Catalog Setup
As your company uses Just Walk Out technology by Amazon, a catalog must be set up to recognize the items that are sold in your store. The catalog must be set up prior to item-placement in the store. This is a process called “bootstrapping”, accomplished using a Associate Tools hand held application built for this purpose. The scanning application will match the item code scanned, and search for it in the catalog. If the item is not found in the catalog, it cannot be merchandised in the store. You will need to provide Amazon with a catalog of detailed product information for the products you sell and keep this information up-to-date.
Typically, Item-level detail can be found in an ERP, merchandising or some home-grown system. These systems may or may not have APIs available for import and export. The item-level detail housed and maintained in these systems is fairly complex and we only need a small sub-set this item-level detail, to be ingested into your Merchant Catalog.
If automation is desired, then the standard data exports will typically need to be modified such that we only receive what is required by our catalog.
Considerations
While your catalog may get updated multiple times, it is important to only update the Amazon catalog with the changes that will impact the Amazon enabled store such as Sku, description
You are required to update the Amazon catalog when new items are offered for sale in the store or any of the following changes to items occur:
- Sku
- Scannable Barcode
- Product Description
Following list might be applicable depending on the responsibility ownership:
- Pricing
- Promotions
Catalog Items can take up to 1 hour to be fully populated in the Amazon systems. This can also depend on the size and frequency of the request.
Note: In order to increase efficiency and reduce cost, it is recommended to perform catalog updates in a batch manner and only when an essential change to the store is required
Mechanisms
There are two mechanisms available to provide Amazon with your catalog content.
- Catalog template (xlsm) ingestion
- Catalog API. If you wish to establish an integration for your store with the Catalog API, please refer to the API reference
Amazon Just Walk Out Catalog API:
API Spec / Sample solution: https://jwo.amazon.com
You can update your catalog manually using the 3PCC Portal or you can use our Catalog API, which allows you to programmatically update your catalog through a simple REST API. This spec will assist you in automating your catalog updates using the Amazon Catalog API.