Retail Link Data: What Walmart's Supplier Portal Actually Gives You

Retail Link data is the sell-through, inventory, and order data Walmart hands its suppliers through its vendor portal, Retail Link. If you sell into Walmart, nothing else comes close to it: store-level numbers, refreshed nearly daily, bundled into your supplier account at no extra charge. The trouble is that detail at that scale becomes a problem of its own.

What Retail Link data shows

Retail Link covers what a supplier needs to run the account week to week:

• Point-of-sale: units and dollars scanned, by item, by store, by day or week. This is the sell-through figure every other report is built on top of.
• Inventory: on-hand and in-transit units at both the store and the distribution center, plus the in-stock percentage that feeds Walmart's on-shelf-availability scorecards.
• Orders and receipts: what Walmart ordered, what actually showed up, and where the two are starting to diverge.
• Store and item attributes: modular (planogram) data, store clusters, and item status, the context that keeps the raw sales numbers from being misread.

All of it runs through Walmart's own tools, and it refreshes far faster than any syndicated panel. You can look at yesterday at the store level instead of last week at the market level.

What Retail Link data leaves out

Retail Link is first-party data, and first-party data carries one fixed blind spot: it only ever shows your shelf, at one retailer.

• No category context. Retail Link can't tell you whether a decline is your problem or the whole category's. It sees no competitors and no category total.
• No other retailers. The Walmart portal shows Walmart. A brand at ten accounts is running ten separate copies of this exercise.
• No shopper. POS scans tell you what sold, not who bought it or why. Retail Link will not distinguish a loyal repeat buyer from a one-time deal chaser.

So Retail Link data is necessary without being sufficient. You pair it with syndicated data, which sees the whole category but lags and generalizes. See What is syndicated data?.

Using Retail Link without drowning in it

Drowning is the usual failure mode. The portal exposes hundreds of report permutations, and an analyst can burn a whole week pulling them and never get to the analysis. A few habits keep it useful.

• Pick the handful of questions that actually matter (in-stock, velocity by store cluster, modular compliance) and pull only those, on a fixed schedule.
• Export it and harmonize it. Retail Link's item identifiers and week definitions are Walmart's own. To stack Walmart against another account, you have to map the export onto a shared product master.
• Treat the in-stock number as a to-do list, not a report. An out-of-stock at a high-velocity store is sales you are losing today, not a metric to file away.

The brands that get real value from Retail Link treat it as a feed, not a destination. They pull what they need, harmonize it with every other retailer feed, and do the actual reading somewhere all the accounts can sit side by side.

Retail Link is one feed inside a bigger picture. For how it sits next to POS scans, EDI, and syndicated panels, start with What is retailer data?.