Items

The Item Management APIs enable you to set up and manage items. You can access them once you register as a developer to  get a valid consumer ID and private key.

The item is the basic building block for all operations. An item includes the item as well as the listing price for the item.

Items must have inventory assigned, be submitted and be published in order to become available for customers to purchase on Walmart.com.

A submitted item is one that has been successfully parsed and classified. The amount of time this takes is typically a few hours.

A published item is one that has had all necessary attributes confirmed and has been back-flushed through all required Walmart systems. Publishing typically takes a few hours.

Submission and publishing occur after a Bulk Upload from the Warehouse Supplier. Inventory changes, including adding inventory, occur via a different process. A monitoring process should be set up to ensure your items are pushed to Walmart.com.

How to Push Warehouse Supplier Items

To complete Item Setup, follow the steps below:

1. Send an Item feed to Walmart by calling Bulk Upload with an attached XML file. This API call is the starting point of the ingestion/publishing process for each item in the XML file. This call returns a feed ID. Use the feed ID to monitor items that are being ingested.
2. You can monitor the status of the feed and the item submission. The API call Get feed and item status includes all details about the feed status. Once the feed has a status of PROCESSED (i.e., the feed is complete), all of the items have either been submitted or have submission errors.
   ** Note: The first items may be successfully submitted days before the last items are successfully submitted.**
3. Step 2 may return errors on individual items. Examine the errors that are returned, check the XML against the XSD and correct errors if any and then mark them for reingestion. If errors persist, contact Partner Support.

The Warehouse Supplier API contains only one set of XSDs that represents an item object (i.e., SupplierItem object). The SupplierItem object contains item information and/or listing/offer information.

Extract the SupplierItem from the .zip directory: V3-Spec-Supplier-3.2-XSD.zip.

Based on the type of information provided, the XSD can be used for the following operations:

1. Set up a full item: If the SupplierItem object contains item information (i.e., SupplierProduct attributes), as well as the listing/offer information (i.e., SupplierOffer attributes), it will be used to set up the item and the listing/offer.
2. Update the item only: If the SupplierItem object contains only item information (i.e., SupplierProduct attributes), only the item will be updated.

Usage

The recommended usage of the different operations mentioned above is as follows:

1. For initial insertion, use the SupplierItem object with the item details and the item listing/offer.
2. Once the item has been set up and the status is PUBLISHED, use the SupplierOffer object for edits to the offer/listing, such as price changes.
3. Use the SupplierProduct object for edits to the item attributes.
   ** Note: SupplierItem object price information is used only when the entire object is processed. It is recommended to use the SupplierItem object only for initial item setup. **

This section provides an example Walmart supplier’s Item ingestion implementation plan.

There are five parts to the implementation plan:

1. Walmart item client-side status
2. Send items for ingestion
3. Check ingestion status
4. Check published status
5. Correct item errors

Get Walmart item client-side status

For this implementation, we assume that you will use your own client-side database to store the status of your items and feeds on Walmart.com. A possible set of statuses could be:

Status	Description	Comment
transmit	To be transmitted to Walmart	Can be set to this state by seller deciding to include SKU on Walmart.com, or by system requesting a re-transmission because data errors were detected and fixed
data fix	Schema or content is incompatible with Walmart.com	Check the item XML file against the XSD file
ingestion in progress	Item is in the ingestion process	No updates allowed at this time
publish in progress	Item is in publishing process	Ingestion is completed, but publishing must be completed before you can add inventory
published	Item is published on Walmart.com	Inventory can be added and the item can be sold to customers
system error	Error occurred during publish process	Contact Walmart Marketplace Support
unpublished	Not avail. on Walmart.com	Usually caused by item removal
data fix – ticket	Support ticket was submitted	Reason for error is “data fix”
system error – ticket	Support ticket submitted	Reason for error is “system error”

Feed Status	Description	Comment
active	Has items that still need ingestion status checked	Do not archive or delete
archive	All items in the feed are done processing	Archive the feed IDs or delete them

Send items for ingestion

This flow describes how you may want to send your items to Walmart and process immediate errors. On an initial ingestion, the object used must be the SupplierItem object; thereafter, you may use the OfferEnvelope or the ProductEnvelope object.

Process flow: send items for ingestion

Check ingestion status

The flow below describes how you may monitor the status of your items as they are ingested.

Process flow: check ingestion status

Check published status

The flow below describes how you may monitor the status of your items as they move through the publishing process.

Process flow: check published status

Correct item errors

The flow below describes how you may implement a process for correcting item errors. In addition to the flow below, you may want to build your own process for correcting items and their statuses as Partner Support responds to support cases.

Process flow: correct item errors