Utilities

The Utility APIs allow you to search for all Walmart item departments, all categories within a department, or retrieve the taxonomy of categories per Feed type.

Utility APIs

• GET All Departments API – Search for all Walmart item departments and department IDs. Use this for Insights about item best sellers.
• GET All Categories API – Search for all Walmart item categories within a department. Use this to fine-tune your best seller searches within a department.
• GET Taxonomy by spec API – Get the item category and sub-category taxonomy for any given Item spec you specify by feedType and version. Use this API to determine which category to best position your product. You can also find similar products under the same subcategory to improve your product organization and placement on Walmart.com.

Get Insights about top-trending Items

To use the Department and Category APIs for insights, see Get all top trending items.

Get Insights about why items go unpublished

To find out the reasons why items go unpublished, see Get unpublished item insights.

To better position your items within categories, use the Taxonomy by spec API to view the category taxonomy available on Walmart.com for a specific feedType and spec version.

You can specify an item spec version and get the category hierarchy for that particular schema. Use the returned categories to decide which category to position your product.

As a seller, you can decide where to place your products within Walmart categories for each item spec available. These are the latest versions:

• Walmart Item spec – feedType=MP_ITEM, version 4.2
• Walmart and WFS item spec – feedType=MP_WFS_ITEM, version 4.1
• Item update spec – feedType=MP_MAINTENANCE, version 4.1

The response provides the item taxonomy of categories and sub-categories in the hierarchy for the spec version you specified in the request.

The taxonomy API supports all versions of item feeds. To get more information about the latest individual item specs available, see Item spec v4.

Get all item categories by item spec version

To get the item category taxonomy for the item spec you are using, call the Taxonomy by spec API.

Specify the feedType that corresponds to the Item spec that you ingest your items with the Item setup process:

• feedType=MP_ITEM&version=4.2
• feedType=MP_MAINTENANCE&version=4.1
• feedType=MP_WFS_ITEM&version=4.1

NOTE: If you do not pass in a feedType, the response returns Item Spec v3.2 categories by default.

The response includes IDs and Names for all item categories and sub-categories for that Item spec.

For example, to get all categories for MP_ITEM feedType version 4.0, call

/v3/utilities/taxonomy?feedType=MP_ITEM&version=4.2

Upon success, the response returns a list of Category Names and IDs. Here is a brief example with two entries:

{ “success”: “SUCCESS”, “payload”: [ { “categoryName”: “Animal Accessories”, “categoryId”: “animal_accessories” }, { “categoryName”: “Animal Food”, “categoryId”: “animal_food” }, ] }

To see an entire payload response sample, see Taxonomy by spec in the API Reference.

API Platform Status APIs aim to provide a comprehensive view of Walmart’s APIs health. These APIs help sellers quickly triage issues while interacting with Walmart APIs. The JSON responses for each API call returns the operational health status for each API queried. Below is a code example of a JSON response for an API call.

{
    apiStatuses : [
       {
          "apiGroup": "Returns",
          "status": "OPERATIONAL",
          "lastUpdatedTime": "2022-01-06T12:30:39.884Z"
       },
       {
          "apiGroup": "Authorization",
          "status": "SERVICE_DEGRADATION",
          "lastUpdatedTime": "2022-01-06T12:30:39.884Z"
       },
       {
          "apiGroup": "Promos",
          "status": "SERVICE_OUTAGE",
          "lastUpdatedTime": "2022-01-06T12:30:39.884Z"
       }
       ..........
    ]
}

From this response you can see the following information:

• “Returns” APIs are fully operational, with no issues communicating with Walmart’s servers.
• “Authorization” and “Promos” related APIs have issues communicating with Walmart’s servers.

Each group of APIs may have one of the following statuses:

• OPERATIONAL: The API is performing as expected and the Walmart Monitoring Systems are reporting no outages
• SERVICE_DEGRADATION: The API is performing less optimally and Sellers may face intermittent issues/comparatively high rate of failures when using the API
• SERVICE_OUTAGE: The API is currently down and not serving any requests. Sellers may face complete failures when using the API

If you encounter issues when using APIs with “Service Degradation” and “Service Outage” statuses, the Walmart Support team is already actively working on resolving the issue, there is no need to create a support ticket for the same issue.

However, if you encounter issues with APIs that have “Operational” statuses, please create a support ticket to inform our team.

Please look out for the outage message posted in https://developer.walmart.com/apiStatus and the current progress and ETA for the issue to be solved.

The API statuses are updated every 30 minutes or less.

Calls to API Platform Status API are throttled, please refer to our guide for specific throttling details.