items have issues with just an easy call. You’ll also be able to include or not include top trending items or WFS-eligible items (again, if you’re signed up for Walmart Fulfillment Services). The API will let you know product name, category, sub-category, and number of items with this issue.

2. Learn the trends of your calls to optimize your usage

It’s important for sellers to visualize the patterns of their API calls so they can easily see when a particular call or set of calls starts to fail more often—and why. That’s where the new API Analytics Dashboard comes into play:

With this new dashboard you’ll be able to see the number of successful calls arranged by API group such as Items or Promotions, which can then be filtered down by a date range and recurring time period. Each API group can also be further filtered by error type (with specific error codes like 400, 404 or 500 for instance) so you can really diagnose what’s happening in detail and know what you’ll need to do next.

To get to the API analytics dashboard all you need to do is log into the developer portal and select API Analytics in the left pane. You can read more how to use the dashboard with our handy FAQ here.

3. Organizing and managing orders and inventory is now easier

The beating heart of any seller operation is the knowledge and understanding of your inventory and orders. Our APIs need to deliver accurate, discernible messaging and information to keep this heart beating at a steady pace, so we’ve made several additions and changes to our order, inventory, and reporting APIs to make sure sellers are on top of operations as much as possible.

For instance, we’ve made a series of changes to the GET ALL Orders API to address seller requests on learning more about orders:

  • The ability to keep track of orders with a new “Delivered” status, so you’ll be able to quickly see if a Purchase Order has been identified as making it to its destination.
  • New query parameters lastModifiedStartDate and lastModifiedEndDate are now in place so you can filter purchase orders based on last modified date and time, so you’ll be able to fetch Purchase Orders that were recently changed (which covers changes to order status, shipping date, carrier, method, tracking numbers and tracking URLs).

For sellers that operate across multiple fulfillment centers (ie. ship nodes), the task of keeping up with item inventories is also now a bit easier with the addition of a series of new or updated Inventory APIs:

  • Single Item Inventory by Ship Node: Fetch inventory count for one item SKU across one or more fulfillment centers.
  • Update Item Inventory per Ship Node: Update an item’s inventory across one or more ship nodes.
  • Bulk Item Update: Update all ship nodes for a particular SKU.

Sellers should also note that a new parameter, availToSellQty, has been added so they can check the inventory available for sale at each ship node.

Please also note the release of Item Spec v4.2, an incremental update that removes the ProductTaxCode attribute completely since tax codes are now auto generated and assigned during the item setup process. You can read more about the Item Management API here.

Finally, we wanted to give you more control over when you can get item reports, which previously were only available once daily, pre-generated at a set time.

Now you can request an item report via the new On-request Reports API and get it within 15-45 minutes, depending on the complexity of the report. If you’re a little impatient you can even use the API to check on the status of your report requests as well as download the report at your convenience. Report requests are retained for 30 days and you can only request one report for each report type once an hour.

NOTE: The On-request Reports API is in testing and a few bugs may persist currently. You can read more about this API here.

Make sure you visit our Dev Portal, which recently got a major UI redesign so you can easily navigate our trove of API guides and references easily.

The Walmart Developer Center Handy Resources:

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