Walmart Integration – Feature & Process Guide
Walmart is a feed-based marketplace connected to Pentagon Connect through a direct integration — Pentagon Connect is not a member of Walmart's Partner Network, so it acts on the seller's behalf rather than as an approved partner. Listings, prices, stock and orders are exchanged with Walmart in batches rather than one-at-a-time in real time, and each type of update (product content, price, stock) runs on its own schedule with its own limits.
Ship With Walmart is available as an optional add-on: instead of only recording tracking information after a shipment has already happened elsewhere, Pentagon Connect can pull shipping rate estimates from Walmart and purchase and download a Walmart shipping label directly.
Quick Reference
Product Management
| Capability | Supported | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Create new products | Yes | Item goes live for purchase as soon as the submission is accepted – there is no separate publish step |
| Update product content (title, description, images, attributes) | Yes | Sent as a lighter update with a shorter required-field list than creation |
| Update SKU / product ID on a live listing | Yes | Treated as a priority update that runs ahead of any pending content update on the same item |
| Product variants (size/colour groups) | Yes | Products share a variation group, the same grouping concept used elsewhere in Pentagon Connect |
| Multiple categories in one submission | No | Every submission can only cover a single product category; mixed-category batches must be split |
| Deactivate / remove a listing | Not documented | No delisting, deactivation or delete flow is described in the current source material |
Pricing & Stock
| Capability | Supported | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Update price | Yes | Runs as its own update, independent of product content |
| RRP / promotional pricing | Yes | Shown as a discount only when a valid reduction type is configured and the reference price is genuinely higher; otherwise only the plain price is sent |
| Scheduled / multiple promotions per item | No | Walmart's separate scheduled-promotions feature is not wired up |
| Update stock/quantity | Yes | Single item or bulk, depending on how many SKUs change at once |
| Per-location / multi-warehouse stock | No | Only one stock number per SKU is supported |
| Price update on a brand-new listing | Restricted | Blocked for the first 24 hours after creation, per Walmart's own processing window |
Orders & Fulfilment
| Capability | Supported | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Automatic order import | Yes | Pulled in on a recurring basis; first pull for a new account looks back 90 days |
| Order acknowledgement | Yes | Required within 4 hours of an order becoming ready, before anything else can happen to it besides cancellation |
| Ship orders (tracking + mark shipped) | Yes | |
| Partial shipment | Yes | A line can ship for fewer than its full ordered quantity, with the remainder shipped later |
| Ship With Walmart (buy labels through Walmart) | Yes | Optional add-on; rate estimate, label purchase and label download in one flow |
| Filter orders by fulfilment type (seller / Walmart / 3rd‑party fulfilled) | Yes | |
| Convert a seller-fulfilled listing to Walmart-fulfilled | No |
Refunds, Returns, Cancellations & Claims
| Capability | Supported | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Cancellation status & reason tracking | Yes | Cancellations reported by Walmart are recorded against the order and its lines, with reason text stored where Walmart provides one |
| Refund status & reason tracking | Yes | Same – refund amounts and reasons Walmart reports are recorded against the order |
| Seller-initiated cancellation | Not documented | No call for Pentagon Connect to request a cancellation on Walmart's side is described in the source material |
| Seller-initiated refund | Not documented | No outbound refund call is described – refunds appear to be read in, not submitted |
| Returns as a distinct object | Not documented | No separate "return" flow distinct from a refund is described |
| Claims / incidents | Not documented | No such concept exists for Walmart in the current source material |
Product Management
Creating products
Products are created through a single-step listing process — once a submission is accepted, the item is live for purchase immediately, with no separate "publish" step.
- Product identifiers follow a strict priority order: EAN, then MPN, then UPC, then ISBN (books only) – whichever is populated first is what gets sent to Walmart.
- Brand is taken from the item's own specifics first, falling back to the product's general brand field if not set there.
- One category per submission – if a batch of products spans more than one Walmart category, it has to be split into separate submissions.
- Variants: products can be grouped into variant sets (e.g. size/colour of the same item) using a shared variation group, the same grouping concept used elsewhere in Pentagon Connect.
- Units: dimensions and weight are converted automatically – Pentagon Connect stores them in metric, Walmart only accepts US units (inches/pounds), so the conversion happens on the way out.
- Empty, non-required fields are left out of the submission entirely rather than sent as blank values.
Updating products
Content updates (title, description, images, attributes) run as a lighter, separate flow from creation, since Walmart only expects the fields that actually changed.
- SKU / product ID changes are handled as a special case – they go out ahead of, and take priority over, any standard content update queued for the same item.
- Price and stock are each updated through their own independent flows – see Pricing & Stock Sync below.
Deactivating / removing products
Not documented in the current source material. No delisting, deactivation or delete flow for Walmart is described in these specs – the one document that looked like it might cover this turned out, on inspection, to be a stray duplicate export of the product-creation spec rather than a real delete feature.
Pricing & Stock Sync
- Price updates run through their own dedicated flow, independent of product content.
- Promotional pricing: an item is shown as discounted only when a valid reduction type is configured (on the item or as an account default) and the reference price is genuinely above the current price; otherwise only the plain price is sent and the item is treated as having no active promotion.
- Walmart's separate scheduled-promotions feature is not used – only standard base/reduced pricing is supported.
- New listings cannot receive a price update for the first 24 hours after creation – this is a Walmart processing-reliability window, not a Pentagon Connect restriction.
- Stock updates support a single quantity per SKU only; Walmart's per-location inventory is not split out.
Order Management
Getting orders
Orders are pulled in automatically on a recurring basis; on the very first pull for a new account, Pentagon Connect looks back 90 days to catch up. Orders only become fully available to process once Walmart's own internal grace period (30 minutes from placement) has passed – before that, order details can still shift on Walmart's side.
Order information we store
- Marketplace order ID, order status, order and delivery-related dates
- Buyer details and shipping/billing address
- Payment, pricing, tax and shipping charge totals, at both order and line level
- Per line item: SKU, product, quantity, price, status, and any cancellation or refund reason Walmart supplies
- Carrier, tracking number and tracking URL once an order has shipped
Shipping orders
Once an order has been acknowledged, Pentagon Connect can ship it – including partial shipments, where a line ships for fewer than its full ordered quantity and the remainder is left for a later shipment.
- Orders must be acknowledged within 4 hours of being ready; unacknowledged orders cannot be shipped.
- Carriers must come from Walmart's own approved list; a carrier that is not on that list is still sent through under a generic "other carrier" field so tracking information isn't lost.
- Ship With Walmart is a separate, optional feature that lets Pentagon Connect buy shipping labels directly through Walmart – getting rate estimates, purchasing a label and downloading it – rather than only recording tracking info after a shipment has already happened elsewhere. It is tied to a single Walmart account per label-provider setup.
Cancellations
Not documented as a seller-initiated action. The source material describes Pentagon Connect reading cancellation status and reason text back from Walmart once a line has been cancelled (by the customer or by Walmart) and reflecting that on the order, but no call for Pentagon Connect to request a cancellation on Walmart's side is described.
Refunds & returns
Not documented as a seller-initiated action, for the same reason as cancellations – refund amounts and reasons are read in from Walmart's order data and recorded against the order, but no outbound refund call is described in the current source material. There is no separate "return" concept distinct from a refund.
Carriers Supported
Carriers must be selected from Walmart's own approved list – a large set covering the major national carriers (UPS, USPS, FedEx, DHL) plus dozens of regional and country-specific couriers (e.g. Canada Post, Purolator), mapped through Pentagon Connect's own carrier list. A carrier that isn't on Walmart's approved list is still sent through under a generic "other carrier" field, so tracking information isn't lost, but it won't be recognised as one of Walmart's own named couriers.
Known Limitations
- No deactivation/delisting flow is documented – there is no described way to take a listing down.
- No seller-initiated cancellation or refund action is documented – cancellations and refunds appear to be customer- or Walmart-initiated, with Pentagon Connect reading and recording the result rather than submitting one.
- No documented reason-code list for cancellations or refunds – Walmart sends free-text reasons rather than a fixed set Pentagon Connect maps against.
- Stock updates support only a single quantity per SKU – no per-location/warehouse split.
- New products cannot receive a price update for the first 24 hours after creation.
- Walmart's scheduled promotions feature is not integrated – only standard base/reduced pricing is supported.
- Converting a seller-fulfilled listing to Walmart-fulfilled (WFS) is not built – only seller-fulfilled listings are supported end-to-end. Walmart- and third-party-fulfilled orders can optionally be excluded from the order pull instead.
- Ship With Walmart's label-download step was never fully verified end-to-end, so the exact file response behaviour is not confirmed.
- Every product submission can only cover one category – mixed-category batches must be split before sending.
Source Materials
This guide was built from Pentagon Connect's Walmart Marketplace integration specifications covering authentication, taxonomy, product creation and updates, pricing, stock, order retrieval, acknowledgement, shipment and Walmart's own label-purchasing feature.