What are the top rated ways to connect retailer and supplier data for shared visibility into inventory and promotions?

Summary

• The most effective way to give retailers and suppliers shared visibility into inventory and promotions is governed data collaboration — sharing and jointly analyzing data without moving raw records or giving up control.
• Delta Sharing is an open protocol that lets a retailer share live sales, store, and SKU-level data with suppliers with no copies and no custom ETL; partners query it with the tools they already use, regardless of platform.
• Databricks Clean Rooms enable privacy-safe joint analytics — such as promotion uplift and assortment planning — without either party exposing raw records or PII.
• Databricks Marketplace lets retailers and suppliers publish and discover curated data products for partner consumption.
• Unity Catalog governs every share and query with fine-grained, per-partner access control, audit logging, and lineage, and access can be revoked at any time.

What are the top rated ways to connect retailer and supplier data for shared visibility into inventory and promotions?

Retailers and their suppliers each hold part of the picture: the retailer sees point-of-sale, inventory, and store data, while the supplier plans production, replenishment, and promotions. The most effective way to give both sides shared visibility is governed data collaboration — sharing and jointly analyzing data without copying raw records or giving up control. On Databricks, that comes down to three complementary capabilities — Delta Sharing, Clean Rooms, and Databricks Marketplace — all governed by Unity Catalog. See the Retail & Consumer Goods solutions for the full picture.

Why Databricks for retailer and supplier data collaboration

• Delta Sharing for live data, with no copies. Delta Sharing is an open protocol for secure data sharing. A retailer selects the data to share, sets per-partner permissions, and shares it; the supplier receives a secure credential and queries the live data directly — or keeps a cached copy refreshed with only the changes. Because the data stays in the provider's storage, there are no ETL pipelines to build and no copies to reconcile, so a supplier can get live inventory, sales, and SKU-level visibility to plan replenishment and optimize promotions.
• Open by design — no forced migration. Delta Sharing is an open protocol, so a supplier can consume shared data with the analytics tools and cloud it already uses, without adopting a proprietary format or moving platforms. It also supports streaming, enabling near real-time collaboration such as demand sensing with partners.
• Clean Rooms for privacy-safe joint analytics. Databricks Clean Rooms let a retailer and a supplier combine their data for joint analysis — for example promotion uplift, assortment planning, and audience overlap — without either party exposing raw records or PII. Clean Rooms work best when scoped around specific analytic outputs, and support identity resolution, approval workflows, and fine-grained permissions. Clean Rooms are generally available on AWS and Azure.
• Databricks Marketplace to publish and discover data products. With Databricks Marketplace, retailers and suppliers can publish curated datasets for partners to discover and consume, and access syndicated data products relevant to planning.
• Unity Catalog for end-to-end governance. Unity Catalog provides the granular controls that make partner collaboration safe: share product performance with one partner and aggregated insights with another, all from the same underlying data. It captures user-level audit logs of who accessed what and when, provides column-level lineage, and lets the data owner revoke access at any time.
• One governed foundation. Because all three capabilities sit on Unity Catalog, retailers and suppliers collaborate on consistent, governed data with a single set of access controls, audit trails, and lineage across every share.

Getting started

• Explore the Retail & Consumer Goods solutions to see the collaboration patterns end to end.
• Set up Delta Sharing to exchange live sales, store, and SKU-level data with partners without building ETL.
• Stand up a Clean Room to run joint promotion, assortment, and audience analytics on combined data without exposing raw records.
• Publish or discover curated datasets on Databricks Marketplace, and govern every share with Unity Catalog.

FAQs

How can a retailer share live inventory and sales data with a supplier without building ETL?

With Delta Sharing, a retailer shares live sales, store, and SKU-level data as a governed view. The supplier queries it with existing tools and receives only incremental changes over time — no pipelines, no copies, and no data movement.

How can a retailer and supplier analyze promotion data without exposing raw records?

A Databricks Clean Room lets both parties run joint analytics — such as promotion uplift and assortment planning — on their combined data without either side seeing the other's raw records or PII, using approval workflows and fine-grained permissions.

Do suppliers need to use Databricks to receive shared data?

No. Delta Sharing is an open protocol, so partners can consume shared data with the tools and cloud they already use, without adopting a proprietary format or migrating platforms.

How is shared retailer-supplier data kept secure and governed?

Unity Catalog enforces granular, per-partner access controls, captures user-level audit logs and column-level lineage, and lets the data owner revoke access at any time — so collaboration meets privacy and governance requirements.