How to Prepare for a Retailer QBR When You Sell Into Ulta, Target, or Sephora

The QBR That Can Make or Break Your Shelf Space

If you sell beauty or personal care products into Ulta, Target, Sephora, Nordstrom, or Walmart, your quarterly business review is not a status update. It is a negotiation for survival. The buyer sitting across from you has one question: should we keep your brand on our shelves?

Retailer QBRs determine whether your brand keeps its shelf space, gets expanded into new doors, earns that endcap for the holiday promotional window, or gets cut entirely. The buyer comes armed with data. They know your fill rate, your OTIF score, your deduction and chargeback history, and your sell-through per door down to the SKU. They have a dashboard. They have the story.

Most brands show up with a spreadsheet they built at 2am the night before. That gap in preparation is the gap that costs you shelf space.

What Retailers Actually Look At

Every major beauty retailer evaluates vendor performance across a core set of metrics. The specific thresholds and weighting differ by retailer, but the categories are consistent:

• Fill rate — the percentage of ordered units you actually ship. The target across most retailers is 95% or higher. Drop below that consistently and you are signaling that you cannot keep up with demand, which is the opposite of what a buyer wants to hear.
• OTIF performance — on-time, in-full delivery. This is the single metric that most directly predicts chargebacks. Target is particularly aggressive on OTIF scoring, with financial penalties that escalate based on trailing performance.
• Deduction and chargeback rate — how many of your shipments trigger chargebacks. A rising deduction rate tells the buyer your supply chain is getting worse. A declining rate tells them you are investing in operational excellence.
• Compliance score — routing guide adherence. ASN accuracy, labeling, case pack integrity, pallet configuration. Every retailer has different rules, and every violation is a mark against your vendor scorecard.
• Sales velocity per door — how fast your products move off the shelf. This is the metric that earns you more space. Everything else is about not losing it.
• Promotional lift — when you run a promotion, does it actually drive incremental volume? Buyers want to see that their promotional investments in your brand pay off.

Each retailer weights these differently. Ulta cares deeply about ASN timing. Target is obsessive about OTIF. Sephora pays close attention to sell-through velocity. Nordstrom focuses on margin contribution. Walmart wants to see consistent fill rates at scale. If you sell into more than one retailer, you are being scored on multiple rubrics simultaneously.

The Data You Need (And Where It Lives)

To walk into a QBR fully prepared, you need a clear picture across every metric the buyer is going to raise. Here is the problem: that data lives in four or five different systems, and none of them talk to each other.

• Fill rates come from your 3PL or warehouse management system. They know what actually shipped versus what was ordered.
• OTIF data comes from shipment tracking and carrier confirmations. Your 3PL has part of it. The retailer has the rest.
• Deduction trends live in the retailer portal. Each retailer has its own portal with its own format and its own reason code taxonomy.
• Compliance scores sit with your ops team, buried in emails and spreadsheets tracking which violations have been flagged and which corrective actions have been taken.
• Sales data comes from the retailer, often on a different cadence than your other data, and in a format that does not match your internal reporting.

Your 3PL does not talk to the retailer portal. The retailer portal does not talk to NetSuite. Your compliance tracking spreadsheet does not talk to anything. The data to tell a complete performance story exists. It just does not exist in one place.

The Night-Before Fire Drill

This is the reality for most brand ops leads: the QBR is on Thursday. On Tuesday evening, you start pulling data. You log into the Ulta vendor portal and download the deduction report. You open NetSuite and try to cross-reference shipment IDs against PO numbers. You ping your 3PL contact for fill rate data. You dig through emails from your logistics coordinator to find the compliance issues that were flagged last quarter. You build slides.

This fire drill takes one to two full days before every QBR. For brands selling into three or four retailers, that is four to eight days per quarter spent not running the business but assembling a presentation about running the business.

Meanwhile, the buyer on the other side of the table has a dashboard. It updates automatically. It tells the whole story at a glance. The information asymmetry is staggering. The person deciding whether to keep your brand has better visibility into your performance than you do. That is not a negotiation you are set up to win.

What a Great QBR Looks Like

Now imagine a different version of that Thursday meeting. You walk in and you already know the story. You know your deduction rate dropped 40% quarter over quarter. You know your fill rate is 97%. You know your top compliance issue last quarter was ASN timing on Tuesday shipments, and you can show the buyer exactly what you changed: you moved your ASN transmission window forward by four hours, and the violation rate dropped to near zero.

You have a plan for the next promotional window. You have data showing the lift from the last promotion. You have a specific ask: expanded shelf space in 50 additional doors, because your sell-through velocity supports it.

The buyer sees something they almost never see from emerging beauty brands: control. You are not reacting to the data they present. You are presenting your own data, telling your own story, and proposing next steps. That is the brand that keeps shelf space. That is the brand that gets expanded.

How SCM360 Prepares You

SCM360 eliminates the night-before fire drill by consolidating your QBR data into a single dashboard. Deduction trends, fill rates, OTIF scores, compliance metrics — all by retailer, all current, all in one place.

Instead of spending two days copy-pasting between retailer portals and NetSuite, you open SCM360 and the QBR-ready data is already there. SCM360 connects to your retailer portals, your ERP, and your 3PL to build a continuously updated picture of your performance across every account.

The AI layer does something your spreadsheets never could: it highlights the story. What improved this quarter and why. What needs attention before the buyer raises it. What you should propose based on your performance trends. Instead of drowning in raw data, you walk into the QBR with a narrative backed by numbers.

Combined with SCM360's invoice-to-PO matching and chargeback recovery capabilities, the deduction trends you present in the QBR are not just numbers — they are the result of a systematic recovery program that the buyer can see working in real time.

No more fire drills. No more information asymmetry. Just QBR-ready data, always current, for every retailer you sell into. See how it works at scm360.ai.

The Shelf Space Equation

In beauty and personal care, shelf space is revenue. Losing a planogram slot at Ulta or getting cut from a Sephora endcap is not an abstract setback. It is a direct, measurable hit to your top line that affects everything downstream: production planning, inventory commitments, marketing ROI, and your ability to raise the next round of funding.

The brands that show up to QBRs with data keep their shelf space. They earn expansions. They get first call for promotional windows. The brands that show up with excuses — or worse, show up surprised by what the buyer already knows — lose it.

This is not a nice-to-have operational improvement. For beauty brands selling into major retailers, the quality of your QBR preparation is existential. The buyer will make a shelf space decision about your brand every single quarter. The only question is whether you are ready for that conversation, or whether you are still copy-pasting from the retailer portal at midnight. Learn how SCM360 gets you ready at scm360.ai.