Update: Item 360 and Supplier One

Earlier this year, some suppliers were concerned when Walmart announced Supplier One. The platform's mirror functionality with heavily used Retail Link apps like Item 360, APDP, and NOVA seemed to be foreshadowing their eventual end.

In Supplier One Early Adopter Trainings and in other trainings available to suppliers after the platform launched, Walmart let suppliers know that just because the functionality of some important Retail Link apps would be duplicated in Supplier One, that did not mean that they would remove the Retail Link apps "as of now."

Recent updates have made some suppliers more skeptical about the future of these apps and even the future of Retail Link as the unified platform through which suppliers access data, view supply chain performance reports, do item maintenance, etc.

With the introduction of Luminate this quarter (Q2 2024), there appears to be a trend of moving away from Retail Link as the main hub for all supplier related tasks.

Some suppliers found this pop-up when trying to log in to Item 360:

In the small print below the main announcement, Walmart implies that Item 360 functionality will stop for all suppliers outside of Canada.

Unlike the transition from DSS to Luminate, however, Supplier One's functionality seems very comparable to Item 360, and there is no paid scale option (i.e. Luminate Charter). This graphic compares the left-navs between the apps:

The future of Retail Link and the other apps in Retail Link with mirrored functionality (i.e. NOVA, APDP, etc.) is still relatively unknown. Both NOVA and APDP are relatively new apps that Walmart invested quite a bit of time and energy into, so for them to remove them entirely at this point would be surprising.

The recent changes involving the discontinuation of Item 360 and DSS, however, seem to be speaking toward a greater trend. 

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