Walmart Scintilla™: What It Is, Basic vs. Charter, and How to Use It Well

8th & Walton, LLC, Bentonville, AR is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Walmart or its affiliates. All references to Walmart, as well as its affiliates, trademarks, and brands, are not intended to imply that 8th & Walton LLC is a Walmart vehicle for advertising or any other commercial purposes. Retail Link® and Walmart Scintilla™ are trademarks of Walmart.

Walmart Scintilla™ is Walmart Data Ventures’ analytics platform for suppliers. Scintilla brings together sales, inventory, customer, and category data so suppliers can understand how their items perform at Walmart and what to do about it.

All suppliers have access to Scintilla and need to make a decision on how they plan to use it. One decision is whether to use Basic or Charter. Unfortunately, many teams hold a misunderstanding about these two tiers, considering the difference between the two as “standard versus more data.” In 8th & Walton’s work with supplier teams, we’ve found that this framing undersells both.

This guide covers what Scintilla is, what each tier is built for, the misconceptions we run into most often, and a practical workflow for turning Scintilla data into actionable recommendations for your Walmart merchant.

What Is Walmart Scintilla?

Walmart Scintilla is the analytics platform Walmart suppliers use to see sales, inventory, customer, and category data across every Walmart channel, including stores, pickup, delivery, and Walmart.com.

In its first incarnation, and under a different name, Scintilla took over from the Decision Support System (DSS) reporting inside Retail Link® when DSS was retired on March 1, 2024. Walmart renamed the platform Scintilla in 2025.

Scintilla login and access: Suppliers sign in to Scintilla with their Retail Link® credentials, which act as a single sign-on. If your company already subscribes to Charter, your company’s Scintilla admin adds you as a user. For a refresher on the login side, see our guide to Retail Link® login.

Canadian suppliers should be aware that Scintilla is still very limited in Canada. Suppliers with questions should contact Walmart Data Ventures Canada. If you are a Sam’s Club supplier, I have good news for you: Walmart has announced that Scintilla will be available to Sam’s Club U.S. merchants and suppliers starting in 2027.

What Scintilla Data Helps Suppliers Answer

At its core, Scintilla Charter helps a supplier team answer the questions that drive a Walmart business:

• Which items are gaining or losing sales?
• Where is an item selling? (store, geography, fulfillment method, or channel)
• Is weak performance a demand problem or an in-stock problem?
• Which items, packs, brands, or price tiers drive the category?
• Which shoppers buy the category, and what else do they buy?
• Is an item at risk in an upcoming modular reset or assortment review?
• Where should we focus inventory, distribution, pricing, promotion, digital content, or merchant conversations?

While some of these questions can be answered with Basic, questions like fulfillment method, channel, and shopper category are only available at the Charter tier.

The bigger point is that Scintilla moves suppliers past total-sales reporting. Knowing that sales are up is a great starting point, but you need more detail. Scintilla ties an item’s results to its distribution, store count, availability, inventory, shopper behavior, and category context. This connection turns a report into a case for getting what you need to improve your sales and earnings at Walmart.

Scintilla Tools and Suites

Scintilla isn’t one report. It’s a set of tools, and access depends on your tier.

• Report Builder. Custom sales, inventory, and store-level reports. For Basic users, this is the everyday workspace.
• Scintilla Boards. Ready-made dashboards that combine performance and customer metrics in one view. Launched in July 2026, they include Business Overview, End-to-End Inventory, Tender Analysis, and Digital Landscapes. (Charter)
• Shopper Behavior. Basket, loyalty, switching, and Assortment Deep Dive reports built on Walmart’s first-party customer data. (Charter)
• Customer Perception. First-party customer feedback and sentiment research. (Charter)
• Digital Landscapes. Insight into how shoppers search for, compare, and choose products online before they buy. (Charter)
• Insights Activation. Connects Scintilla audience and retail insights to Walmart Connect campaign planning. Available to Charter suppliers and their agencies.
• Scintilla In-Store. The mobile app for supplier field reps, which replaced Walmart’s Volt app in February 2026.

Scintilla also includes Marty, an AI assistant that explains metrics, including how they map to old DSS terms. Walmart has said Marty will soon be able to flag issues and suggest next steps.

Walmart Scintilla Basic vs. Charter: Different Jobs, Not More Data

Basic tells you what is happening in your business. Charter helps you figure out why it’s happening, who is driving it, where the opportunity is, and what Walmart should consider doing about it.

Pricing: Basic is included at no cost for Walmart suppliers. Charter is a paid subscription. For current Charter pricing, talk with Walmart Data Ventures.

When Basic Is Enough

Basic can carry a supplier with a narrow assortment, a few categories, limited analytical resources, or very stable replenishment. If your team’s main weekly questions are “Did sales rise or fall?”, “Which stores carry the item?”, “Is inventory too high or too low?”, and “Where are we likely to run out?”, Basic can deliver a lot of value.

The catch is discipline. Basic is most valuable when it is used as a recurring operating discipline. A team that reviews it weekly and acts on exceptions will get more from Basic than a team that opens it only when a buyer calls.

When Charter Is Justified

Charter becomes easier to justify when a supplier has significant sales at Walmart, a broad item portfolio, active reset risk, category-management responsibility, Walmart Connect spending, or an assortment decision it needs to influence.

In practice, Charter pays off when you need to show that an item brings incremental shoppers or trips to the category, serves a distinct customer or need state, has strong potential in specific store clusters, or has an availability problem rather than a demand problem. It also helps when you need to show that a new item should replace a weaker one or that a launch is backed by more than internal assumptions.

Common Scintilla Misconceptions

I hear these regularly from supplier teams, and each one can cost a supplier a stronger conversation with its merchant.

“Charter is only for large suppliers.” Charter is valuable whenever a supplier needs to influence an assortment, item-retention, distribution-expansion, price-pack, innovation, or Walmart Connect decision. Organization size isn’t the deciding factor. The decision you’re trying to influence is.

“Good sales make a strong retention argument.” Sales alone don’t prove an item is productive, incremental, in stock, differentiated, or right for a particular store cluster. A merchant weighing a reset is looking at the whole category, and your argument has to do the same.

“Weak sales mean customers don’t want the item.” Weak sales can come from out-of-stocks, poor replenishment, uneven distribution, lost stores, a price-pack mismatch, weak digital content, a poor fit in certain stores, or a competing SKU. Before you accept that demand is the problem, rule out everything else.

“Charter reports will tell us what to decide.” Charter provides evidence, not decisions. The supplier still has to define the business question, select the right comparison group, distinguish correlation from causation, and turn the finding into an actionable recommendation.

How to Use Walmart Scintilla Effectively

The strongest operating model treats Basic and Charter as partners, not substitutes. Basic flags the exception, Charter explains the customer and category story, then your account team turns those findings into an action plan.

Use Basic for Weekly Exception Management

Basic should feed a weekly item and supply chain review:

• Review sales, units, store count, inventory, and availability.
• Flag items with declining velocity, distribution, or service levels.
• Separate demand issues from availability issues.
• Spot excess inventory and markdown risk.
• Escalate supply, replenishment, item-data, or store-execution problems quickly.

For most teams, this starts in Report Builder. Pull a weekly sales report by item and store, add a matching inventory report covering on-hand, on-order, and weeks of supply, and compare point-of-sale data with shipments. Large gaps between POS and shipments, or between store count and stores actually selling, are often where problems first appear.

Use Charter for Decisions and Influence

Charter belongs with the higher-stakes work: line reviews and modular preparation, item-retention or store-expansion cases, new-item justification, price-pack architecture, innovation pipelines, Walmart Connect audience planning, and quarterly or annual business reviews.

Start With a Business Question

Opening a Charter report without a clear question is like walking into a store without a list: you leave with something, but probably not what you needed. Before you start, decide whether you’re trying to understand penetration, repeat purchase, switching, incrementality, basket affinity, or store-cluster opportunity.

Build a Shared Data Dictionary

Define your company’s most-used measures, time periods, store groups, item hierarchies, and calculation rules. Without that, sales, supply chain, and category teams can bring three different numbers to the same meeting, and nothing undermines a merchant conversation faster.

A Starter Plan for New Charter Users

Newly upgraded Charter suppliers shouldn’t try to learn every dataset at once. I recommend a short, practical start:

1. Assign access by role. Decide who needs Charter access: sales, category management, replenishment, supply chain, finance, analytics, and leadership.
2. Set three starter business questions. For example: Which items are most at risk of losing stores or being deleted? Which customer or store segments offer the most growth? Which products, packs, or price points add the most to the category?
3. Build a recurring item-risk dashboard. Track store count, units per store per week, sales per store, in-stock performance, weeks of supply, inventory turns, markdowns, and peer-item rankings.
4. Pick one real business case. Choose an upcoming reset, a declining item, a new-item launch, or a Walmart Connect campaign, and build a documented recommendation from it.

Shopper Behavior: The Most Underused Charter Capability

If I could point Charter users to one place, it would be Shopper Behavior, especially Assortment Deep Dive, the switching reports, and basket analysis.

Most suppliers spend their time in sales, inventory, and store-level reports because those reports are familiar, urgent, and easy to explain. They’re essential, but on their own they tend to produce a narrow story: “Our item’s sales are up (or down), so Walmart should add (or keep, or remove) it.”

I see four reasons Shopper Behavior goes unused:

• Teams start with the data they already know. POS, shipments, inventory, and store count are familiar, and they’re required for weekly management.
• The business question isn’t defined. Users open a report before deciding what they’re trying to learn.
• It takes more interpretation. A sales report shows a rank or trend. Shopper data has to be explained, along with what action should follow.
• The insight never gets tied to a decision. A buyer needs a recommendation, not an interesting customer statistic.

Used well, Shopper Behavior answers the questions merchants care about: Who buys the item compared with who buys the category? Is it bringing in new-to-brand or new-to-category shoppers? Does it increase trips, frequency, or household penetration? What else is in the basket? Is it taking sales from your own SKU, a competitor, private brand, or outside the category? Does it serve a distinct need state, price point, or purchase occasion?

One of the biggest missed opportunities that I’ve seen is treating Charter as a reporting upgrade instead of a decision-support and influence tool.

Example: Building the Case for an At-Risk Item

Here’s an illustrative scenario (not a specific client) that shows how the two tiers work together.

An item’s total sales are declining. Its store count has dropped from 2,000 to 1,700, and units per store per week are down 8%.

The Basic read. Report Builder shows that on-hand inventory is uneven, a meaningful share of stores have low or zero sales, and the item has had out-of-stock days in higher-volume locations. That’s valuable operational evidence, but probably won’t persuade a merchant to keep the item on its own.

The Charter read. Shopper Behavior and category data fill the gaps in the story. The analysis might show that the item has higher repeat purchase among a defined shopper segment, and that its buyers spend more in the category than average. It might show that the item performs much better in a specific store cluster, region, or format. Sales losses may be concentrated in stores with poor in-stock performance, and where the item is consistently available, its velocity may match or beat its direct peers.

The recommendation. Now the supplier can bring specific options to the merchant:

• Keep the item in its strongest store clusters instead of deleting it everywhere.
• Expand to stores that match the profile where the item succeeds.
• Fix the in-stock issue before judging demand.

This shifts the conversation from “please keep our item” to “here is the evidence-based assortment recommendation.” If your team is facing a reset and wants a second set of eyes on the case, that’s the kind of work our PathFinders Walmart advisory support is built for.

Walmart Scintilla Training and Certifications

Walmart Data Ventures offers official Scintilla User Certifications in Sales Analysis, Replenishment Analysis, Customer Insights, Category Manager, and the Scintilla Insights Model, with Account Management listed as coming soon. Certification is an exclusive benefit for Scintilla subscribers and requires annual recertification. Basic users can join Walmart Data Ventures’ live webinars, including sessions on Report Builder.

Certifications teach the tool. What they can’t do is build your team’s own workflows: your weekly exception review, your data dictionary, your item-risk dashboard, your line-review fact base. That’s the gap hands-on training fills.

I spent nearly a decade inside Walmart, much of it on replenishment systems and data, before joining 8th & Walton. It is exciting to see supplier teams transition from being overwhelmed by the data, complexity, and change to operating at a high level. If that’s where your team wants to go, learn more about Scintilla training for your team.

The Bottom Line

Basic is the operational foundation. It shows what’s happening to your items, inventory, distribution, and sales. Charter is the strategic layer. It shows who is buying, why, and where the opportunity is.

A supplier that uses only Basic can manage its business. A supplier that uses Charter effectively can shape it by defending productive items, targeting the right stores and shoppers, and bringing better-supported recommendations to Walmart before Walmart makes the assortment decision on its own.

At 8th & Walton, our team of former Walmart associates and supplier veterans helps suppliers do exactly that. If you’re not sure whether your team is getting full value from Scintilla, start with a free Walmart Business Health Assessment.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Walmart Scintilla?

Walmart Scintilla™ is Walmart Data Ventures’ analytics platform for suppliers. It provides sales, inventory, customer, and category data across Walmart stores, pickup, delivery, and Walmart.com.

Did Scintilla replace Retail Link?

No. Scintilla replaced the Decision Support System (DSS) reporting inside Retail Link®, which was retired on March 1, 2024. Retail Link® is still used for other applications and serves as the single sign-on for Scintilla.

What is the difference between Scintilla Basic and Charter?

Basic is built for operational reporting and answers “What happened?” Charter adds shopper, category, and assortment analysis that explains why it happened and where the opportunity is, which helps suppliers build recommendations for Walmart merchants.

Is Scintilla Basic free for Walmart suppliers?

Yes. Basic is included at no cost for Walmart suppliers. Charter is a paid subscription; contact Walmart Data Ventures for current pricing.

How do I use Walmart Scintilla effectively?

Use Basic for a weekly exception review of sales, store count, inventory, and availability. Use Charter to explain exceptions and build merchant-facing recommendations. Start every Charter analysis with a defined business question.

What is the best training for Walmart Scintilla?

Pair official Scintilla User Certifications, which teach the tool, with hands-on team training that builds your own workflows, dashboards, and line-review cases.

What is Scintilla In-Store?

Scintilla In-Store is the mobile app for supplier field representatives. It replaced Walmart’s Volt app in February 2026 and brings store-level data and assigned tasks into one place.

How do I log in to Walmart Scintilla?

Go to the Scintilla site and sign in with your Retail Link® credentials. If your company subscribes to Charter, your company’s Scintilla admin can add you as a user.