Walmart Business Plan

In fact, most Walmart suppliers have employees on the ground in Arkansas, making sure that they can serve Walmart fully (Carol Tice, "An Inside Look At Being a Wal-Mart Supplier", Entrepreneur).

The Local Purchase Program, explains Walmart's website, "provides an avenue for small, domestic suppliers to sell their locally made, shelf-ready products at Walmart stores within their local area".

After its acquisition and delisting, Seiyu adopted a Walmart-style "every day low price" strategy, but struggled to compete with drugstores and other discount retailers.

Walmart Japan reported a 200 million yen ($1.87 million at current rates) net loss for 2016, broke even in 2017 and logged a 66 million yen loss last year.

Besides dramatically increasing a business’s profits and opening doors to other lucrative retail contracts, having your products on a big box retailer’s shelves gives consumers and other retailers the message that your company’s products are winners.

However, competition to become a Walmart vendor is fierce; in 2004, “about 10,000 new suppliers applied to become Walmart vendors.

Even if you can get the buyer interested in your product, having only one product to offer can be a deal killer.

Setting up a new supplier takes time and effort – so the potential supplier who can offer a complete line rather than a single product will always have the edge.

Becoming a Walmart vendor or vendor for some other big box retailer certainly isn’t an appropriate goal for every product-based small business – nor is it the only route to retail success.

But if your products and company are a good fit with big box retail, becoming a big box supplier can be extremely rewarding.