DIRECT ANSWER
Route a Walmart chargeback by where the money moved. Dispute payment deductions in APDP and Walmart-issued AR invoices, such as OTIF or SQEP charges, in HighRadius EIPP. Post-audit claims go to the named audit firm; contracted allowances and carrier losses follow their buyer or carrier lanes.
You dispute a Walmart chargeback in the lane that owns it, and the lane is decided by where the money moved, not by what the charge was for. A deduction netted off a payment, the kind that appears with a numeric claim code in the check detail, is an accounts-payable claim: it disputes in APDP, the Accounts Payable Disputes Portal, inside Retail Link. A charge Walmart bills you as an invoice, the way OTIF fines and SQEP billings arrive, is an accounts-receivable bill: it disputes in HighRadius EIPP. Post-audit claims are excluded from APDP and go to the audit firm named in the claim package. Contracted-allowance recovery belongs with your buyer as a payback request, and a prepaid-freight loss that genuinely happened in transit belongs with your carrier.
Getting that routing wrong is the most common reason a Walmart dispute dies unheard. The AP and AR sides run on separate systems with separate portals, and a dispute filed in the wrong one draws an eligibility denial rather than a reading of your evidence. The flip side matters just as much: a wrong-lane denial is a routing error, not a ruling. Refile in the owning lane while the window allows and the merits are untouched. The routing decision runs on four layers: the first fork, the lane map, the identifying signals, and the evidence class each lane accepts. For per-code evidence depth, start with deduction code 22, the worked example for the shortage family.
Is the charge an AP claim or an AR bill?
The first fork: did Walmart take the money out of a payment, or bill you for it? A deduction shortens a check you were owed. It shows up in the check detail, in APIS, and in Supplier One’s Deductions view, each line carrying a numeric claim code. That is the AP side, and its dispute portal is APDP. An AR bill runs the other direction: Walmart issues an invoice against you, and it appears in HighRadius EIPP under open bills (paid bills move to the closed tab, and closed items remain disputable). That is the AR side, and the dispute is filed against the invoice itself inside EIPP.
The fork is structural. Walmart’s headline program fines are AR bills even when they surface in the check detail: OTIF and SQEP charges are issued as AR invoices and netted against what you are paid, so a code 99 line in a check-detail export is one of those invoices being netted, not an APDP-eligible deduction. And APDP’s own scope rules exclude AR deductions and post-audit claims, so the AP portal cannot rule on them no matter how complete the filing.
Which lane owns which charge family?
Five lanes cover nearly everything, and the charge family predicts the lane. The map below is current as of July 2026; if what you see inside the portal differs, trust the portal.
APDP owns deductions taken against your invoices: the shortage family, pricing and substitution differences, misapplied allowances, returns charges, and, through its separate Invoices submission path, incorrect taxes and cash discounts.
HighRadius EIPP owns charges billed as AR invoices: OTIF fines, SQEP billings, and much of the advertising and co-op billback traffic that arrives as 7000-series invoices.
The post-audit lane is the audit firm itself. Walmart contracts third-party firms to re-audit old payments, findings arrive months or even years after the transaction, and the dispute goes directly to the firm named in your claim package. Post-audit is excluded from APDP; backup documentation for these claims lives in HighRadius.
The buyer-payback lane exists for contracted pricing and allowance money. In practice, APDP redirects recovery of agreed-upon allowances to a buyer payback, a request the merchant team submits on your behalf; a misapplied allowance (wrong amount, wrong base, taken twice) remains an APDP dispute. The split is between money your agreement says was always yours, which is the buyer’s to return, and money Walmart’s processing took incorrectly, which is APDP’s.
The carrier lane is the end state for prepaid transit loss. When a shortage deduction survives dispute because the goods genuinely went missing between your dock and Walmart’s, the remaining claim belongs with the carrier under its own claims process, not with Walmart.
Drop-ship suppliers have a parallel world: DSV chargebacks run through their own program categories and typically dispute through the DSV portal’s own dispute flow, with some flowing through APDP and some through DSV support contacts.
What signals identify the lane?
Three signal classes route almost any charge: the claim number’s shape, the billing cadence, and where the charge surfaces.
Claim-number shape does the most work. A numeric claim code attached to a check line is usually an AP deduction: APDP. A claim number beginning with 700 that is not one of your own invoice numbers is an AR bill: EIPP. A claim number that reads as your six-digit supplier number followed by a two-digit month and two-digit year is a SQEP billing: EIPP. A prefix tied to an audit firm marks a post-audit claim: the firm directly. Returns backup splits along the same seam, with 9-prefixed invoices sitting in APIS and 7000-series in HighRadius.
Cadence narrows it further. OTIF fines bill quarterly, landing roughly five weeks after the fiscal quarter ends (Walmart quarters, not calendar ones; the week converter maps them). SQEP bills monthly. Post-audit arrives long after the underlying transaction. A shortage deduction tracks an individual invoice with no cadence at all.
Where the charge surfaces is the tiebreaker: deductions in APIS and Supplier One’s Deductions view, AR bills in EIPP, post-audit backup in HighRadius. The map of which portal lives where is a moving target of its own; Supplier One vs Retail Link covers it.
What evidence class does each lane accept?
Each lane has its own evidence class, and a package built for one lane rarely carries in another.
APDP disputes run on signed freight paper: the carrier-signed bill of lading for collect freight, proof of delivery with the receiving stamp for prepaid, all of it tied to the PO and invoice numbers on the claim. Where the dispute is about allowances or cost rather than quantity, the executed agreement and the cost documentation replace the freight file. The per-code detail runs deep; the code 22 walkthrough shows one full package end to end.
EIPP disputes run on Walmart’s data turned back on the charge: the receiving quantities in the OTIF app set against your ASN, the per-defect detail in the SQEP Dashboard, FIXIt inspection records, plus pre-shipment photos where the charge alleges a physical defect. The pattern across winning AR disputes is Walmart data rebutting Walmart data, with PO and item numbers in every submission.
The post-audit lane runs on history: the original transaction records and the contract terms in effect during the audited period, aimed at the audit firm’s calculation.
The buyer-payback lane runs on clean paper: claim numbers, amounts, the agreement clause, the denial history, and one specific ask. Buyers act on a tight recap and ignore raw grievance.
The carrier lane reuses the freight file, redirected into the carrier’s claims process.
What does a routing decode look like?
One decode, start to finish. A check-detail export shows a charge under code 99, sitting in the same columns as ordinary shortage codes. Everything about its position says AP deduction. But the signals disagree: the amount ties to a quarterly bill rather than a single invoice, a matching 7000-series invoice sits in EIPP, and code 99 is OTIF, which is not on APDP’s eligible-code list. The charge is an AR bill wearing an AP costume, an artifact of how OTIF fines net against payments. Routed correctly, the dispute is filed in EIPP against the invoice and argued with the OTIF app’s own receiving data against your ASN quantities. Filed in APDP, the same dispute draws an eligibility denial weeks later, with the evidence unread.
What does a wrong-lane denial mean, and what follows a real one?
A wrong-lane denial means refile, not lose. Nothing about the merits was decided, and the charge can be refiled in the lane that owns it. The constraint is time: dispute windows anchor to dates Walmart controls (the check date of the original deduction bounds the AP side; returns windows anchor to the invoice post date, or the claim date for some claim types, and run shorter), and the current values are the ones in the APDP FAQs and the returns FAQs inside Retail Link. How long the OTIF window runs is genuinely unsettled, which is a reason to dispute new fines promptly rather than banking on a long one.
A real denial, in the right lane, has its own next steps. In APDP, submissions per invoice number are capped; once they are spent, the path is a support ticket, not another filing. In EIPP, a denied dispute can be re-disputed with new evidence and an explanation of what is new, while resubmitting the same package repeatedly stops getting reviewed. Beyond both sits the escalation ladder: a buyer payback for pricing and allowance money the portals will not move, supplier-support escalation when the process itself misfired, and the open disputed balance as a standing line in the business review.
Who checks the routing plan before you file?
A quarter’s statement rarely carries one charge family. A shortage code, a 7000-series bill, and a post-audit letter can land in the same month, and a dispute plan drafted in one route’s terms quietly misroutes the others. That is the failure mode Retail Reason is built to catch: paste in the plan, the list of charges and where and how you intend to file each one, and it checks the routing, the window anchors, and the evidence class route by route, flagging what a denial would otherwise teach you weeks later. Answers are dated and carry a confidence class, so you know which routing facts are firm and which to re-check in the portal. It answers questions and checks plans; it does not file disputes or touch your account, and no person sits between question and answer. See pricing, or contact Matt.