SMART Types: The Fastest Way to List to Amazon, Walmart & Beyond

This blog was originally published on July 24, 2016 and has since been updated to reflect more recent information.

Let’s take a quick walk down memory lane. In 2015, Jet.com was a fast-growing marketplace with more than 4.5 million products up for sale. We ourselves were selling on Jet—even managing to rank as a Top 5 marketplace seller. 

More importantly, we were publishing around 200,000 SKUs on Jet using product information from various sources. Some of these sources offered clean data. Most, however, required us to enrich and reformat the data so that it met Jet’s listing requirements. 

True to our nature, we built something to automate this process. 

Within that same year, Jet's founding team encouraged us to open up our homegrown system to other sellers, citing how our listing quality and fulfillment performance were consistently higher than the average seller’s. That's how SMART Types (and Zentail) was born.

Today, SMART Types is central to our platform. It's the fastest, safest way for sellers to list their products to multiple channels and keep up with marketplace changes.

SMART stands for Standard Marketplace Attribute Relationship Technology

List Your Products in Less Clicks

The process of getting just one listing up is tedious—and historically, listing multiple products across multiple online channels (like Amazon, Walmart Marketplace, eBay, a Shopify webstore and your own site) has meant asking one or two poor souls from your team to do this all by hand. 

Nowadays, there are plenty of listing services that claim to automate this. The problem? The majority of those platforms severely underestimate the data transformation required to comply (and remain compliant) with each channel.

For example, the same shirt that's listed under Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry > Men > Clothing > Shirts > Casual Button-Down Shirts on Amazon is listed as Clothing > Mens Clothing > Mens Dress Shirts on Walmart Marketplace. In addition to this, per its latest changes to apparel sizing, Amazon demands your sizes to follow a strict format and requires several attributes that Walmart does not. 

Your job becomes exponentially harder, and while some listing platforms will copy and paste your product titles from one channel to another, few will go the extra step of making sure your product data is properly mapped and doesn’t result in a listing error. 

In fact, Zentail’s SMART Types system is the only solution that can keep up with the requirements of today’s top marketplaces. You simply assign the SMART Type to your product, and Zentail auto-categorizes your listings for multiple channels at once. Any corresponding attributes (like Age Range) will then be communicated and auto-formatted for every marketplace that accepts them. With AI at its core, SMART Types also adjusts your data for any sudden changes to marketplace requirements.

Eliminate Listing Errors, Both Now and in the Future

Your product listings, unfortunately, aren’t something that you can just set and forget. Marketplace requirements are constantly changing. Some changes even happen with relatively short notice. 

Amazon, for instance, abruptly announced that it would be revamping its requirements for all U.S. footwear listings. Sellers had to submit a dozen more item specifics to every shoe they sold in order to remain listed.

Sellers who used SMART Types were able to cut their work in half; Zentail only needed a few standard fields to be filled out in order to infer the rest of the attributes for Amazon. It could decipher details like “footwear size calsee,” “footwear size system” and the proper way to format sizes. 

Worth mentioning: Zentail's platform includes tools like QuickEdit, which enables bulk edits and quick error resolution. 

Get Your Products Ranking Higher

It’s safe to say that high-quality product data is often underrated. What feels like maintenance work is actually a critical task that has the power to help or hinder your sales. Consider it this way:

• If your data is incomplete, your customer may not trust your listing and never transact
• If your data is inaccurate, customer expectations and order routing could get confused, resulting in a poor buyer experience and, ultimately, a return
• If your product is incorrectly categorized—well, that’s just embarrassing and it’s no wonder you’re not getting that many sales
• If your data isn’t optimized for the channel, your product could be delisted or outranked by others that meet or exceed marketplace expectations 

Don’t put yourself in a position where you’re selling yourself short. Take advantage of the tools at your disposal to keep your listings up to snuff. 

How to Use SMART Types in Zentail

When creating a new SKU in Zentail, select the SMART Type from the labeled dropdown. Zentail will automatically assign all or most channel category values (i.e. Amazon Item Type, Amazon Product Type, eBay Category ID, Walmart Product Type, Google Shopping Category ID, etc.) to your listing.

If you don’t see a SMART Type that matches what you’re looking for, you can alternately add the Amazon Item Type for your SKU, and Zentail will automatically identify the best category IDs across all of your channels. You can do this when you're creating a new SKU or when you're editing the SKU you've already created.

If you notice an opportunity to assign a more accurate category ID for any channel, simply edit the value for one of your SKUs of that Smart Type, and the change will be applied to all of your SKUs using that SMART Type.

That’s it! 

In Summary

We created SMART Types to make your life as a multichannel seller 10x easier and more fruitful. See SMART Types up close by contacting our team today for a free, no-strings-attached demo.