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!”
How about Walmart stops STEALING from their sellers? When tracking confirms delivery (even with signature) and the fraud customer says they didn’t get the order, Walmart gives a full refund no questions asked and doesn’t even email or notify the seller they are STEALING from. Walmart policy (ha, like they would ever follow or even know their policy) dictates that “did not received” claim on any item over $250 the customer must file a chargeback claim with their card provider. This has not been adhered to once, instead the clueless, barely literate, uninformed Walmart reps take the funds from sellers. Walmart Sellers need to unite and file a CLASS ACTION against this despicable company.