Sam's Club Deductions Do Not Appear in Your Walmart View

Sam's Club uses the same Retail Link sign-on as Walmart. Same URL, same credentials, an AP Disputes section in both. It looks like one account, and for a good number of brands it is.

For a brand that holds separate Walmart and Sam's Club vendor accounts, it is not. The deductions post to a separate portal view, and the 30-day window does not pause while you look for them in the wrong one.

This is a routing problem, not a compliance problem. Nothing in the evidence you are assembling is the issue. The issue is that the evidence is attached to a filing that lands on the wrong account.

Same sign-on, different view

The two profiles share more than a login. They share the single sign-on and the CommerceHub AS2 infrastructure, which is the AS2 connection your EDI transmissions travel over. The dispute window is 30 days for both.

The rows that differ are the ones that cost you. Every step of signing in is identical, so nothing in the sign-in flow tells you which account you are looking at. The only thing that tells you is where the deduction line appears, and you find that out by looking, which is the step the clock is running through.

For the window and portal figures across every retailer, see the dispute window table.

Verify which account the PO belongs to

The profile's guidance on this is short, and it is the whole post: some brands have separate Walmart and Sam's Club vendor accounts with different buyer relationships, and you should verify which account a purchase order belongs to before you file.

Different accounts means different buyers. That matters operationally, because the person who can tell you which account issued a given PO is not always the person who reviews your Walmart deduction queue.

Start from the PO number on the deduction line. The PO is the record of which account issued it, and the account is what tells you which view to open. If you cannot attribute the PO to an account before you start assembling evidence, you do not yet know which evidence list applies, and you are spending a 30-day window on a lookup.

The check is cheap. It is also the one that gets skipped, because the deduction memo carries the retailer group's name and the invoice number looks like every other invoice number in the file.

The four reason codes

Three of those four are winnable, and they are the arguments you already know. SC-OTIF is a timing and completeness failure, and the document list the profile carries for it is a timestamp list. SC-ASN is a transmission and data argument, and its document list is the transmission log.

SC-QTY is the one to confirm before you start. It is marked disputable, but the Sam's Club profile carries no document list against it. Walmart's short-ship and quantity list is the closest published equivalent; treat it as a starting point to check rather than a requirement you can rely on.

SC-CLUBPK is the exception, and it is marked not usually disputable. That is structural rather than procedural. A club-pack non-compliance is a physical mismatch between what you shipped and what the specification requires, and no attached document turns a non-compliant pack into a compliant one. A document packet does exist for it and is worth keeping in reserve, but the same hour is better spent on the pack specification that produced the pack.

Club-pack compliance is the requirement Walmart does not carry

Sam's Club's profile states the same compliance structure as Walmart and adds one requirement of its own: club-pack compliance, meaning display-ready configuration, an exact unit count, and a specific pallet configuration.

Those three are not a style preference. Unit count and pallet configuration are the numbers a receiving DC checks against the pack specification, and display-ready describes the condition a pallet has to arrive in to go straight to the floor.

The figure that is not yours to reuse

Walmart's OTIF penalty is 3% of cost of goods on the non-compliant case. Walmart's profile also carries a variable SQEP penalty per incident or PO, $50 to $500 per incident for ASN and labeling, and the freight-cost difference for routing. Those are Walmart's numbers, on Walmart's profile.

Sam's Club's profile says its compliance structure is the same, and then stops. It carries no dollar amount of its own. "Same compliance structure as Walmart" tells you the shape of the penalty, not the size of it, and reusing the 3% because two accounts share a login is exactly how a wrong figure reaches your finance team.

If the deduction memo carries a dollar amount, that amount came from Sam's Club. Use it.

What each deduction type needs

Same format requirements as Walmart, which is the one piece of good news in this routing problem. The ASN packet is the packet we build in the 997 acknowledgment evidence post: the functional acknowledgment is what proves the transmission landed inside the window.

The filing sequence is the Walmart sequence with one extra step. Log in at retaillink.login.wal-mart.com with your Retail Link credentials, navigate to the Sam's Club-specific view, open the AP Disputes section, find the deduction, click Dispute, upload your documents, submit, and record the dispute reference number.

One caution about queues. Walmart runs its own disputes through two portals, and an OTIF dispute filed in the wrong Walmart queue is denied automatically; that split is covered in APDP and HighRadius are not the same queue. The Sam's Club profile does not carry that split. Its filing steps route to the AP Disputes section of the Sam's Club view and stop there. Do not assume the second queue exists on the Sam's Club side, and do not assume it does not. Ask for the Sam's Club routing in writing when you set up account access, and you will have the answer before a deduction arrives.

The window is 30 days, the portal is the same URL behind both accounts, and the only thing that separates them is which view you open. Confirm which account the PO belongs to before you build the packet. Thirty days is the whole runway, and the clock starts before you are logged in.