by Claudia Bruemmer

Business in the wholesale industry can be very competitive. That’s why wholesalers need to make it easy for their customers to find them in the right vertical search directories, and then make it easy to conduct business. Some important variables include order response speed and customer service requests, the time to market with new products, your delivery speed and the overall customer experience on your site. Retaining customers and growing revenue from existing customers is vital to a wholesale company’s success.

Additionally, there are a wide range of electronic message exchange and business processes necessary in wholesale distribution, including ecommerce integration, punchout integration, purchase order exchange, invoice exchange, price and product availability verification and EDI integration. To achieve success, wholesalers need to streamline the following processes, which are further described below.

• Real-time integration between the ecommerce site and customers and suppliers
• Support for critical transactions and processes including punchout, real-time queries and business document exchanges
• Coordination between formats and protocols, allowing all companies to communicate with their native systems and applications

Ecommerce Integration. Ecommerce has changed the way purchases are made because of its convenience and ease of use. In B2B ecommerce, integration between the store and the buyers’ and suppliers’ applications is vital for a successful operation and essential for a seamless shopping experience.

Punchout Integration. This enables a direct connection and flawless integration between your customer’s eProcurement system and your webstore or online catalog. You need to support various eProcurement systems such as Ariba, Oracle, PeopleSoft, and others, while supporting various required Internet standards. When you provide easy connections, your customers will likely shop from you rather than your competitors, leading to increased customer retention and the growth of new business.

Purchase Order Integration. You need to provide the electronic exchange of purchase orders and related messages across systems, applications and enterprises. No matter what procurement system you or your customers, partners or suppliers use, you want to send and receive documents and data in your preferred format. You can optimize your procurement system by supporting all PO formats, from EDI 850/855 and XML to specific procurement systems like Ariba, SAP, Oracle and Lawson. This eliminates manual data entry and management, ensures faster, easier order tracking and delivery, and improves customer satisfaction.

Invoice Exchange. As with purchase order integration, you need to provide the electronic exchange of invoicing and related messages across systems, applications and enterprises. No matter what procurement system you or your customers, partners or suppliers are using, you want to send and receive documents and data in your preferred format. You can optimize your invoice exchange system by supporting all invoicing formats from EDI 810/811 to procurement systems like Ariba, SAP, Oracle and custom systems. This also eliminates manual data entry and management, ensures faster payment and easier payment tracking, and improves relationships with your customers, partners and suppliers.

Price and Product Availability Verification. You must enable a direct connection between a hosted online catalog and your back-end system. When customers shop through an online catalog, they often want to verify the pricing information and verify product availability. Once a buyer selects an item from your catalog, they want to initiate a real-time query and receive instant information on pricing, availability, estimated shipping dates and so forth. This real-time information is beneficial to managers and accounting departments during the procurement work flow to ensure pricing and availability is correct prior to approval or final submission of the purchase order.

EDI Integration. Since electronic data interchange (EDI) was introduced in the 1980’s, many companies adopted an EDI standard to expedite and streamline transmission of data between businesses and systems. There are so many standardized business documents today that you need a flexible system of interoperability across standards combined with increased security, visibility and business process.