Our guest this week was 8th & Walton’s Heather Reid, Director of Education Canada and Accounting Insights. Check out our interview with Heather on Walmart Canada’s Supplier Manual!
Lainie: How would you briefly explain Walmart Canada’s inbound compliance codes and how they relate to SQEP style fines?
Heather: SQEP is very similar in Canada. It’s just that the terminology is different. So SQEP, the supplier Quality Excellence program, which is named in the US, is all about supply chain compliance, whereas in Canada, they call it inbound compliance codes, definitions, and fees. And it’s very similar in the sense that it’s all about PO accuracy, load accuracy, pallet accuracy, and packaging accuracy.
In Canada, they actually call it quality. So low quality, pallet quality. And in the US, they’ll call it pallet compliance or load compliance. So very similar. And with similar expectations. So we need to find out where we can get this information ’cause as we know, it has recently been updated, right?
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Lainie: Could you walk us through where to find this in Retail Link and the supplier information manual?
Heather: For sure, as a Canadian supplier, you wanna be on the Retail Link Canada site. And then you wanna go into the Docs tab for suppliers in Canada. The Docs tab is where everything is available to you. We don’t have Academy in Canada, so we use the docs, and under the docs, you’re gonna look for the supplier information manual. Such an important section. And what you’re gonna do when you get to that is you’re gonna look for a section called distribution centers. There are multiple distribution center guides. I believe that there are actually six of them, depending on how you ship to Walmart.
The one I want to focus on is the Regional Distribution Center Guide. And if you ship to their main distribution centers within that, you will see what we call the compliance fees. And if you look at pages 128 to 137 in that specific guide, it’ll break down those different fees.
I do want to make sure we mention that the fees were updated in February of 2026.
There are also processing fees, and depending on the type of DCs you send to the flat rate for most of ’em is $170. There’s also a flat rate for ambient, which is slightly higher. So very important. If you’re not getting information about any non-compliance, you can actually get an email sent to you before you receive the fine. So it’s not a surprise. And there is a section within the supplier information manual under what they call distribution centers, as well, but they also call the section Distribution Center Forms and Tables. And if you go in there, you will actually find a form to fill out for Canada non-compliance, so the compliance information is emailed to you in advance of actually receiving that fine.
