We don't usually "pull back the curtain" and talk about what goes on behind the scenes at SureDone, but Walmart is a bit different from other marketplaces in the way it operates (outside of SureDone's control) so we thought it might be helpful in this case.
- Walmart is similar to Amazon in that it's not realtime. There is a delay from when you send data to Walmart vs. when it will actually appear.
- Unlike eBay and Amazon, Walmart does not provide a place for us to test (sometimes called a sandbox). We need to use real customer accounts in order to do quality assurance on coding. This means that we're limited in the amount of testing we can actually do, but we do our best to ensure any SureDone changes will have minimal negative impact on your selling.
- Walmart will make changes to their API with little or no notification to us. The first time we might hear about a change is from our customers. We'll do our best to update our system as quickly as possible when this happens.
- We highly recommend you review the entire Walmart Knowledge Base here (it's not huge) for all sorts of requirements and policies with regards to listing. We use the Walmart V3 item spec.
Walmart Product Categorization
Walmart does not have hundreds of subcategories. Instead, they have primary top level categories with a few subcategories of each. You cannot list a product under a primary category - only one of the subcategories. For example, there's no "Men's Cargo Pants" subcategory. Instead, you use "attributes" or specifications to map a product into "Clothing > Men > Mens Pants > Men's Pants" after selecting a sublevel category of "Clothing". These attributes may include "Pant Style", "Gender", "Clothing Size" and more. There is a lot of information on this topic on Walmart's site here. There are spreadsheets available inside your Walmart Seller Portal that contain all the available attributes for each category. We have attached a sample sheet for Clothing to this help article (click on "Data Definitions" inside the sheet to see the attributes you can use). You will use custom field mapping inside the SureDone Walmart plugin settings to map your fields to the available Walmart attributes for each category.
There is also additional information in the Walmart FAQ - "Select the best category for your items".
Our guide on how to map attributes using SureDone is located here.
Publishing items on Walmart
Walmart passes far less information back to us as to why products do not succeed in listing. We will display everything we receive back, but it's not always going to be helpful. Sometimes there's more information available inside your Walmart Seller Portal. If you don't understand a response feel free to open a support ticket and we'll work with you to find the root of the issue. There is a lot of information in the Walmart FAQ: Items.
Walmart will unpublish items for a number of reasons. These may include pricing policies such as "This rule will automatically unpublish items from Walmart Marketplace if a customer would save by purchasing the same item from the same Seller on a competing website, including the cost of shipping" and "This rule will automatically unpublish items from Walmart Marketplace if a customer would save drastically by purchasing the item on a competing website, regardless of the Seller. This calculation also considers the cost of shipping."
We highly recommend you read through the entire Walmart knowledge base (it's not huge) located here in order to understand how they work with your products and data.