Getting Started with Walmart

Summary

This selling channel connector supports pulling orders from Walmart to send to a fulfillment channel, pushing fulfillments back to Walmart to update order status, syncing inventory to Walmart based on inventory from a fulfillment channel.

With the Walmart connector you will be able to perform the following:

• Pull Orders
• Pull Products
• Push Products
• Push Inventory 
• Push Fulfillments

In this article

• Recommendations
• Basic setup
• Testing

Recommendations

• Make sure you are licensed to use the Pipe17 Walmart connector. If you're not certain, book a demo with a Pipe17 team member to ensure you are ready to begin setup.
• Before adding the integration, turn off pop-up blockers in your browser.

Basic setup

Setup the Connector

• Navigate to Integrations in your Pipe17 portal and click on "Add Integration" to add the Walmart connector to your account.

• Enter your Walmart ClientID and ClientSecret; click “Connect”

  • Visit Home-US  and login with your Walmart Seller Center account details

  • Click Add New Key for a Solution Provider

• Navigate to the "Settings" tab of the connector. In most configurations, we recommend you turn on:

  • Pull orders from Walmart - this will allow orders to sync from Walmart to Pipe17. Orders pulled in Pipe17 depends on the filters set in the Orders section.

  • Products - allows either pulling products from Walmart or pushing products to Walmart

    • Pull products from Walmart - Product updates are pulled from Walmart in 1, 2, 4, 8, 12, or 24 hours interval, depending on the size of the product catalog. The cadence is adaptive and decided based on the time required for the last product pull. If the last pull was done in last than 1 hour, next one will be scheduled in an hour from the start of pervious run, and so on. 

    • Push products to Walmart - Product updates pushed to Walmart are processed every 5 minutes. Product changed since the last run are included in the push.

  • Inventory
    • Pull inventory from Walmart - Inventory is pulled from Walmart in 1, 2, 4, 8, 12, or 24 hours, depending on the size of the inventory. If the inventory data is large, inventory is pulled once every 24 hours. 
    • Push inventory to Walmart - Inventory changes since the last run are pushed every 5 minutes to Walmart. Make sure your Walmart locations are properly merged into the source inventory location. 
    • Push & pull inventory - Inventory flows in either direction. See above explanation on push and pull.
  • Push fulfillments to Walmart - this will allow orders to be updated when a fulfillment is created in Pipe17 from the fulfillment channel
  • Pull locations (ship nodes) from Walmart - this will allow locations to be created in Pipe17 representing 1 or more ship nodes in the Walmart account

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Additional Settings

Locations

• Create WFS location to track Walmart fulfillable inventory quantities - select this option if you want to allow collecting WFS inventory. By default only Seller Fulfilled ship nodes are pulled into Pipe17. Enabling this option will create a virtual location for WFS inventory. The WFS inventory will be tied to this virtual location in Pipe17. 

Orders

• Exclude orders created before this date - set this with the order date/time cutoff to pull orders into Pipe17. Orders prior to this cutoff will not be ingested into Pipe17
• Use customer order id as order number in Pipe17 - select if you want to use customer order # instead of the purchase order # as the external order id in Pipe17
• Pull only following orders form Walmart - select if you want Pipe17 to pull only specific types of orders. Choices are - Seller Fulfilled, Walmart Fulfilled, Partner Fulfilled. You can select one or more order types
• Pull only orders in these states - select if you would like all orders (created & acknowledged) or just one of the states to be ingested into Pipe17
• Acknowledge orders automatically - select if you want Pipe17 to mark the order in Walmart as Acknowledged when pulled into Pipe17
• Cancel Pipe17 order when Walmart order gets cancelled - select if you want to mark order cancelled in Pipe17 when the order is marked cancelled in Walmart
• When applying fulfillment, cancel lineItems not reported in first fulfillment - select if you want any line items not included on the first partial fulfillment of an order to be cancelled in Walmart. If turned off, Pipe17 will look for other partial fulfillments and apply them as they are received.

Products

• Apply product updates only for specific SKUs - add a list of SKUs that should be processed, depending on the product flow setting under Connection Flow. It is recommended to use this option for testing or for a small list. Large SKU list provided here will make processing highly inefficient.  
• Force product catalog resync - select this option to force a full sync of the products, depending on the product flow setting under Connection Flow. It is not recommended to use force resync frequently, rather only in extreme circumstances as it will create a large sync job that includes the entire catalog. It will pause the incremental product sync job until this force sync job is completed. For a smaller set of products to be resynced, use the bulk Sync Product action on the product list page.

Note: Products push to Walmart is done in batches. The outbound product entity event is a single event for the entire batch. Events are not created for individual products in the batch.

Products push to Walmart will work as long as you all properties required by Walmart is available on the product. The required properties depend on product category and might vary from a few to over 50 properties. These properties usually do not exist in Pipe17. You will have to customize the product entity or use custom mappings to successfully push products to Walmart.

Inventory

• Push inventory information to Walmart in batches - select this to use the more efficient way to push inventory using Walmart feed API, especially useful for large inventory catalog. Inventory sync runs every 5 minutes and pushed inventory records that have changed since last sync job. 
• Process only inventory items with specific SKUs - add a list of SKUs that should be processed, depending on the inventory flow setting under Connection Flow. It is recommended to use this option for testing or for a small list. Large SKU list provided here will make processing highly inefficient.  
• Report inventory totals form Pipe17 to dedicated Walmart location - select this option if you want to push inventory totals in Pipe17 to the selected Walmart location. Pick a Walmart location form the drop down. Ensure Pipe17 has pulled location from Walmart using the "Pull location (ship nodes) from Walmart" option above. Inventory from all location that are not marked "Exclude from totals" are summed up and sent to the selected Walmart location.
• Force inventory resync - select this option to force a full sync of the inventory, depending on the inventory flow setting under Connection Flow. It is not recommended to use force resync frequently, rather only in extreme circumstances as it will create a large sync job that includes the entire catalog. It will pause the incremental inventory sync job until this force sync job is completed. For a smaller set of inventory to be resynced, use the bulk Sync Inventory action on the inventory list page.

Location Setup

• Click on Inventory > Locations in the Pipe17 portal. You should see at least one location created by the Walmart integration.
• Click into the Walmart location that will hold the inventory from your 3PL/warehouse location, and click "Merge location", then select the corresponding 3PL/warehouse location to be the source for the inventory that syncs to the Walmart location. This "links" the two locations so that the inventory from the 3PL/warehouse is available to sell in Walmart. You can refer to our guide on Merging Locations for more detail on these steps.

Order Routing Setup

1. Click on Organization > Order Routing on the left-hand side of the Pipe17 portal. You will now configure an Order Routing rule to send your orders to the right fulfillment location.
2. For "Name", enter a title for your routing rule (for example, "All orders to 3PL").
3. For "Destination", pick the country or countries that this rule will apply to. You can add new destinations under Organization > Filters. Leave blank if all orders should route the same way no matter the shipping destination.
4. For "Fulfillment Location", pick whichever 3PL/warehouse location should fulfill your Walmart orders. When you are done it should look similar to this:
   
   • Note: based on the orders settings you added when doing the basic Walmart connector setup, any new & unfulfilled orders that are ingested from Walmart into Pipe17 will flow through this routing rule/rules and may be routed to fulfillment if passing the routing criteria you set up. This is why we always recommend trying this with a test order or two first, using the available filters on the order routing rule to ensure Pipe17 only routes the test order you want to send for fulfillment.

5. Save your changes.

Testing

• To test your setup, ensure inventory looks good in Pipe17 (this should sync from your fulfillment location). Then, you can create a test order in Walmart for a product for which you have inventory in the fulfillment location. We suggest you use your business address or a friend’s address for the ship-to address. Your order should appear in Pipe17 within five minutes, and you should see it generate a shipping request to the fulfillment location you configured in the order routing rules. The order should then appear in the fulfillment system within a few minutes.