In this article, learn about:
The major supplier-facing verticals at retail organizations
Roles commonly encountered within those verticals
How different retail teams and stakeholders interface with suppliers
If broken down to its most fundamental elements, the retailer-supplier relationship can seem simple: A retailer purchases a vendor’s goods, displays those goods, and once the goods are sold, splits the profits between itself and the vendor. However, this surface impression belies the true depth of these organizations.
Retail organizations are intricate ecosystems, structured into specialized verticals—such as merchandising, logistics, store operations, quality assurance, marketing, and eCommerce. While suppliers often focus primarily on building relationships with buyers and merchandising teams—the most visible decision-makers in product selection and procurement—the reality is that retail success depends on coordination across multiple verticals.
This article defines the major verticals of retail organizations which vendors might interact with during the course of the relationship and explores common roles within those teams, as well as how those roles typically interface with suppliers.
Buying and Merchandising
At its most basic level, the buying and merchandising team functions as the commercial heart of a retail organization. They operate the strategy for major product categories, select SKUs for sale, and determine pricing and promotions. Essentially, the buying and merchandising team decides what products customers will see in-store and online.
Roles Within Buying and Merchandising Teams
A buying and merchandising team can contain a variety of roles, depending on the retailer’s needs and size. Large retailers might employ dozens of people on their buying and merchandising teams, while small retailers might only have a single employee handling their purchasing and merchandising for one category.
At the senior leadership level, buying and merchandising roles might include a Chief Merchandising Officer (CMO), who sets overall merchandising strategy, and a General Merchandise Manager (GMM), who manages product divisions and sets long-term strategic plans for their product portfolio.
Beneath the leadership level, buying and merchandising teams often include Category Managers, who direct specific product categories, such as women’s shoes or kitchen appliances. Other roles within this vertical include Senior, Associate, and Assistant Buyers, who help to manage vendor relationships, negotiate terms, and manage inventory levels.
Additionally, larger retailers often find it helpful to employ some workers dedicated to planning and analytics. Roles within this space include Merchandise Planners (who help to create financial plans, manage budgets, and optimize inventory levels) and Pricing Analysts (who typically manage markdown strategies and optimize pricing for profitability).
As an example, here are some roles within its merchandising team that Walmart is currently hiring for:
Manager, Product Development - Women's - Walmart Fashion
Senior Merchant – Utility Bedding
Senior Manager, Product Development – Bakery
Designer, Fashion – Kids Sleep, Basics, & Ways to Celebrate
Though the job titles might differ slightly between different organizations, the fundamental responsibilities of the roles will be quite similar. Every retailer needs employees dedicated to merchandising and pricing. Since vendors work closely with merchandising and buying teams, it's in their best interest to fully understand how the retailers they work with structure these teams, make decisions, and measure success.
Related Reading: How to Improve Your Relationship with Your Buyer
How Does the Buying and Merchandising Team Interface with Suppliers?
Buying and merchandising teams work with suppliers across several key areas. Buyers often work directly with suppliers to help plan seasonal assortments and price promotions, as suppliers can help contribute market intelligence and insights into trends to help shape the retailer’s long-term vision.
Collaboration can even go further than that. It’s not uncommon for buying and merchandising teams to work directly with suppliers on product creation, from initial concept to packaging and launch strategies. Close collaboration such as this helps to ensure that both retailers and suppliers are responding properly to customer demand and selling the right products at the right time.
Both suppliers and retailers benefit from partnership. Vendors should invest in building relationships with their retailers’ merchandising teams, such as appointing dedicated account managers who understand a retailer’s history, business model, and long-term goals.
Additionally, sharing data and insights can be extremely helpful in aligning suppliers and retailers together into a shared vision. The exchange of data facilitates informed decision-making, allowing suppliers to provide their retailers’ merchandising teams with more accurate, actionable purchasing forecasts. Please note, however, that there’re restrictions regarding what information is allowed to be disseminated freely. Suppliers should be mindful of their retailer relationships and proprietary information when deciding what information should be shared with retail partners.
Supply Chain and Logistics
The supply chain and logistics team functions as the operational backbone of retail organizations, moving products from suppliers to consumers efficiently and cost-effectively. They help manage the physical execution of what the buying and merchandising teams negotiate—once the buyer has purchased goods, the supply chain and logistics team helps the products go where they need to go, by managing warehousing, arranging transportation, and tracking vendor compliance, among other tasks.
Roles Within Supply Chain and Logistics Teams
Senior leadership within the supply chain and logistics team can include roles such as Chief Supply Chain Officer, who sets overall supply chain strategy, or Vice President of Distribution, who oversees all distribution center operations and fulfillment activities.
Below senior leadership, roles within supply chain and logistics teams are often split into various sub-teams, such as distribution center operations, transportation, or inventory and planning.
Within distribution center operations, for instance, roles can include Distribution Center General Manager, who runs day-to-day operations of individual DCs, and Fulfillment Manager, who specializes in eCommerce order fulfillment. Transportation, on the other hand, can have roles such as Transportation Manager, who handles specific transportation modes or geographic regions, or Fleet Manager, who manages private fleet operations. These are just some examples of the breadth of possible roles within supply chain and logistics teams and their subdivisions.
Here are some roles that Walmart is currently hiring for on their supply chain and logistics team:
Shipping and Receiving Coordinator, Central Fill, Health and Wellness Central Operations
Specialist, Supply Chain Management
Assistant General Manager II Transportation
Area Manager - Energy Center (Grocery)
How Does the Supply Chain and Logistics Team Interface with Suppliers?
Typically, a supply chain and logistics team works very closely with its suppliers. Together, they work to establish delivery schedules, shipping requirements, and performance standards. They coordinate inbound logistics, managing everything from freight routing and carrier selection to delivery appointments and dock scheduling. This includes setting up vendor compliance programs that ensure suppliers meet packaging standards, labeling requirements, and delivery windows.
Additionally, supply chain and logistics teams are often transparent about sharing data with their vendors, with the expectation that vendors will also freely share their data with them. Sharing data freely helps to create end-to-end visibility of inventory movement, as both organizations can react to real-time information regarding inventory levels, shipment tracking, and demand forecasting.
Major operational changes, like implementing new fulfillment capabilities or expanding into new markets, will often encourage retailers’ logistics teams to interface more directly with their vendors. This can help to smooth transitions and maintain service levels throughout the process.
Related Reading: Distribution Glossary of Terms
Store Operations
The store operations team is responsible for the day-to-day execution of the desired retail experience across all physical locations. They oversee all aspects of store-level operations to drive sales, profitability, and customer satisfaction. This includes setting performance standards, monitoring key metrics like sales per square foot and conversion rates, and ensuring individual stores meet financial targets.
Roles Within Store Operations Teams
Larger retailers typically have many roles under the banner of store operations, at every level from senior management down to workers and individual stores. At the highest level, a retailer’s Chief Operating Officer functions as the head of store operations, setting overall store strategy and overseeing all field operations. Other senior leadership roles within this domain may include Regional Vice Presidents, who typically oversee store operations across multiple states or major metropolitan areas, often managing 100-500+ stores for large retailers.
District Managers are typically at a level below Regional Vice Presidents, directly managing up to a few dozen stores within a single geographic area, coaching individual store managers and ensuring operational compliance. Store level leadership typically are the Store Managers, who run the operations of individual stores. Store-level employees can include Shift Supervisors, Sales Associates, and Loss Prevention Associates, all of whom are responsible for making sure that their stores are functioning smoothly on a daily basis.
Here are some example roles being advertised within store operations at Walmart:
Stocking & Unloading
Staff Pharmacist
Manager, Operations
Store Manager – Supercenter
How Does the Store Operations Team Interface with Suppliers?
There are a variety of ways in which store operations teams interact with vendors. One common way that they interface is through product training and education. Often, vendors will send product experts to individual stores or corporate training centers to ensure store associates have the product knowledge needed to effectively sell and support customers. Additionally, suppliers often provide training materials, conduct in-store product demonstrations, and offer certification programs.
Suppliers collaborate with store operations on visual merchandising strategies, providing planograms, display fixtures, and promotional materials. They may send merchandising representatives to stores to set up displays, ensure proper product placement, and maintain brand presentation standards according to corporate merchandising guidelines. During promotional campaigns, suppliers work directly with store teams to ensure proper execution of price changes, signage placement, and special displays.
In addition, store operations teams coordinate with suppliers on stock levels, delivery schedules, and inventory turns at the store level. This includes managing direct-store-delivery (DSD) relationships where suppliers deliver directly to stores, coordinating receiving schedules, and addressing out-of-stock situations quickly.
Quality Assurance
In a retail organization, the quality assurance team serves as the guardian of product standards and regulatory compliance, ensuring that everything sold meets safety requirements and brand expectations. They establish and enforce quality standards for all merchandise, conducting rigorous testing of products before they reach stores. This includes safety testing, durability assessments, environmental impact testing, performance evaluations, and other tests.
Roles Within Quality Assurance
Large retailers often have several roles, at all different levels of management, on their quality assurance teams. At the highest level, companies often have Chief Quality Officers or Vice Presidents of Quality Assurance, who set overall quality strategy and standards and manage regulatory relationships.
Quality assurance teams also often have roles dedicated to testing quality assurance in specific product categories. These roles could include Senior Quality Managers, who oversee product categories, or Quality Assurance Managers, who focus specifically on individual product lines. Laboratory Managers and Quality Analysts, on the other hand, are more hands-on with products, managing testing facilities and conducting product testing respectively.
There are also quality assurance teams which employ people specifically to ensure that their products are in compliance with both government regulations and retailer guidelines. These roles include Regulatory Affairs Managers, who handle government regulations, and Compliance Analysts, who typically maintain compliance documentation and monitor regulatory changes.
Here are some roles within its quality assurance team that Walmart is currently hiring for:
Quality Assurance Associate
Senior Quality Engineer
Senior Manager, Quality Assurance – Fashion
Quality Assurance/Systems Manager (Grocery)
Related Reading: SQEP and Its Defects
How Does the Quality Assurance Team Interface with Suppliers?
Quality assurance teams work closely with suppliers to establish clear quality specifications, safety requirements, and testing protocols. They provide detailed quality manuals and compliance guidelines that vendors must follow, ensuring consistent standards across the entire supply base and reducing the risk of quality issues reaching customers.
Often, quality assurance teams conduct on-site audits of supplier manufacturing facilities, reviewing production processes, quality control systems, and worker safety protocols. These assessments help identify potential quality risks early and ensure suppliers maintain the operational standards necessary to produce compliant products consistently.
When quality issues inevitably arise, quality assurance teams will often partner with vendors to produce a root cause analysis and create a plan for corrective action. Quality assurance teams are also required to maintain documentation of their quality processes, certifications, and test results. They work closely with suppliers to manage certification renewals and maintain the paper trail necessary for regulatory compliance and traceability.
Marketing
At retailers, marketing teams drive customer acquisition, engagement, and loyalty by creating and executing strategies that build brand awareness and drive sales. They develop and maintain the retailer's brand identity, messaging, and positioning in the marketplace by planning and executing advertising campaigns across multiple channels—television, digital, print, radio, and out-of-home advertising. Essentially, marketing serves as the voice of the brand, creating an emotional connection between customers and the retailer.
Roles Within Marketing
At the highest level, marketing teams are often led by Chief Marketing Officers, who set the overall marketing strategy and manage the marketing budget. Other senior leadership roles in this sector can include Vice Presidents of Marketing, who typically manage specific marketing functions like digital, traditional advertising, or customer marketing.
Marketing teams are often divided by the marketing mode they focus on, such as digital advertising, print advertising, or out-of-home advertising. On digital marketing teams, roles often include Director of Digital Marketing, who oversee all eCommerce marketing strategies, SEO Managers, who specialize in search engine optimization, and Social Media Managers, who deal with social media strategies and content creation.
Traditional marketing teams, on the other hand, include roles such as Media Planner, who plans and purchases media across a variety of channels, Graphic Designers, who create visual assets, and Copywriters, who develop messaging for all marketing communications.
Marketing is a highly variable field, and there are many different types of marketing teams besides those stated here, such as customer marketing, marketing analytics, and event marketing. The structure varies based on the retailer's size, channels, and customer base, with larger organizations having more specialized roles and dedicated channel expertise.
Here are some example marketing roles that are currently being advertised at Walmart:
Senior Manager, Digital Media
Director, Creative (Packaging)
Manager, Creative (Learning Design Manager), Walmart Marketplace
Senior Partner, Advertising Sales, Walmart Connect
How Does a Marketing Team Interface with Suppliers?
Marketing teams collaborate with suppliers on joint advertising campaigns and shared promotional investments. Suppliers often provide marketing funds, creative assets, and promotional support that help amplify campaigns while reducing the retailer’s marketing costs and extending reach through combined budgets.
One common way that suppliers and marketing teams work together is through strategic brand partnerships, such as exclusive product launches, co-branded events, or cross-promotional campaigns. These collaborations can include everything from joint social media campaigns to shared sponsorship opportunities that leverage both brands’ customer bases.
Marketing teams often require their company’s suppliers to provide them with product photography, videos, technical specifications, and brand guidelines that support advertising and promotional efforts. Additionally, marketing teams benefit from receiving customer and sales data from suppliers. Suppliers often have deep category expertise and consumer insights that help marketing teams develop more targeted and effective campaigns.
Sharing data is not a one-way street, however. Marketing teams often share campaign performance data with suppliers to demonstrate the effectiveness of joint marketing investments and optimize future collaborations. This data exchange helps both parties understand which marketing tactics drive the best results and allocate resources more effectively.
eCommerce
At retailers, the eCommerce team manages the retailer's digital sales channels and online customer experience, serving as the bridge between traditional retail operations and the digital marketplace. They oversee the retailer's website, mobile apps, and other digital sales channels, and translate physical merchandising strategies into digital formats, managing product catalogs, pricing, promotions, and inventory visibility online.
Roles Within eCommerce
eCommerce roles are varied and often are integrated with or work very closely with other teams, as eCommerce functionalities tend to permeate every vertical within large retailers. Senior leadership for eCommerce teams often consists of a Chief Digital Officer or a Vice President of eCommerce, who oversees digital strategy and digital initiatives. eCommerce teams are often split into different categories depending on their overall function. Digital merchandising teams, for instance, fall under the banner of eCommerce. These teams are often run by an eCommerce Merchandising Manager, who translates merchandising strategies into digital formats, or various Digital Category Managers, who handle specific product types online.
There are also customer experience teams—who focus on optimizing the end-to-end online customer journey and user experience—and omnichannel operations teams, which focus on the integration between offline and online channels. These teams typically have dedicated managers and employees who specialize in their different formats and concerns.
Additionally, marketing teams couldn’t function without robust data and analytics. These teams often use eCommerce Analysts, who analyze website performance and sales data to drive insights and online improvements, as well as Digital Insights Managers, who provide strategic analysis and reporting on eCommerce performance and market trends.
To show potential eCommerce job titles, here are some that Walmart is currently hiring for:
Director, Personalization – eCommerce
Senior Manager, Site Merchandising, School & Office Supplies
Director, Creative - eComm Content Creation
How Does an eCommerce Team Interface with Suppliers?
As with other types of teams, eCommerce teams interface with suppliers in a variety of ways. Suppliers provide these teams with high-quality product images, videos, 360-degree views, and detailed product specifications needed for online presentation. This sort of digital content helps customers make informed purchasing decisions, including technical specifications, sizing guides, and lifestyle imagery that showcases products in use.
Product information is another cornerstone in the eCommerce-supplier relationship. The eCommerce team collaborates with suppliers to ensure accurate and comprehensive product data flows seamlessly into online systems. This includes coordinating product information management (PIM) systems, managing SKU data, and ensuring item attributes, descriptions, and specifications are optimized for search and filtering capabilities on the website.
Many eCommerce teams work with suppliers on drop-ship arrangements where suppliers fulfill orders directly to customers, which expands a retailer’s product assortments without needing further inventory investment. This requires close coordination on inventory visibility, order processing, shipping standards, and customer communication.
As with any aspect of the supplier-retailer relationship, the free sharing of information helps to benefit both parties. eCommerce teams share detailed online data with suppliers, including click-through rates, conversion rates, and customer behavior patterns. This data helps suppliers understand how their products perform in digital environments and optimize everything from product positioning to pricing strategies.
Building a Partnership with Your Retailer Team
A mutually beneficial retailer-supplier relationship extends far beyond the negotiating table. Each vertical—from the buying team to the store operations team, to quality assurance and marketing—plays a critical role in ensuring that a vendor’s products will be brought to market successfully.
Suppliers who invest time in understanding these diverse teams, their unique challenges, and how they interconnect will find themselves better positioned to build meaningful partnerships. By recognizing that retail success depends on collaboration across multiple functions, suppliers can develop more strategic and flexible approaches, ultimately creating stronger, more resilient supply chain relationships that benefit both parties in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
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