How to Sell Your Product to Walmart

How to sell your product to Walmart, in the order it actually happens: qualify as a supplier, get a merchant to say yes, sign the supplier agreement, set the item up against a GS1 GTIN, connect EDI, ship to a must-arrive-by date, and hold on-time and in-full performance above Walmart's thresholds. The first three get all the attention. The last three decide whether the item makes money.

Everything below traces to Walmart's own supplier pages where Walmart publishes it, and to a named secondary source with a date where it does not. Compliance thresholds have moved most years, and Walmart publishes the current version to suppliers inside its own systems, so check there before planning against a number from any article, this one included.

Key takeaways

• Registering as a supplier is not a distribution win. Walmart states plainly that self-registering does not guarantee an agreement.
• A GS1 Company Prefix is a hard prerequisite. Walmart requires the number on your application documents, so the barcode work starts before the buyer conversation, not after it.
• Item setup is a data job with real hours in it, and it is where first-time suppliers lose weeks.
• On-time in-full is the largest controllable cost in the relationship, and it is a forecasting and lead-time problem visible in your own data long before the chargeback arrives.
• Selling on Walmart Marketplace as a third-party seller is a different programme from supplying stores. Winning one does not get you the other.

How to sell your product to Walmart: the sequence

Qualifying: what Walmart asks for before anyone looks at your product

Walmart's supplier requirements page names the administrative prerequisites directly. A Federal Taxpayer ID, which Walmart says it requires on all US-based suppliers' application documents. Registration with Dun and Bradstreet. A GS1 Company Prefix, which Walmart again requires on your application documents. Insurance, where Walmart says suppliers must carry certain types and provide evidence of that financial responsibility. Compliance with its supply chain packaging guide, covering case durability, labelling, markings and trailer loading.

Then the audits, which vary by what you sell: food safety, general merchandise product safety, health and wellness product safety, responsible sourcing and supply chain security. Direct import factories in non-food and non-packaging categories also carry a Factory Capability and Capacity Audit, which Walmart states is required prior to order commitment for new factories.

On the application page itself, Walmart directs prospective suppliers to create a Retail Link account to begin the qualification process, and adds a sentence worth quoting to anyone on your team who thinks registration is the finish line: "Self-registering your company does not guarantee you will be extended an agreement to do business with Walmart or its subsidiaries." The same page describes a supplier pool of over 100,000 businesses worldwide, which is the useful context for what a registration is worth on its own.

Retail Link and Supplier One

Retail Link is the supplier portal, and it is where the relationship lives once it exists: store-level and week-level point-of-sale, on-hand and in-stock, the store list an item is authorised for, and the reports a merchant will quote back at you in a review. What it shows and how to read it is covered in Retail Link data.

Supplier One is Walmart's newer front end. Per a September 2024 guide from Walmart supplier consultancy 8th and Walton, it consolidates Retail Link applications including Item 360 and purchase order management into a single portal, and its items and inventory section complements Item 360's catalog, setup, maintenance and submissions functions. In practice, expect to work across both for a while: the underlying applications are the same ones.

One caution about the data, because it shapes how brands behave in year one. Retail Link shows you Walmart. It does not show you the rest of your business, and a Walmart week does not line up with a syndicated week without work. A supplier that runs entirely on Retail Link reporting ends up optimising the account it can see rather than the portfolio it owns.

Item setup, GTINs and UPCs

The barcode chain starts with a GS1 Company Prefix issued by GS1 US, which is what Walmart requires on the application. From that prefix you assign a GTIN to each distinct selling unit and a separate one to each case configuration. Walmart's catalog accepts GTIN, UPC, ISBN and EAN as product identifier types.

Three failures account for most of the delay. Reusing one identifier across flavours or sizes, which collapses two items into one and makes the sell-through read meaningless later. Confusing the each with the case, which breaks receiving. And submitting dimensions or weights that do not match the physical pallet, which is the one that shows up as a DC problem months after setup, because those numbers drive slotting and truck cube. Get the case pack hierarchy right on paper before anyone types it into a form.

The supplier agreement, and what it commits you to

The agreement is Walmart's paper. Terms of sale, allowances, deductions, insurance, audit rights, returns and the compliance schedule all sit in it, and for a first item there is effectively no negotiation of the compliance regime. That is not a horror story, it is the operating model of a retailer with a supplier pool of over 100,000 businesses worldwide: the rules cannot be per-supplier and still be enforceable.

The reading advice is simple. Spend your review time on the sections that price your risk rather than the ones that price your product. Deduction and chargeback mechanics, delivery windows, and the allowance structure will move your landed margin more than the cost line you negotiated, and they will do it every week rather than once.

OTIF and the must-arrive-by date

Every purchase order carries a must-arrive-by date, the date the shipment has to be received at the assigned distribution centre. Orderful's supplier guide, published October 2025 and updated March 2026, puts the rule plainly: if a shipment misses its must-arrive-by date, shows up incomplete, or fails to match the purchase order, the supplier risks OTIF penalties. Early is not automatically safe either, since arrivals outside the window are treated as misses.

Those figures come from 8th and Walton's OTIF guide of May 2024, describing thresholds as of March 2024, and the same source notes Walmart has changed supplier expectations most years since OTIF launched in 2017. Treat the table as the shape of the programme rather than as this quarter's number, and pull the current version from your own scorecard.

What a miss costs, worked through

Take a prepaid supplier shipping 1,850 cases a week at a $22.40 cost per case. That is $41,440 of cost of goods a week and about $2.15 million a year. Assume it runs 86% on time against the 90% threshold and 92% in full against 95%.

On the on-time side, 14% of cases, 259 a week, arrive outside the window. At 3% of cost that is $174.05 a week, about $9,050 a year. On the in-full side, 8% of cases, 148 a week, are short. At 3% of cost that is $99.46 a week, about $5,170 a year. Together, roughly $14,200 a year, or about 0.7% of cost of goods.

Small against the revenue and large against a new item's first-year margin, which is exactly why it belongs in the model before the first purchase order rather than in a variance report after it. It is also the most controllable line in the whole relationship. Late and short are lead-time and forecast problems, and both are visible in your own shipment and demand data weeks before a deduction appears. Supplier performance metrics covers how OTIF and fill rate are actually calculated, which is worth reading before you argue about a number with anyone.

What to model before you say yes

• Landed cost per case at the DC, at the volume Walmart will actually order rather than the volume in the pitch deck.
• Lead time and safety stock sufficient to hold a must-arrive-by window, including your co-packer's lead time, which is usually the binding constraint.
• OTIF exposure at the performance you can realistically hold in year one, not at 100%.
• Item setup and data maintenance as real hours, whether they are yours or an agency's.
• Allowances, deductions and returns per the agreement, modelled as a percentage of sales rather than as an exception.
• The cost of being out of stock at store level, which for a growing item is usually larger than every penalty combined.

Where Scout fits

Scout reads Walmart point-of-sale alongside your other retailer and syndicated feeds, so store-level sell-through, in-stock and velocity sit next to the rest of the business on one calendar rather than in a portal with its own fiscal weeks. That is the input to a Walmart forecast that can actually hold a must-arrive-by date, and to the store-level void and out-of-stock work that decides whether the item survives its first review.

The boundary, stated once and plainly: Scout does not broker the Walmart relationship. It does not submit your supplier application, it is not a portal or an EDI gateway, and it does not transmit anything to Walmart. Walmart's systems stay Walmart's systems. Scout is the demand-side read on the data that comes out of them.

Related: how to get your product into retail stores for the general version of this process, EDI transactions for the document flow, and who does UNFI distribute to if a distributor route is on the table alongside a direct one.