How to improve your Walmart content quality score

To improve your Walmart content quality score, work the per-item issue list Walmart gives you and fix the four fields it says the score measures: item name, item description, key features and images. Start with missing product-type attributes, because Walmart reports them as content issues directly and they also feed the title and key features that the score reads.

Walmart does not publish the formula. What it does publish is enough to work from: which fields count, how issues are labelled, and what each field must contain. The rest of this post is that, in the order we would fix it.

What the Walmart Content Quality score measures

On Marketplace Learn, Walmart describes Listing Quality as five components: content quality, price competitiveness, shipping, published and in stock, and ratings and reviews. Content quality "measures the efficacy of your listing's item name, item description, key features and images." You get an item-level score for each listing, and your catalog-level score is the average of those item scores.

Two details matter for planning. Items over 50 pounds or listed at 10 dollars or less are excluded from the Listing Quality calculation, per the same page. And that page gives no component weights, no content-score formula and no published pass threshold. Agency posts that quote a specific target percentage are not quoting this page, so treat any number like that as their benchmark, not Walmart's rule.

Of the five components, content is the one that is purely a product-data problem. Price, shipping speed, stock and reviews are commercial and operational. Content is fields you control.

Where the "Content Quality" score shows up for an item

Sellers see it in three places:

• The Listing Quality dashboard in Seller Center, filtered down to low-scoring items.
• The Bulk Attribute Editor, which Walmart says exists to "help you improve your Content quality score." You build a spreadsheet from the dashboard, filter to the items that need work, edit item name, description, key features and images, and upload it back. Walmart notes newly published offers can take up to a week to show in the dashboard.
• The API. The Listing Quality score endpoint returns a contentScore from 0 to 100 alongside priceScore, shippingScore, transactibilityScore and ratingReviewScore.

The most useful of these is the Item Listing Quality Details API. Under contentAndDiscoverability it returns an issues array per attribute, with an attributeName (examples in the docs include capacity, color and product_name), a per-attribute score, an isEditable flag and an isSpecAttribute flag. The issue types are concrete: MISSING, MISSING_KEY_ATTRIBUTES, NOT_ENOUGH_BULLET_POINTS, IMAGE_COUNT_TOO_LOW.

That list is the real spec for your score. Pull it for the whole catalog and you have a work queue sorted by field, rather than a single percentage to stare at.

Walmart Marketplace item content requirements, field by field

Here is what Walmart's product details policy and image guidelines say for each field the content score reads. Requirements change, so confirm against the current Marketplace Learn pages and your category's item spec before a bulk upload.

Field	What Walmart asks for	Issue type you may see
Item name	Brief, 150 characters or fewer; no repeated keywords, multiple brands or multiple product types; no all caps, special characters, promo claims or retailer names	MISSING_KEY_ATTRIBUTES on product_name
Key features	3 to 10, most important first; 80 characters max each, spaces included; no URLs, emojis, special characters, HTML or numbered lists	MISSING on features
Description	One paragraph, minimum 150 words (varies by category); features, benefits, product name, brand; no bullet points, numbered lists or URLs	NOT_ENOUGH_BULLET_POINTS (on product_long_description in Walmart's API example)
Images	Upload a minimum of four; 1:1 square; 2200 x 2200 px standard, 1500 x 1500 px minimum for zoom; seamless white 255/255/255 background; 5MB or less; JPEG, JPG, PNG or BMP, no GIF	IMAGE_COUNT_TOO_LOW
Attributes	Values relevant to the attribute and in its unit of measure; fill "as many attributes as possible, if accurate information is available"	MISSING

On keywords, Walmart's keyword guidance is to pick one or two primary keywords and use each once in the title, description and key features, and not to repeat the same word within a title or description.

How to improve your Walmart content quality score, in fix order

Order by how many issues a fix clears and how much it unblocks downstream.

1. Attributes first. A missing color or capacity is an issue by itself, and it is also why the title fails MISSING_KEY_ATTRIBUTES. Walmart's own API example flags a title that includes brand but is missing capacity and material: you cannot write "32 oz Stainless Steel Water Bottle, Matte Black" if the catalog does not know the capacity, material or finish. Walmart's attribution guide ties attributes to product type: the item's category and product type determine which attributes are relevant, and without them "customers will likely have a hard time finding your items."
2. Titles, rebuilt from attributes. Once brand, product type, size, count and material are populated, generate titles from those fields under a pattern per product type. This is faster and more consistent than hand-editing thousands of names.
3. Key features. Reach at least three, ideally more, each under 80 characters. Pull them from spec values that matter to a buyer (voltage, load rating, certification), not from marketing copy.
4. Images. Get every item to four or more. The primary image is the one most likely to fail on background or dimensions.
5. Description. Write it last, because by then you have the attributes and features it should describe in sentences.

The attribute-completeness work most sellers skip

Most sellers edit what shoppers see: the title and the bullets. The spec attributes (isSpecAttribute in the API) sit lower on the page and get left blank, often because the value lives in a PDF spec sheet, a manufacturer page or a column in the ERP that never got mapped.

The volume is what makes it skippable. For illustration, take a 5,000-SKU catalog where the issue list shows an average of 12 missing attributes per item. That is 60,000 values. At 2 minutes per value to find it in a spec sheet and enter it in the right unit, that is 2,000 hours of work, before anyone checks it.

Three things go wrong when this gets rushed:

• Unit mismatches. A value typed as 12in into a field expecting a number plus a unit fails Walmart's requirement that values "correspond with each attribute's unit of measure."
• Guessed values. Walmart's product details policy says sellers are responsible for substantiating AI-generated content before publishing. A plausible but wrong voltage is worse than a blank field, because it ships to a customer.
• Ownership blocks. Walmart's content update overview says that without brand owner or authorized reseller privileges you cannot update some content fields, including blank fields. If you are the manufacturer, establishing brand ownership is a prerequisite, not an afterthought. Check isEditable before you assign work.

Deciding who does the attribute work

There are three usual paths: an internal catalog team, an offshore data-entry vendor working through a spreadsheet, or a tool that generates copy. Copy generators help with descriptions but do not know the chuck size of a drill that is not in their input. Data-entry vendors can find values but usually run as a project that ends, while Walmart's content requirements and your catalog keep moving.

This is where how Anglera works fits. Your PIM, ERP or a flat CSV export stays the system of record. Anglera extracts attribute values from the source documents you already have (spec sheets, catalogs, manufacturer sites, ERP fields), normalizes them to the target unit, scores each value for confidence, and flags conflicts for review rather than inventing a value. Typical setup is 30 days or less, and a newly required attribute can be backfilled across the catalog once instead of SKU by SKU.

If you want a single number to track internally alongside Walmart's, a content health score built on attribute fill rate per product type tracks the same thing Walmart's issue list does. For how marketplace content rules differ across channels, see marketplace content compliance.

How to tell it worked

Re-pull the item details API a week after upload, given Walmart's stated lag, and compare issue counts by type rather than the overall percentage. If MISSING and MISSING_KEY_ATTRIBUTES counts fall, the attribute work landed. If contentScore moves but issues do not, something else changed.

Walmart's content score is mostly a measure of whether the product data behind each listing is complete and correct. Anglera does that work underneath whatever PIM or feed tool you already run, pulling attribute values from real source documents so titles, key features and descriptions have something accurate to say.