Walmart gives suppliers access to dozens of metrics through Scintilla — sales dollars, units, instock, AUR, GMROII, fill rate, weeks of supply, margin, comp sales, tender amounts, forecast accuracy, and more. It's a lot of data.
But not all of it matters equally. When your buyer opens their dashboard to evaluate your business, they're looking at a specific set of KPIs. These numbers determine whether you get more shelf space or less, whether your item stays in the planogram or gets cut, whether your next line review is a celebration or an intervention.
Seven KPIs drive those decisions.
1. Omni Sales (Store + eCommerce)
Total sales dollars across all channels — brick-and-mortar stores plus walmart.com (including pickup and delivery).
Sales is the metric. Everything else — instock, margin, forecast accuracy — exists in service of it. A supplier with growing sales gets the benefit of the doubt on other metrics. A supplier with declining sales gets scrutiny on everything.
Buyers want to see year-over-year growth, week-over-week consistency, and a YTD trajectory that tells a good story. Sum your Sales & Inventory (store) and eComm Sales datasets. Build a 52-week trend.
And here's what a lot of suppliers miss: buyers don't just look at your absolute sales. They look at your sales relative to the category. If you grew 5% but the category grew 12%, you lost share. That's not a win.
2. Instock Percentage
The percentage of your authorized item-store combinations that have product on the shelf at any given time.
Instock is the operational metric buyers care about most after sales. It directly measures whether customers can actually buy your product. Low instock means lost sales, and Walmart takes lost sales personally.
Buyers look at the absolute level (above 95%? above 97%?), the trend direction (improving or deteriorating?), and item-level outliers dragging the whole number down. Your Vendor Scorecard has the official Walmart-calculated instock. You can also calculate it from Sales & Inventory data by checking on-hand quantities across valid stores.
The thresholds are category-dependent, but generally: below 95% triggers a conversation, below 92% triggers a corrective action request. For eCommerce, the bar is higher — 98% is the target.
3. OTIF (On Time In Full)
The percentage of your shipments that arrive at Walmart's distribution centers (a) by the Must Arrive By Date, and (b) with the full ordered quantity.
OTIF is Walmart's flagship supply chain metric. It measures whether you're reliable. Late shipments and short shipments create downstream problems — DC inventory gaps, store out-of-stocks, extra handling costs. Your Vendor Scorecard includes OTIF metrics, and Tender Analysis data can help you cross-reference specific POs against delivery performance.
Buyers look at three numbers: On Time percentage (did shipments arrive by the MABD?), In Full percentage (did shipments contain the full ordered quantity?), and the combined OTIF score — both on time AND in full.
Poor OTIF can result in fines, reduced order quantities, or loss of direct-store-delivery privileges. It's not an abstract metric. It has direct financial consequences.
4. Average Unit Retail (AUR)
The average selling price per unit: total sales dollars divided by total units sold.
AUR tells you what customers are actually paying. It reflects your pricing strategy, promotional cadence, and markdown activity. A declining AUR means you're selling cheaper — which might be intentional (promotions) or might signal a problem (excessive markdowns, price competition).
Calculate it from Sales & Inventory: pos_sales_dollars / pos_sales_units. Track weekly and compare year-over-year.
Buyers watch AUR vs. last year, AUR vs. the category average, and AUR behavior during promotions — how deep are your promos, and are they driving enough volume to justify the margin hit?
This is where merchandising and finance intersect. Your buyer manages a category budget, and your AUR directly impacts their margin mix. If your AUR is dropping without a corresponding increase in units, you're becoming a less profitable part of their category. That's a dangerous position to be in.
5. Sell-Through Rate
Units sold divided by units received over a given period.
Sell-through measures the health of your inventory flow. High sell-through means product is moving — stores sell what they receive, and inventory isn't piling up. Low sell-through means product is accumulating, tying up shelf space and warehouse capacity.
Different categories have different norms. Consumables sell through faster than seasonal goods. But a drop in sell-through almost always predicts a future problem: markdowns, clearance, or returns. And for new items in the planogram, sell-through in the first 4-8 weeks determines whether the item stays or gets cut.
Combine Sales & Inventory (units sold) with DC Metrics or Tender Analysis (units received/shipped). Calculate rolling 4-week sell-through for a smoothed view.
Walmart's planogram decisions are heavily influenced by sell-through. Items with strong sell-through earn more facings. Items with weak sell-through get fewer facings — or get dropped entirely at the next modular reset.
6. Weeks of Supply
How many weeks of sales your current inventory can cover at the current sales rate. Calculated as on-hand inventory units divided by average weekly units sold.
Weeks of supply is the balance metric. Too low (under 2-3 weeks) and you risk going out of stock. Too high (over 8-10 weeks for most categories) and inventory is sitting, taking up shelf space and potentially heading for markdowns.
Most categories target 3-6 weeks of supply at the store level and 2-4 weeks at the DC level. Your buyer knows the right range. Spiky weeks of supply — bouncing between 1 week and 10 weeks — indicates replenishment instability. And if the DC has 8 weeks of supply but stores are running at 1 week, there's a distribution problem.
Calculate from Sales & Inventory and DC Metrics: (store_on_hand + dc_on_hand) / weekly_units_sold.
A buyer managing 500 items in a category doesn't have time to monitor every item's inventory. They use weeks of supply as a quick health check. If your numbers are in range, you don't get a conversation. If they're out of range — in either direction — you will.
7. Digital Penetration
The share of your total sales that comes through eCommerce channels (walmart.com, pickup, delivery) vs. in-store purchases.
Walmart's eCommerce business is growing faster than its store business. Buyers are expected to grow their digital numbers, which means they're evaluating suppliers partly on eCommerce contribution. Strong store performance but no eCommerce presence? That's a gap your buyer will notice.
Buyers compare your penetration to the category average — if the category is 15% digital but you're only 5%, you're underperforming online. They also look at your digital growth rate and whether your items are listed, in stock, and available for all fulfillment methods (shipping, pickup, delivery).
Calculate it from your Sales & Inventory (store sales), eComm Sales, and Tender Analysis data: (ecomm_sales + dotcom_tender_sales) / (store_sales + ecomm_sales) x 100. The .com Tender (Type 46) captures online orders fulfilled through stores that don't appear in the eComm Sales dataset.
Digital penetration is a growth lever. If your items are well-positioned for online purchase — good images, accurate descriptions, competitive pricing, strong reviews — you can grow total sales without needing more physical shelf space.
Putting It Together
These 7 KPIs form a complete picture of your Walmart business:
| KPI | What It Answers |
|---|---|
| Omni Sales | Is the business growing? |
| Instock | Are we capturing available demand? |
| OTIF | Are we a reliable supply chain partner? |
| AUR | Is our pricing healthy? |
| Sell-Through | Is product moving at the right velocity? |
| Weeks of Supply | Is inventory balanced? |
| Digital Penetration | Are we capturing online growth? |
No single metric tells the full story. Strong sales but poor instock? You're leaving money on the table. Great instock but declining AUR? You're becoming less profitable. Good store performance but low digital penetration? You're missing the fastest-growing channel.
Building Your Weekly KPI Dashboard
Every week when your Scintilla data drops, update these 7 numbers. Track them week over week, compare to last year, and flag anything that moves more than 10-15% in either direction.
Your buyer evaluates your business through these metrics. Make sure you're looking at the same ones.