Ulta Beauty trades five EDI documents and allows only one ASN per purchase order per delivery, so the PO, the ASN and the invoice all have to agree or a deduction follows. AIMS360 handles it natively, from the 850 through GS1-128 cartons to the invoice, and runs Mirakl-powered UB Marketplace orders off the same inventory.
Ulta trades 850, 855, 856, 860 and 810, and allows exactly one ASN per purchase order per delivery. Separately, UB Marketplace has run on Mirakl since October 2025, invitation-only and open to brands rather than resellers. Most brands that get into Ulta end up running both, and the trap is running them on two systems: the first marketplace order that ships stock already promised to a buyer costs you twice.
Yes, and it is a condition of the account rather than an efficiency you opt into. Ulta expects suppliers to be EDI capable within 30 days of signing a Vendor Purchasing Agreement. The document set is five: 850, 855, 856, 860 and 810. OpenText is Ulta's preferred EDI partner, and third-party providers such as SPS Commerce are also accepted.
UB Marketplace is separate. Ulta launched it on 14 October 2025 on Mirakl, open to invited brands rather than third-party resellers. There you keep the inventory and ship the order yourself, which makes it dropship in everything but name.
Ulta closed fiscal 2025 on 31 January 2026 with net sales of 12,392.8 million dollars and 1,591 stores, 1,505 of them in the United States and 86 international. For a beauty brand a yes here is a step change in volume, and it arrives with a compliance program attached.
Five transaction sets on ANSI ASC X12. AIMS360 generates all five off the order record, so nothing is retyped and nothing is assembled by hand at the end of a shift.
| Document | What it carries | Direction |
|---|---|---|
| 850 | Purchase order from Ulta | Ulta to you |
| 855 | Purchase order acknowledgement, confirming what you will actually ship | You to Ulta |
| 856 | Advance ship notice with carton and SSCC detail. The document that drives shipping accuracy deductions | You to Ulta |
| 860 | Purchase order change request, issued after the original PO | Ulta to you |
| 810 | Invoice, which has to reconcile to both the PO and the ASN | You to Ulta |
Ulta allows only one ASN per PO, per delivery. The purchase order, the invoice, the ASN and the physical shipment all have to agree. Split a PO across two trailers and improvise a second ASN, and you have not solved a shipping problem, you have created a deduction.
This is the most common way a beauty brand loses money on Ulta in its first year, and it is entirely a systems problem, which is the good news.
Allocation is checked against the full purchase order before release, so a short ship surfaces before the truck is booked rather than after the ASN has already gone.
GS1-128 labels and the 856 come off the same pack scan, so what the label says and what the ASN says cannot drift apart.
The 810 is built from the shipment, not keyed from a copy of the PO, so the three documents Ulta compares are generated from one record.
Every chargeback is tied to the order and document that caused it, so a dispute is a lookup rather than an archaeology project.
Ulta names OpenText as its preferred EDI partner and offers two ways onto it, but does not lock you there. Third-party providers including SPS Commerce are accepted.
| Route | Who it suits | Published cost |
|---|---|---|
| OpenText EDI Integrated | Suppliers who already run EDI | $450 one-time |
| OpenText Freeway Web Portal | Smaller or newer suppliers keying documents by hand | $199 setup, then monthly fees by document volume from around $41 |
| Third-party provider | Brands already trading with other retailers | Varies |
The web portal is the option worth thinking twice about. It is cheap to start, and it means a person retyping every purchase order, every ASN and every invoice by hand. That is precisely where the one-ASN-per-PO rule gets broken. EDI is built into AIMS360, so Ulta becomes one more connection on the system already running your other retailers rather than a second subscription and a second login.
Ulta's Supply Chain Guide carries the current specification for carton labeling, packing and palletization. Two rules trip up new vendors often enough to call out.
Handwritten lists are not acceptable and will slow your freight down at the distribution center. AIMS360 prints them from the shipment record.
The list goes in a plastic pouch marked Packing List Enclosed on the first carton, and visible on the last pallet. Small rule, real deduction.
Ulta went live with UB Marketplace on 14 October 2025, built on Mirakl with delivery support from Merkle. More than 100 brands launched on it.
It is deliberately curated. UB Marketplace is open to brands by invitation and does not accept third-party sellers, which is a meaningful difference from most retail marketplaces and the reason it is worth pursuing rather than merely tolerating.
Operationally it behaves like dropship. The order is placed on ulta.com or in the Ulta app, it lands with you, and you ship to the shopper. It sits inside Ulta's own checkout, counts toward Ultamate Rewards, and shoppers can return marketplace purchases in more than 1,400 Ulta stores. That last detail matters more than it looks: your returns enter Ulta's reverse logistics and have to come back into your inventory correctly.
Marketplace orders drop into the same order queue as wholesale, drawing on one inventory pool, so a marketplace sale cannot oversell stock committed to an Ulta purchase order.
Ship from your own warehouse or your 3PL, with tracking posting back. Lot and expiration travel with every beauty unit.
In-store returns post against the original order, get graded on receipt, and damaged units are held out of sellable stock rather than quietly resold. See returns management.
Allocation rules decide which channel wins contested stock, so the decision is made once, in advance, rather than by whoever ships first on the day.
Ulta purchase orders land in the same order queue as your other retailers and draw on the same style, color and size inventory as your Shopify store and your marketplace listings. The GS1-128 carton label and the 856 are generated from the same scan that packed the carton. AIMS360 charges no per-document or per-kilocharacter fees of its own, and Ulta is one of hundreds of retailer EDI connections already built.
The questions beauty operators ask before the first purchase order lands.
Yes. EDI is a condition of being a wholesale vendor, not an optional efficiency. Ulta expects suppliers to be EDI capable within 30 days of signing a Vendor Purchasing Agreement, and trades 850, 855, 856, 860 and 810 with its vendors.
Five: 850 purchase order, 855 purchase order acknowledgement, 856 advance ship notice, 860 purchase order change request, and 810 invoice. The 856 generates most compliance deductions, because Ulta allows only one ASN per purchase order per delivery and expects the purchase order, invoice, ASN and shipment to agree.
OpenText is Ulta's preferred EDI partner, offered as OpenText EDI Integrated for suppliers who already run EDI, or as the OpenText Freeway Web Portal for smaller vendors. Third-party providers such as SPS Commerce are also permitted, and AIMS360 connects either way.
Published figures put OpenText EDI Integrated at a $450 one-time fee, and the Freeway Web Portal at $199 to set up plus a monthly document fee starting around $41 that scales with volume. Those are connection costs. The larger cost is usually the labor of keying documents by hand and the deductions that follow.
Because their distribution centers receive against the ASN. One ASN per purchase order per delivery keeps the receiving scan, the purchase order and the invoice reconcilable in a single pass. A second ASN covering a split shipment breaks that reconciliation and triggers a shipping accuracy deduction.
UB Marketplace is Ulta's third-party marketplace, launched 14 October 2025 and powered by Mirakl. In wholesale, Ulta buys your inventory and resells it. On UB Marketplace you keep the inventory, Ulta hosts the listing inside ulta.com and the Ulta app, and you ship the order to the shopper. It is invitation-only and open to brands rather than third-party resellers.
Yes, and most brands eventually do. The requirement is a single inventory position underneath both, otherwise a marketplace order will eventually ship units already committed to an Ulta purchase order. AIMS360 allocates both channels from one pool with explicit priority rules.
Yes, natively over EDI as part of the ERP rather than a separate subscription. Ulta purchase orders land in the same order queue as your other retailers, draw on the same style, color and size inventory, and the GS1-128 carton label and the 856 are generated from the same scan that packed the carton. Marketplace orders run through the same Mirakl connection AIMS360 already supports.
Bring your Ulta vendor guide, your purchase order volume and your marketplace plan. We will walk the five documents, where the ASN has to line up with the invoice, and what happens the first time a UB Marketplace order lands on stock a buyer has already committed.
