Retail Link Data: What Walmart's Portal Shows

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?.

What is Walmart Retail Link?

Retail Link (often typed retaillink) is the web portal Walmart uses to share data and run its day-to-day business with the brands that sell to it. It started in the early 1990s as a way to give suppliers a direct look at how their products were moving, and it has stayed the central system of record between Walmart and its vendors ever since. When a buyer, a supplier analyst, or a broker talks about pulling Walmart numbers, Retail Link is almost always the system they mean.

Access is tied to being a Walmart supplier. You cannot buy a Retail Link subscription on its own. You get into the portal because Walmart has set you up as a vendor with an item selling through its stores or on Walmart.com. So the people inside the portal are supplier-side teams, the account managers, demand planners, and category analysts, plus the brokers and agencies those brands hire to read the account on their behalf. A brand that sells through a distributor instead of direct to Walmart usually will not have its own Retail Link access at all.

How Retail Link login works

A Walmart Retail Link login is granted, not signed up for. Walmart provisions a user account once a supplier is established, and an administrator on the supplier side then requests access for each person who needs it. New users get set up by the company's Retail Link administrator rather than by registering themselves, so for most people the practical first step is asking whoever manages the account at their company, not Walmart directly.

Each login is a named user with permissions scoped to that supplier's own items and stores, and Walmart layers identity checks on top of the password the way any account holding sales data would. Here is the detail worth holding onto: a Retail Link login only ever sees one supplier's slice of Walmart, and only the reports that user has been granted. Two analysts at the same brand can sign in and see different things depending on what their administrator turned on.

Retail Link Walmart data: what the portal exposes

The reason Retail Link matters is the supplier data sitting behind that login. The earlier sections covered the broad categories. Here is how the most-used pieces line up against the questions people actually open the portal to answer.

The order and receipt detail is what makes Retail Link more than a sales dashboard. Walmart scores suppliers on OTIF, and the gap between what Walmart ordered and what showed up on time and complete is the number behind those scorecards. A brand that ignores that side of the portal can be growing on the POS line and quietly bleeding fees on the delivery line at the same time. The order data behind those scorecards is the same EDI flow brands exchange with Walmart day to day. See EDI transactions for how those documents move.

All of this is first-party Walmart data, so it is precise about Walmart and silent about everything else. To read it next to other accounts and the wider category, brands pair it with syndicated data and fold the export into broader supply chain analytics rather than leaving it stranded in the portal.