Supplier catalog: item references, packaging levels, and reconciliation

As a first-party supplier you sell wholesale to Walmart. Walmart owns the inventory once received, sets the retail price, and sells the product in its stores and on Walmart.com. You do not publish an offer, compete with other sellers for the sale, or ship to shoppers; that is the marketplace model, and it is not yours.

Whether Walmart carries an item is decided by the merchant (also called the buyer) for its merchandise department, who owns the assortment decision: which items, where, and when. Your item data does not create an item; it describes one the merchant has agreed to carry, and nothing is orderable until that approval. Item setup covers that flow.

Your items sit under a supplier number within that department — the account context for every report, ticket, and merchant approval. What you control is the record itself: identifiers, packaging data, content, and their source of truth.

Two Walmart systems carry supplier work, with different jobs.

• Supplier One is where items are set up and maintained. In most accounts it holds a Setup Hub for new items, a Maintenance Hub for changes to existing ones, and an Activity Monitor that shows where each submission stands: processing, action needed from you or Walmart, or complete. Screen names shift between releases; what matters is that creation, change, and status each have a home. Item setup and Content maintenance cover the hubs.
• Retail Link is Walmart's supplier portal for data and reporting — sales, inventory, and store-level figures. Supplier One sign-in normally uses your Retail Link credentials.

Keep the split in mind: "the data shows" usually came from Retail Link; "the item is wrong" is fixed in Supplier One. A report cannot change an item record — only a submission, a ticket, or, for a few changes, a request to the merchant can.

Every identifier and measurement belongs to one packaging level:

• Each — the consumer unit, with its UPC or EAN; both are GTINs (Global Trade Item Numbers, from GS1, the barcode standards body): GTIN-12 and GTIN-13.
• Inner pack (Walmart's warehouse pack) — eaches bundled in the case, with its own GTIN-14, sent by distribution centers to stores.
• Case (Walmart's vendor pack) — the shipping unit a distribution center receives, with its own GTIN-14, dimensions, weight, and each-count; if the case is not broken down, the two coincide.
• Pallet — cases per layer, layers per pallet, any pallet GTIN.

Above the levels sit item references: your supplier stock number (or vendor stock number), kept on the item so reports map to your systems; the Walmart item number, assigned at setup to your configuration of a GTIN, used by merchants, stores, and Walmart.com; and, for online items, a WPID (Walmart Product ID) and the Item ID ending a Walmart.com URL. Keep them in one master-data row; a ticket quoting a UPC without the Walmart item number costs a round-trip.

Owned items ship to a Walmart receiving point — usually a distribution center, a fulfillment center for online items, in some arrangements a store — and Walmart handles them from there. DSD (direct store delivery) items are store items you or your distributor deliver straight to each store.

A single Supplier One setup flow handles both models: your answers about where the item sells and how it ships decide which logistics fields appear, so an item entered under the wrong model comes back with gaps. Both models need the packaging hierarchy — Walmart orders and receives against case data whether it arrives at a distribution center or a store. What differs is shipping and delivery data: an owned item needs inbound details for the Walmart node receiving it, while a DSD item needs the direct-delivery details the owned answers never ask for. Confirm the model first; the fields follow from it.

Label every measurement column with its level — "Case dimensions (in)", never "Dimensions": a unit measurement in a case field means short-shipped or refused loads, not a content error.

There are two records: your source of truth and Walmart's. Walmart's record rests on a product type, which decides the required attributes, and on content — product name, description, key features, images — each held to Walmart's published content standards (length limits for name and description, size and background rules for images), so check the current standard, not a remembered number; Item setup covers pulling the current list from the form. Walmart.com shows your contribution as Walmart holds it, not your source file.

When sources disagree — a sales sheet says six per case, the packaging spec is blank — the item is not ready:

1. Compare the sources and spot where they disagree.
2. Name the discrepancy so it is visible rather than quietly patched.
3. Resolve it against the approved specification or the physical carton.
4. Pass the confirmed value into the next workflow and your master data.

Averaging, picking the most recent file, or filling the blank with the "usual" number all produce records that fail later, when they are most expensive to fix.