Groupon Goods: How to Effectively Respond to the Changing eCommerce Ecosystem

As Groupon continues to shift from specializing solely in “Daily Deals” to an eCommerce site, suppliers must be ready to face changes in the eCommerce ecosystem. One way to be prepared to face these changes is by making sure you are EDI compliant. Groupon, along with other large marketplaces and retailers, require their suppliers to be EDI compliant. Groupon Goods prides itself on “putting great products in front of the largest daily deal audience out there.” To maximize your exposure in the eCommerce space, it is worth looking into selling on Groupon Goods.

Beyond enabling suppliers to sell on Groupon, EDI increases the efficiency of businesses by removing manual touches, freeing up resources, and saving money.

With an end-to-end EDI integration you are integrated directly with Groupon. This means that once a customer places an order for your goods, a purchase order would be generated and sent to you. As you went through the process of order fulfillment, purchase order acknowledgements, advance shipment notices, and invoices would be created based on status changes and sent back to Groupon. With this automation, there is no need to manually enter order information, which eliminates the chance of costly errors.

Think about this: If you are spending one or more hours manually processing orders each day – you are losing valuable time that could be used to grow other parts of your business. Just take a look at this stat- There are 250 days in a typical work year, and if you are spending at least 1 hour a day processing orders, that equates to 250 hours a year. When you take in account the average work day is 8 hours, all of that manual work equals around 31 work days a year. Imagine what you could do to help your business if you had that time back!

Time is money, and if your time is being allocated to manually processing orders, other areas of your business could be neglected. For example, if a member of your sales team has been manually fulfilling orders, that is an hour each day that they are not selling. In a year, that will equate to a month of lost sales.  Electing to implement and EDI provider and integration hub will free up your team so they can focus on their true tasks and your business will run more efficiently. Your EDI provider will translate documents and ensure they flow into the correct system (eliminating the need for data entry).

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. EDI also enables your company to go green and reduce your corporate carbon footprint.

The landscape of the eCommerce ecosystem is rapidly changing. With Groupon’s eCommerce site challenging Amazon, suppliers have another, high-profile outlet to sell their goods on. By implementing an EDI solution, suppliers are capable of selling on Groupon along with other large marketplaces and retailers. In addition, EDI will increase the efficiency of businesses by eliminating manual data entry, freeing up resources, and saving money.