The Supply Side: Walmart touts its connections with small businesses

Walmart is a long way from being a small business with recent annual revenue of $681 billion. But the Bentonville-based retailer continues to court entrepreneurs and small businesses to sell goods on its growing marketplace.

Walmart is also two years into its business membership offering that provides convenience and savings for businesses. Ashley Hubka, senior vice president of Walmart Business, said Walmart’s business is an omnichannel working to sell to businesses, nonprofits and government entities.

“We do that with a really broad online assortment of items and more specialty items that are not carried in most of our stores,” Hubka said during the retail giant’s shareholder media events on June 4. “Think about bulk quantities of office supplies or office storage, you might use a similar item that we would sell in a store or club, but you need it in much greater quantities. There are also products that are different, commercial items, like tri-fold paper towels or center-fold paper towels. Those are not the ones we have at our houses. Those are commercial items. And then the third area might be industrial formulations, not cleaning chemicals for your house but concrete floor cleaner.”

She said businesses can access the Walmart business portal online and create an account for free. The most basic membership is for a small or local company and costs $98 annually. Another membership level is for $498 and allows a business to have 50 users.

Bentonville-based Airship Coffee is a Walmart Business member purchasing some of the products it needs to run its day-to-day operations. Airship also sells its coffee on Walmart shelves and operates four cafes in Bentonville, with a fifth set to open on Walmart’s new corporate campus. Mark Bray, owner of Airship Coffee, said he was at a local charity event and was introduced to the Walmart coffee buyer.

“I was so nervous to talk to him,” Bray said. “But I asked him why Walmart customers bought their groceries from him, but they bought their coffee from me. Then I answered that maybe it was because Walmart hadn’t sold it yet. He thought that was funny, and I got a meeting with him.”

“We started small, doing direct-to-store deliveries, but during the pandemic, we went into stores and asked if we could fill empty shelves,” he said. “An inflection point for us was when we got the product fulfilled from warehouses because of the logistical efficiency it provided.”

Bray said his buyer asked him why the coffee was selling really well in Mountain Home (Baxter County), and he had no answer.

“The data analytics our buyer ran for us helps us to identify other regions where the coffee brand might do well,” Bray said. “We scaled up manufacturing by four times the capacity, and Walmart provided accurate data to us so we could make good decisions about where to invest. We would not have been able to access that data or understand how to build a strategy without Walmart’s support.”

Bray said Airship Coffee is leaning into omnichannel to expand the brand’s reach via online sales.

“We are getting support in the B2B [business-to-business] channel, and that’s a great offering for us to be in because for 10 years we have run a local delivery route,” he said. “I would love to see that go away and have people order on Walmart B2B.”

Walmart said last year that more than 60% of its supplier base was a small business.

Jaclyn Lomax, vice president of supplier excellence at Walmart, said small businesses are the backbone of local communities, and Walmart wants to help them succeed. She said small suppliers selling on the retailer’s marketplace provide a broader assortment of goods that helps Walmart have more products to sell to customers.

Walmart recently launched a new Grow with Us program aimed at providing small businesses and small suppliers with the resources, mentorship and support they need to be successful in stores and on the marketplace. Lomax said it’s a voluntary four-part program where they have access to training and learning on the Supplier Academy portal. The content is free and covers 30 modules that include retail fundamentals, Walmart 101 and other training to enhance their ability to grow their business.

There is a discovery access that allows suppliers a host of different ways to get their products discovered by Walmart merchants. One of those is Open Call, but there is also the Range Me Discovery Portal and Walmart’s marketplace. The last part is mentorship and financing support for eligible suppliers, such as early payment options and access to financing through various financial partners.

Fiserv’s Small Business Index for May indicated sales grew 3.3% year over year while total transactions rose 3.8%. The report found that compared to 2024, small business retail sales grew modestly at 0.9%, while transactions increased 2.9%.

“Small businesses continue to show resilience, with May marking another month of year-over-year growth,” said Prasanna Dhore, chief data officer at Fiserv, a global fintech firm. “The continued shift toward essential spending is now a defining trend — growing at double the rate of discretionary purchases as consumers are more intentional with their spending.”

Editor’s note: The Supply Side section of Talk Business & Politics focuses on the companies, organizations, issues and individuals engaged in providing products and services to retailers. The Supply Side is managed by Talk Business & Politics, and is sponsored by HRG.