EDI requirements for Walmart suppliers running Odoo

What Walmart publishes, by supplier path

Drop-ship vendors on Walmart.com. Walmart publishes its EDI guides on its developer site, in a section it labels Data Transfer, EDI (DSV only). Each document has its own guide, and the guides for the 850, 855, 856 and 846 are written to X12 version 4010. The 856 guide, for example, sets out every required and optional segment with a sample file. Walmart also documents an XML order interface for drop-ship vendors as an alternative to EDI.

Store and distribution-centre suppliers. Walmart's public supplier pages cover the application path, the Standards for Suppliers that every supplier and facility is held to, and the setup identifiers: a US federal tax identification number on application documents and a Dun and Bradstreet registration. The document set, the testing sequence and the scorecard for this path arrive through Walmart's supplier systems after vendor setup, scoped to your department and channel.

So the first question for your buyer or merchant contact is which path you are being set up for. On drop-ship, Walmart's guides are the specification to read first. On the store path, ask which documents your category trades and where your integration guideline lives. The free Requirement Check reads whatever you are given and turns it into an Odoo-side scope.

The documents, path by path

Walmart's drop-ship EDI guide lists eight documents. Each links to Walmart's own page, and to ours where we explain what the document does inside Odoo.

The published set carries no invoice guide. Walmart's supplier reports count invoices that suppliers send by EDI, so ask during setup which invoice document and version apply to you, and get the answer in writing.

Store and distribution-centre programmes generally run the standard loop with an acknowledgment discipline on top. The order arrives as an 850 purchase order, an 855 order acknowledgment answers it, the 856 advance ship notice precedes the freight, and the 810 invoice has to match the order it bills. The 997 functional acknowledgment confirms receipt of each envelope. Which of them your agreement mandates is a guideline fact, so collect it from your setup material before scoping anything. The X12 catalog covers every number in plain language.

Which route your files travel

For drop-ship EDI, Walmart's connection types page names four: AS2, a value-added network, SFTP, and a solution provider. On the network and solution-provider routes Walmart states that it does not govern the data flow between the provider and the vendor, so the provider's side of the mapping is a question for the provider. AS2 and SFTP are direct connections, where the whole mapping is yours.

If your setup names SPS Commerce, the Odoo side of an SPS Commerce connection is covered separately. Whichever route your programme runs, the route only moves the files. The mapping between their documents and your Odoo records decides whether the connection holds, and it is the same work on every route.

What changes inside your Odoo

There is no X12 in Odoo, so a Walmart programme is a connector sitting on top of it. The four Odoo-side mechanisms are the same ones every retail mandate exercises. Packagings carry the casepack, per product, with a Unit Name, Quantity and Reference Unit. The GS1 nomenclature maps the GTIN to the product Barcode field and the SSCC to the Package name, which is what the 856 hierarchy and the carton labels are built from. The retailer's PO number belongs in Customer Reference, the field Odoo exposes as client_order_ref, because every document coming back quotes it. And the Delivery Date against Expected date decides what your warehouse promises into the routing window.

Drop-ship adds one more. Each order is a single consumer's, so the sales order needs Walmart as the customer you invoice and the consumer as the address it ships to. With the Customer Addresses setting on, Odoo 19.0 carries a separate Invoice Address and Delivery Address on every quotation, which is the pair this order needs.

The store path puts the pressure on the item master: department numbers, item identifiers and casepacks have to agree across your Odoo, their item file and your labels, and the mismatches surface as receiving exceptions weeks later.

Testing and enforcement, in general form

Large programmes test in stages: connectivity, then document validation against the guideline, then a watched production window. Enforcement runs on scorecards and deductions, and the deduction reaches you as a line on the remittance advice with a code on it. How chargebacks land in Odoo covers counting them, and the rates and windows that apply to you are guideline facts to collect in writing before a go-live date is agreed.

For the wider US picture, see US retail EDI compliance. The grocery mirror of this page is Kroger EDI requirements, and Canadian general merchandise runs through Canadian Tire EDI requirements.