Name: How to get on shelves at Target, Walmart, Nordstrom & more
Uploaded: 2026-06-04T19:01:08.846Z
Duration: 35 min
Description: How to get on shelves at Target, Walmart, Nordstrom & more

Transcript for "How to get on shelves at Target, Walmart, Nordstrom & more": Everyone, welcome in. If you're joining, drop where you're tuning in from in the chat. It's always fun to see who's in the room. A couple of quick housekeeping things before we get started. Use the chat throughout the session. We'll do a live q and a at the end so you can get your questions answered directly. We also have docs tab with additional resources. Definitely check those out. And finally, this session is being recorded. So if you need to step away or want want to rewatch, it'll be in your inbox tomorrow. So today's topic. If you're a brand owner or operator, there's a good chance getting your products on shelves in Target or Walmart or Nordstrom is somewhere on the roadmap. Maybe it's already happening. Maybe it feels far off. Either way, today's session is going to give you a really concrete picture of what it actually takes to get there and how to do it without adding complexity or headcount. Let's get into it. So some quick intros before we dive in. I'm Tom Fowell. I'm the manager of solutions engineering here at ShipBob. And I've been with ShipBob for eight years and have spoken to all variety and size of merchants to help them improve their customer experience and grow their brand with better and faster fulfillment. And I'm excited to have Savannah Kirk joining us today. Savannah, Yeah. you think yeah. Thank you, Tom. Sorry about that. I'm Savannah. I'm an enterprise account executive here at SPS Commerce. I'm really excited to be here today. I've also had the pleasure of working with hundreds of brands and seeing the data behind hundreds of brands as well for, all of their compliance needs. So I'm really excited to dive into what I've learned over the years and talk more about that today. Yeah. And we're also partnering with SPS Commerce for this entire session. They're one, a really strong B2B partner with ShipBob, and they are the experts when it comes to retail compliance, EDI, and making the whole omnichannel piece work behind the scenes. By the end of today, you'll walk away knowing how to get your products on shelves at Target, Walmart, Nordstrom, and more without having to hire a team or build out a ton of infrastructure to do it. So let's start with where brands actually are right now. From our state of e commerce fulfillment survey, we found that 86% of brands already sell on two or more channels. 75% are adding at least one more channel this year, and more than half are now selling through some form of B2B, retail, or brick and mortar. The title of this slide says single channel is the new risk. And I mean that. If you're only selling on B2C, you're missing a customer who wants to find you on Amazon. If you're only on Amazon, you're missing the customer who wants a branded experience on your own site. Your customers are shopping everywhere, and the question is whether your operations can follow. The hardest part isn't making the decision to expand to a new channel. The hard part is what happens when to your operations when you do. And that's what we're gonna walk through. By a quick show of hands in the chat, how many of you are currently selling on one or more channels? So what actually breaks down when you add a new channel? It comes down to three things consistently. Inventory fragmentation, where you split inventory between channels and you sell oversell d to c. And now a retail PO is sitting there unfulfilled because you didn't have enough visibility across your inventory. Number two, compliance. EDI isn't optional with major retailers and every retailer that has their own requirements. If you miss a deadline or submit the wrong documentation, you eat the chargeback. And three, SLAs. Target has specific routing guide requirements, and they're different from Walmart's or Nordstrom's. Each channel has its own operational logic, and your team has to manage all of them. The result, your ops team spends more time on reconciliation than on growth. Savannah, you've worked with a ton of brands getting them on shelves. What's the most common pain point you hear from them? Yeah. Thanks, Tom. And I'll definitely echo everything you just said because we hear the same from brands of all sizes. Every trading partner definitely has very different requirements. And while a lot of that information is out there, it's constantly changing. It's incredibly hard to keep up with. Walmart alone has over a 100 different types of deductions. And on top of that, they have their own fines and other requirements as well. So you have to know as a brand what each of those types means, how to dispute it, how to prevent it, and also what type of documentation is gonna go with each of those different types of disputes. So it is a massive operational lift, and that's just for one retailer. The brands that are winning right now are not choosing between d to c and the wholesale. Can we go to the next slide? Thank you. They are doing all of it. 80% of mid market brands on Shipbob are adding a new sales channel this year. The difference between brands that scale successfully and the ones that get stuck is really about infrastructure. With Shipbob, you manage omnichannel from one pool of inventory. And with SPS, you get guidance to manage the compliance piece. Next slide. For those who are new to Shipbob, we help brands fulfill their everything orders. What does that mean? It means you can sell on any channel, expand into any market, and deliver a great customer experience all from one platform. Shipbob connects your storefronts, automates your operations, and uses AI to optimize those decisions, everything from where to place inventory to which carrier gets something delivered fastest at the lowest cost. We work with brands like Our Place, Ezy Bombs, and Bloom Nutrition to fulfill their orders from any channel in multiple markets. And when we say one platform, here's what we actually mean for you. You can sell everywhere. We have 200 plus retailers supported. Wherever you sell, Shipbob handles the channel specific operations, so you don't have to build separate workflows for each. You can scale confidently with our turnkey cross border shipping and 60 plus fulfillment centers in The US, Canada, The UK, Europe, and Australia. And one platform covers every market. And you can delight every customer. Custom packaging, inserts, branded tracking, all built into our network. One of the things that we hear most from brands is that their 3PL becomes a ceiling. You get to a certain volume or you add a new channel, and they're building Band Aid solutions that don't grow with you. ShipBob is built to be the infrastructure you never outgrow. Yeah. And I can I can take a quick minute here to tell more about SPS Commerce and who we are and why it matters for today's conversation? So SPS Commerce is a very intelligent and large supply chain network. And I'm gonna go through some of these numbers on the screen here, because the numbers definitely speak for themselves. So more than 650,000,000,000 in annual transaction volume flows through our network. Over 50,000 subscribing customers trust SPS to keep their supply chains running. Seven of the top 10 retailers rely on SPS Commerce, and over two thirds of the fastest growing brands are on the network. And then also 10 of the top 10 food and beverage manufacturers work with us, which is very exciting. And that skill definitely matters because it also means whenever you join the SPS Commerce network, you're not just starting from scratch. The connections, the compliance knowledge, any of the trading partner requirements that you may need are already there. So the network has already worked with your customers many times for a very long time. We already know the partners, and we already know everything that's needed to get started with them. And then how we like to explain SPS Commerce, it really comes down to three things, which is connect, orchestrate, and optimize. So whenever you're thinking about connect, it's about establishing a shared truth. So how do we put all of your data, your orders, your trading partner requirements, and let them live in one place so that way you can stop constantly having to chase down information? And then it goes to orchestrate. So once you have all of your data and everything on one area, you have that shared foundation. Orchestrate means now those handoffs can be automated, monitored, and handled. And then when something is missing or it's out of sequence, the network can catch it before it becomes a very expensive problem, and then optimize. That's where the real intelligence can come in. So the SPS network learns from 750,000,000 transactions a year across over 300,000 training relationships. And so SPS can surface those insights so you can act on them and definitely protect your margins, and just keep getting better over time. And then I love this graphic here because it really shows that SPS is here to support you throughout your entire supply chain journey. So it can be one network, one resource all the way from product design, all the way through the end of season reflections and everything in between. So for today's conversation, we're definitely gonna focus on the fulfillment side with SPS commerce, and that's what helps brands ship it right every time. So that way you can run your business with confidence. So together with SPS Commerce, Shipbob helps brands move into retail with your existing supply chain. Landing your retail partnership is a huge growth milestone, but fulfilling it reliably is the hard part. Shipbob B2B fulfillment suite handles rather retailer compliance for you so your team can focus on the relationship and not the routing guide. We work with SPS to help manage retail relationships from one place, view POs, ASNs, packing slips in a single dashboard, automate order routing, meaning the right order goes to the right place without manual intervention, generate invoices, and view data between connected platforms. Some brands that we've helped scale retail include Dossier, Array, Our Place, Bloom, Ezybombs, and Chamberlain Coffee. Each of them has a story that some version of, we thought retail was gonna require a whole new operations team, and it didn't. Yep. And this is exactly where SPS and Shipbob work together. So that way the compliance complexity is handled and your team, again, can stay focused on growing your operations and doing what you do best, which is the retailer relationships. And this is really the heart of what we're building together with SPS. On the left, SPS Commerce, the data and retail connections layer. On the right, ShipBob, the physical fulfillment layer. These aren't two separate vendors you have to manage. They're one connected motion. Savannah, do you want to talk through what SPS manages in the integration? Yeah. For sure. So in the integration, SPS manages, you can think of it as the retailer connectivity. So that's the data side of the integration. So how do we get the automated flow of documents and information between your system and the retailer system, and how do we make it accurate and compliant. So we also provide visibility into what's happening across those retailer relationships. So think orders, inventory, any compliance related activity. And that way, you don't have to manage that process manually on your side. And on the ShipBob side, 200 plus retail partner integrations automate omnichannel at scale. We provide retail drop shipping fulfillment that fulfills orders placed on retailer.com, whether that's Walmart, Target, Nordstrom, and shipped directly to your shoppers. Retailer ready support, we can provide retail display assembly, kitting, and chargeback support, and we have a dedicated implementation team that connects new retailers fast. The biggest takeaways here are you don't need an in house EDI team. You don't need to negotiate retail compliance requirements yourself. And you connect once, and we handle the complexity on both sides. Together, we help brands reach more retailers, stay compliant, and get paid faster. And SPS Commerce and ShipBob make it easy to automate order fulfillment so you can see your products on shelves of your favorite retailer. Let's say you landed a PO from Target for 100,000 units. Target sends the PO, SPS Commerce receives and routes it to you automatically, and you send order acknowledgment back, including fill rate. You can tell Target upfront you can fulfill 75% now and 25% in two weeks, and Target plans around that. That transparency protects you from getting penalized. ShipBob picks, packs, and ships the order and sends an ASN or advanced shipment notice back through SPS Commerce so the retailer knows exactly what's coming and when. Goods arrive at the FC, they get scanned and received, the invoice is sent, and you get paid. Automation is crucial for all parties and involved to optimize selling your products. Think we're having some technical difficulties here. Bear with us. So maybe while we wait for this, Savannah, I'll ask you. What's the biggest misconception brands have about what it actually takes to manage retail compliance in house? Yeah. That's a great question. I would say a lot of brands think that, okay, I fulfilled an order perfectly or perfectly on time and in full, and that they don't understand that there might be a lot of work on the back end to getting paid for those orders. I've worked with brands where, hey. It's our first month shipping to Walmart, and now I already have over a thousand deductions individually. And I don't have a team in place that can go and dispute every single one of those manually because it can take, you know, twenty to thirty minutes just to dispute one of those. So even brands that are shipping perfectly are never gonna not receive any deductions. It's gonna be the cost of doing business no matter what. And now that becomes your team's responsibility to unfortunately show the proof that everything shipped, and that everything was in the terms. So I think that's definitely a big mixed misconception as teams just aren't expecting that. Yeah. Thank you for that. Can we go one more slide? We wanna ask you a few questions of the SPS Commerce team, so perfect timing here. Before we actually get, before we actually activate. the integration, I wanna talk a bit more about how you know when you're actually ready to get on shelves. So from the SPS Commerce side, how would a brand know when they're ready for retail? What should they start preparing now if that's the goal? Yeah. It's a great question. One of the biggest signs that I would say that you're ready for retail is when you're confident that you can consistently meet the retailer's expectations. So we always get really excited. Yay. We've landed the account. We're ready to start filling and shipping orders. But are you actually ready to keep up with the demand, fulfill the orders accurately and on time, manage your inventory, and also handle the operational requirements like I've mentioned a little bit earlier that come with retail such as EDI, your invoicing, your routing guides, and making sure you're meeting those compliance standards. I think that I the best in class teams that I've worked with that are just getting started, they know that they're gonna have to have a partner that understands all these requirements from the get go, and they can get those tools in place ahead of time. So that way, there's not too much of a lag in what they've shipped and, what they're invoicing for and how they get paid. Great. And as you expand from direct to consumer to retail, you'll be looking at new requirements from each different retailer. Those can change too from new ship locations, different data needed, or new processes. How does SPS Commerce help brands navigate that? Yeah. So when you're expanding into retail or b to b, you're not just adding customers. You're inheriting each of those retailers' specific requirements, unfortunately. So that's going to be requirements around the labeling, the data formats, the routing rules, like I mentioned, and those requirements are constantly changing. So what's different about SPS Commerce is that we've already seen all of these retailers before and worked with them. The requirements, the nuances, the compliance rules, the knowledge is already built in luckily. So you're not just starting from zero. You can be up and running within just a few weeks with a new trading partner whenever you're working with SPS Commerce, and normally that can be a few months on your own if you're trying to do that being manually. And then whenever things do change, so whenever you are getting a new ship location or an updated routing guide, SPS Commerce can monitor that across the network and can keep those connections current automatically. So that way your team can focus on growth and just the network can handle the rest of it. Amazing. And and how different is the process going from d to c to retail compared to when you're already in Target and want to expand to additional channels? Yep. It can definitely be a very different process. So whenever a supplier is going from d to c into their first retailer, that definitely becomes an enablement conversation. So how do we have this EDI conversation and on getting connected, again, meeting those retail requirements and making sure before we're shipping that we can send these orders and invoices and have them flow correctly? And then it's a little bit of a different conversation when a supplier is already in a a Target, for example, and they're adding a Walmart, or another retailer. They generally already have that EDI infrastructure in place internally. And then that challenge becomes managing the different retailer requirements that you're adding on and avoiding the operational complexity, that comes just with adding that new channel. But it usually, from what I've seen, it's a little bit easier to add a new one if you're already established with another. And then I also like to go through the deduction side, and you're gonna see from this presentation, I'm very biased on the compliance side because that's my, specialty, and that's where I focus in. But that same shift can happen with deductions. So if you're newer to retail, a supplier is going to be very focused on how can I prevent these chargebacks and understanding what are all of the different deduction types, why do they happen? An established supplier, though, that's expanding into additional retailers, they're often asking a little bit of a different question of how do we keep growing with the volume of deductions. So how do we make sure that we're getting paid on everything that we're owed while also monitoring what are some of these valid deductions that we're receiving? What are some things that we can change? So that way we don't have to keep adding headcount to manage the process of disputing those and getting paid. Perfect. Thank you. And luckily, Yep. implementation is easy. It's a proven process we can do in as quickly as one to two weeks. Our goal is to make saying yes to your partner as easy as possible. Step one, you need to already be an SPS customer or become one. Shipbob and SPS work together on discovery, so you're not managing two separate onboarding conversations. Step two, this is where we authenticate the integration and run testing from both Shipbob and SPS, and they are hands on here. You're not doing this alone. Step three, once the testing is complete, order start routing. And step four is optimize and grow. This isn't a set it and forget it connection. Both teams stay engaged to help you add retailers and to scale. So we've mentioned this a bit already, but there is a cost to getting retail wrong. Chargebacks, deductions, and compliance penalties can add up. Our integration with SPS Commerce is designed to protect you from the harder parts of retail expansion. I'm going to pass it back to Savannah to walk through the real cost of getting retail wrong and how integration helps mitigate that. Yeah. Thank you, Tom. And going back to this chart, now we're highlighting the revenue recovery piece, which is the department that I work in. And this is something that surprises a lot of brands. And what I was mentioning a little bit earlier is, okay, we've had our EDI. It's clean. Our shipments are compliant. Your ASNs are accurate and sent on time. And no matter what, you're still gonna be hit with those deductions. Again, that's a huge surprise for people that are just getting started in retail, because, unfortunately, you just can't control what happens on the retailer's receiving end. So those invalid deductions are they're gonna happen to everyone, the most compliant suppliers. And that's exactly the problem that we solve is, okay, if you're gonna get invalid deductions, how are you gonna make that work of automating it a little bit easier so that way you can go after every dollar? And then just running a modern supply chain going through this slide, again, it's a maze of rules. Every partner is going to have their own different deductions, their own requirements, and they're always going to change or they're going to add new ones every year. And so that's when the deductions can definitely start stacking up. And something that we've noticed over the past couple of years is that the volume also just continues to grow across the board with these deductions. And what we've seen, which is definitely a crazy stat, is five to 7% of suppliers revenue lost each year to deductions that were actually recoverable. And what's really frustrating is that when these are recoverable and they're invalid, it's not a problem of, hey. Like, we were just hit with this deduction. It's a problem with bandwidth. So they just don't have the time or the team to go and dispute every single one and do the research that it takes to gather all the necessary documents to validate the deduction. And it ends up just being a huge unexplained revenue loss. There's lack of visibility into the root causation of why they're happening. It's a manual resource strain, and at the end of the day, it could damage your retailer relationship. So this is exactly the reason why we've built SPS Commerce revenue recovery. So we can automatically identify on what you're owed. We can validate which disputes are worth pursuing. So which of these deductions were you not supposed to receive? And then on top of that, we can automate attaching the right proof documentation for your team and submitting the claims on your behalf and submitting compliant claims, which is extremely important. So that way there's no more hopping between different portals between the retailers. You're not doing the manual chasing of these. There's no more written off deductions where, hey, our team just couldn't get to any of these claims that were below $200 because of time and research, and there's no more guessing on which disputes are worth your team's time. And we don't stop at SPS Commerce revenue recovery. We also start at the root causation. So now that we've taken a lot of the time off your plate for manually chasing them down, now we can talk about, okay, let's look at some of the valid claims that happened and figure out what happened behind the scenes. What are some quick changes that can be made for us to not be hit with these swept lines or, for us to not get some of these shortage deductions that were valid. And that's definitely where our team can sort of hold your hand through the process and say, okay. We've seen this before hundreds of times. We know exactly what to do. And ShipBob also supports this with time stamps and photos to help dispute charges. Our system allows clients to upload b o BOLs. We upload from our workflow as well. Yeah. And definitely having the digital access to those is going to be extremely important. So you will need all of the documentation possible to upload to any disputes, and that's definitely what's really nice about ShipBob there too. And then lastly on the slide, whenever you recover invalid deductions and you're not just working on getting the money back, you're identifying why the losses happen. You are consolidating all of your information and letting it live in one place, which anyone who has been inside of Walmart or Target's portal is very excited about not having to go to those portals to dispute anymore. And then you're just showing up to your retailer partners and you're able to say, hey. I've I've been very reliable this year. I've cleaned up my supply chain. I've gotten my OTOF scorecards to, to be extremely high and accurate. Now we can talk about expanding our shelves and having really great conversation with those buyers down the road and using that a little bit as leverage. And then just another few stats I like to always hit on is SPS revenue recovery has recovered more than 2,000,000,000 for our brands. So, again, those finance and AR teams are definitely underestimating sometimes how much they're sitting on that could be recovered or how much is unrecovered right now. And I always like to mention, we have a free audit at SPS revenue recovery where we can show you from the last couple of years what's the real dollar amount that your team is sitting on that could be recoverable. So if anyone is interested in that, I think at the end of this presentation, we're gonna have a link where you can also link up with my calendar and talk about this, but we do always offer that free analysis for anyone so you can see what the actual impact would be for your team. Okay. Thanks for that, Savannah. Now. let's walk through a few examples. So starting with Our Place. Our Place scales to Nordstrom, Target, and even more with a two person operations team. They were able to expand their retail reach and serve Nordstrom, Target, Bloomingdale's, and Saks through a single fulfillment partner, managing both D2C and B2B wholesale from one unified inventory pool. They were able to lower outbound freight to retailers. A nationwide warehouse footprint reduced freight costs to retail DCs regardless of who covered the cost. Our Place saved $1,500,000 in outbound freight by distributing inventory across four ShipBob fulfillment centers. They were able to stay lean while scaling their B2B. That two person operations team manages end to end fulfillment across seven warehouses, including all retail wholesale and direct to vendor shipments by letting Shipbob handle the operational workload. And they have one integration for every channel. D2C and B2B draw from a single inventory pool, eliminating the risk of overselling D2C while a retail PO sits unfulfilled. Another brand, Nude, went from 300 to 1,500 Target stores without adding headcount. They were able to scale retail fast, even at peak. They launched six SKUs across 1,500 Target stores in time for Black Friday, which was 5x their previous retail footprint. And with Shipbob handling EDI compliance, warehouse receiving, and packing to Target's exact specifications. They were able to automate the administrative grind. SPS Commerce routes incoming Target POs directly to Shipbob and issues ASNs automatically. No manual entry, no retail compliance guesswork. That automation alone saves Newt one hundred and twenty hours per week, the equivalent of three full time employees. They have expert support built in. A dedicated Shipbob retail operations manager helps manage the day to day legwork, like fulfilling 29 target POs per week, so Nude's team can stay focused on growth. And they have one partner across every channel, from Target B2B wholesale to Amazon FBA prep. Nude runs all retail and marketplace fulfillment through Shipbob, so there are no separate inventory pools and no separate vendor relationships. And finally, Dossier. Dossier scaled into almost 4,000 Walmart stores with a three person team. They were able to scale retail without operational chaos. Dossier went from fulfilling orders by hands to distributing across 4,000 Walmart locations with that three person fulfillment team by relying on Shipbob to handle B2B compliance and operations end to end. It's just one partner for B2B and D2C. There's zero juggling. D2C and B2B require completely different skill sets and logistics, and Dossier runs both channels through Shipbob and SPS from the same inventory pool, the same partner. There are no operational silos. And they get the details right at retail scale. In B2B, logistics errors undo everything. Our B2B solution handles the nitty gritty so Dossier can confidently fulfill across 4,000 Walmart locations without shipping or compliance issues derailing their retail partnerships. And Walmart became a growth lever. Their retail distribution has been significant revenue needle mover for Dossier, made possible by having a partner who can execute at scale without becoming the bottleneck. To recap, our partnership offers one platform for you to expand every channel. Connect once and sell everywhere. SPS Commerce links you to hundreds of retailers. Shipbob fills the order. Your inventory stays in one pool across every channel. Compliance is handled. Chargebacks are prevented. EDI automation means accurate POs, ASNs, and invoices every time. No manual entry, no retailer penalties. And from PO to in stores, on shelves. Automated from end to end with no headaches. We have a bit of time left, so please drop your questions in chat and we can get to them. To help facilitate this conversation a little bit more, Savannah, I would love to ask you a few more questions for our audience. Yeah. For sure. Perfect. So starting with, is there a retail requirement that consistently catches brands off guard? It's a great question. I would say definitely this is gonna be very important for someone that's a little bit smaller like a Nordstrom's versus a Walmart or Target. It's always important for all of these is making sure you're sending your ASNs directly after a truck leaves with your load. And definitely that can cause some fines on the Walmart side. But I think where it's so important is for retailers that are manually loading in, scan guns at the DC level. So whenever your product is going to be received, something that helps you just already mitigate some of those deductions and some of these compliance issues from the beginning, again, is knowing that that warehouse has what it needs, or that DC has what they need to be able to receive that product accurately. So they already know what's going to be showing up. They already know the count. And so, yeah, ASNs are very important. I tell everyone that every day. It's just making sure those are being sent immediately. Awesome. Thank you for that. And we talked a lot about getting into retail, but what does it actually look like for a brand that's already in one or two retailers and wants to expand to more? Is the second retailer, the third retailer easier than the first? Definitely easier, especially if you're going from someone like a Walmart. We always say Walmart is sort of the best in class because they have probably the most requirements out of them all. And from what we've seen is if you can ship to a Walmart, you can ship to anyone compliantly. So Walmart's rules, they tend to trickle down retailer to retailer. So whenever they implement new rules, that usually starts at Target and so forth. So, again, if you can be clean with one of your retailers, you can just use all of that same information you've learned from them and try to implement it into the others. Amazing. Thank you. Yeah. And my last question, deductions and chargebacks obviously came up a few times today. If. someone on the call is losing revenue to deductions right now and doesn't know why, what's the first thing that they should do this week? Yeah. Definitely have a conversation with a partner like SPS Commerce because they've seen it. We work with, thousands of brands on compliance. So whatever problem you're going through, we've already seen it. Then my second thing that I would say there is make sure you're saving all documentation. I think it becomes a much harder conversation when we've seen teams that are holding onto physical documents like shipping documents or or inventory receive reports or anything like that. Make sure those are scanned in and saved and that your team does not lose them because that is going to be essential to getting paid down the road or just knowing what happened throughout the process if there was a valid claim. Awesome. Thank you for that. Yeah. If you're ready to get started, the first step is getting on a call with our team. The link is in the chat. If you're already a ShipBob or SPS customer, ask your rep about activating the integration. And we'll stick around for a few minutes here for any remaining questions. Thank you again for attending our webinar. Thank you, everyone.