How to Approach a Retail Buyer in Australia

Your product is probably good. That is not the question the buyer is answering. A buyer manages a category profit and loss and sees a stack of submissions every review cycle. The decision they have to defend internally is whether your product grows the category: brings in new shoppers, lifts the basket, or trades existing shoppers up to a higher price point. A pitch that only says your product is better than what is on shelf asks the buyer to swap one sale for another. That is a zero for them.

The strongest evidence you can bring is rate of sale, the units a product sells per store per week. You will not have supermarket scan data yet, so use what you have: DTC volumes, marketplace velocity, sell-through in independents or pharmacy. Real numbers from a smaller channel beat projections from no channel.

Two numbers decide more than the meeting does. First, trade spend: the rebates, co-op contributions and promotional funding deducted from what the retailer pays you. In Australian FMCG it commonly runs 10 to 25 percent of gross sales, and most founders meet their real number after signing trading terms, which is the wrong side of the signature. Second, retailer margin, which varies by category from roughly 25 to 45 percent.

Build the pricing waterfall before you email anyone: shelf price at the top, retailer margin off, trade spend line by line, freight into the distribution centre, and what actually reaches you per unit. Whether you can afford a given retailer depends on numbers most founders have not modelled, and no buyer meeting fixes a waterfall that ends in a negative number. If yours does, the answer is not a better pitch. It is a different price, a different pack size, or a different channel first.

Major Australian retailers do not range products whenever a good one shows up. Each category is re-decided at a range review, a scheduled window that comes around roughly every six months. Miss it and the honest answer from even an interested buyer is to wait for the next one.

The practical consequence is that the approach starts months early. Find your category's review window, then work backwards. The invitation to present can come with about two weeks' notice, which is not enough time to build a case from scratch. It is enough time to tailor one you already built.

The formal mechanism is usually a new-line submission: the retailer's paperwork covering cost price, recommended retail price, promotional pricing, case configuration and barcodes. Treat the form as the pitch. A buyer can champion a complete submission internally. An incomplete one goes to the bottom of the pile through no fault of the product.

The meeting is short and the buyer has seen every deck format there is. What holds attention is a supplier who has already done the arithmetic and can answer the supply question. Bring one page of numbers and be ready on the following.

A ranging win is the start of the expensive part. The first purchase order typically lands one to six months after the decision, and you carry costs across that gap. EDI, the electronic ordering connection retailers require for purchase orders and invoices, takes months to stand up and test, not weeks, so it starts the day you win, not the day the order arrives.

Getting compliance wrong has a price attached. Chargebacks, the deductions retailers apply for late, short or non-compliant deliveries, commonly run 1 to 5 percent of invoice value when it fails. And the number your buyer checks before your story at the next review is DIFOT, delivered in full and on time. Winning the review and missing the delivery windows is how brands lose the shelf they just won, and no one in that chain is being unreasonable. A distribution centre runs on its schedule because thousands of suppliers depend on it.

In FY25, 871 Australian retail businesses hit insolvency for the first time. Some of that is shelf space won on maths that never worked: trade spend underestimated, promotional funding unbudgeted, a purchase order accepted that the cash flow could not carry. Delaying one review cycle to fix the model is cheaper than ranging into a loss.

If the modelling is the part you have not done, that is the specific job our Retail-Readiness Sprint exists for: a fixed-fee, roughly four-week build of your trade spend model, pricing waterfall, review calendar and compliance gap list, before you commit to anything longer. Sometimes its answer is not yet. You keep the model either way, and the readiness work is indicative only. The buyer decides the ranging. What you control is whether you walk in with a case instead of a hope.