How Retailers Benefit from EDI

Have manual processes caused your online business to plateau? Are you looking for a way to scale your business? If you have answered yes to either question (or both), implementing EDI could be exactly what you need to kick start your business. Some of you may be familiar with EDI, while others may have never heard of it. For those of you who are unfamiliar, EDI stands for electronic data interchange and is the structured transmission of data between organizations via electronic means.

With an EDI solution, end-to-end integrations enable the following benefits to retailers:

Integration with their vendors

Your EDI provider will map and test to perform an integration with your trading partners. Once integrated, you can automatically send out purchase orders and receive purchase order acknowledgements, advance shipment notices, and invoices.

No data entry

Once you are integrated with your suppliers/vendors, all order documents flow automatically from one system to another. As a result, there is no need to rekey information.

Drop ship automation

EDI automates the drop ship process. If you are drop shipping and offer the same product from multiple vendors, your provider can source the order to the lowest cost provider or the warehouse that is closer to the customer to cut down on shipping. In addition, all documents are automated and will send faster so that your store can operate in real time and you will never have to worry about selling out-of-stock inventory.

Cost savings

When you elect to use EDI, expenses associated with paper, printing, reproduction, storage, filing, postage and document retrieval are all reduced or eliminated lowering your transaction costs by at least 35%. Forester research reports that a major electronics manufacturer calculated the cost of processing an order manually at $38 compared to just $1.35 for an order processed using EDI.

These are the four main benefits that retailers will experience from implementing EDI. Other benefits include going green from eliminating paper, increasing efficiency, and freeing up staff. To lean how EDI can benefit your store, contact us.