Walmart Has Two Compliance Programs. Most Brands Only Know One.

Here's something that trips up a lot of brands: Walmart has two compliance programs, and most suppliers only know about one.

OTIF and SQEP are not the same thing. And confusing them? That costs you.

Let's break it down.

The two programs

OTIF (On-Time In-Full) measures delivery. Did your shipment arrive within Walmart's Must Arrive By Date window? Did it arrive complete, at 95%+ of the ordered quantity for food brands? Miss either and Walmart charges 3% of cost of goods on the affected PO.

SQEP (Supplier Quality Excellence Program) measures everything else, in four phases: accuracy and ASN, barcode and labelling, load quality, and scheduling and transportation. It scores you in defects per million and charges a variable amount per incident or per PO, depending on the phase. The rate has never been published, so you cannot budget for it. Most brands find out what it costs from a deduction rather than from a notice. What SQEP actually measures, phase by phase, is here.

Here's the kicker: They live in different portals. They generate different chargebacks. And they compound differently.

We've seen brands get hit by both at the same time and not even realize what happened.

Three things most brands get wrong

OTIF is measured at the DC, not at your dock. Your 3PL ships on time. The carrier misses the DC appointment window. Walmart clocks you as late. The MABD is an arrival date, not a ship date. We've watched brands argue this in disputes and lose every time.

SQEP violations show up months later. A wrong net weight declaration or missing country of origin today can trigger a corrective action that holds your next PO in November. By then, you've forgotten about the original issue and can't even figure out why you're blocked.

New items are highest risk for both. The first 90 days after launch are when OTIF and SQEP violations accumulate fastest, before your routing is dialed in, before your 3PL knows the label spec, before anyone on your team knows to check Retail Link. The first 90 days break in a predictable order, and this is the window.

What to do about it

Here's what you need to know: The dispute window for OTIF chargebacks is 30 days. Most brands aren't checking Retail Link frequently enough to catch them in time, and an OTIF chargeback is not filed where you would expect, which is APDP and HighRadius are two different queues and filing in the wrong one is auto-denied.

We've seen it happen over and over. A brand launches a new product, gets hit with OTIF and SQEP violations, and by the time they figure out what's going on, the dispute window has closed. Thousands of dollars, gone. Every retailer's window is different, and the shortest ones are shorter than you think. They are all in one table.

If you're selling to Walmart, you need to be monitoring both programs. Not just one. Both.