Retail Compliance

Our successful Retail Compliance program forms a partnership between GRS and retail store chains which allows us to work direclty with suppliers to ensure product compliancy and virtually eliminate in-store violations and fines. Retailers can end violations by giving GRS us a call to establish a partnership now!

What is Retail Compliance

Retail Compliance is a program designed by GRS to help retailers alleviate the issues of violations in their stores due to lack of registration, expired registration or incorrect registration on the supplier end. The service was invented when a major retailer approached GRS with the ongoing problem of store violations and asked for our help. We’ve been offering the program since 2011 and have been extremely successful in drastically reducing the violations nationwide (almost to 0) for major retailers by inspecting the license status of their suppliers.

Your participation eligibility

If you sell to a partnered GRS’ Retail Compliance store, you’re required to sign up with GRS in order for GRS to act as the ‘certifier’ that your licenses are on hand and current. We provide a status for each of your URNs and licenses you enroll with GRS and report their status to the retailer on a regular basis.

How to participate

Your first step to participate is to subscribe to one on our 3 Monitored Services. These 3 services were designed to assist any company with ongoing support of managing licenses - whether they are a registration client of GRS or not. Each of the 3 Monitored Services offers a different level of support to our clients based on their needs.

The 3 Monitored Services

GlobalTrak - use our online interface to conveniently organize and store your licenses for your own management.
License Management - turn over your licenses for GRS to manage with the states on a yearly basis.
Guaranteed Compliance - also allows GRS to take over your license managing but with additional piece of mind and a single yearly payment of state renewal fees.

You can read more about and compare these services here.

Simple enrollment process

When your company enrolls in one of these 3 GRS services you are required to upload the complete set of licenses for a URN into our database. For Retail Compliance, only URNs of factories that manufacture products sold to that particuler retailer are requried to be enrolled for Certification purposes, however you may choose to enroll additional URNs if you would like GRS to manage those licenses for your company also (it is typical for Importers, Distributors and Wholesalers to be working with multiple factories). It’s a very simple process.

Any retailers who are partnered with GRS’ Retailer Compliance Program are listed on the website and can be found after you logon to your account page. If you sell to one of the retailers listed, you must select that retailer and enter your vendor ID for that customer. Once your URNs are enrolled and the retailer vendor ID is entered, the detail page of each enrolled URNs will display that retailer’s name with a selection button. Click the button to add that URN to that retailer’s database registry.

How URNs are monitored for compliancy

Whenever a license is uploaded or its data (license number, effective date and expiration date) is entered or changed, a request goes into the GRS queue for a Compliance Specialist to review and accept the license as being valid. Having a complete set of valid licenses makes that URN ‘Certified’. Certified licenses means no violations and fines for the supplier and the retailer. This is the objective of the program. If a license is deemed to be invalid you will be notified and must provide a valid copy for acceptance.

Once your URNs are in a retailer’s database registry, that retailer has access to all suppliers and URNs in our database. Our system shows the retailer which URNs are Certified, which are Non-Compliant and which have not completed the process of uploading all the required licenses yet. Reports will be sent to the retailers on a periodic basis at their discretion.

If the retailer chooses our Test Lab feature, verifying your URNs status through our database will become a part of that retailer’s testing protocol. Having a Non-Compliant URN would mean failed testing.

Cost

In addition to the yearly cost of the Monitored Services, when you required to participate in Retailer Compliance for a particular store, the cost is $315.00 to enter a Vendor ID for that store. The fee is yearly as long as your company is a supplier of of that retailer or for as long as the Retailer Compliancy partnership between the retailer and GRS is effective.

If you manage your own licenses in-house or through another third party

The entry level Monitored Service is GlobalTrak and does not require you to turn over your licenses to GRS for management like License Management and Guaranteed Compliance do. If you are managing your licenses and renewals internally or using a third party handle them, you may continue to do so. You would only need to provide GRS with a copy of the licenses and upload new ones as they are issued.