Feeling the pain of managing your own drop ship program? You’re not alone.

For IT leaders tasked with managing their company’s automated drop ship and marketplace programs, there are a lot of balls to keep in the air: Integrations, vendor maintenance, monitoring, compliance and more. Continually adding new products and vendors, while smart from a business standpoint, is a major drain on resources and the source of many a headache from an IT perspective.

When we talk with IT teams about their pain points in managing a homegrown drop ship automation program, the same challenges come up again and again:

• Integration and onboarding. Integrating with new trading partners and eCommerce platforms often requires huge amounts of time and effort, particularly if your legacy systems include a lot of custom coding. Onboarding new suppliers alone can easily eat up hundreds of hours a week.

• Vendor Lock-In. IT teams often have to undertake extensive rewrites to integrate with a given partner or platform, only to find themselves back at square one if they want to make a change. As a result, those changes may not happen—even if they would be in the company’s best interest. After spending months writing code to integrate with UPS, for example, switching to FedEx, even if it would save money on shipping cost, would cost IT time and lost opportunity.

• Maintenance & Monitoring. Ensuring the ongoing integrity of connections with your trading partners is another heavy lift. System changes and updates need to be monitored, flagged and dealt with promptly to prevent interruptions in the order and fulfillment process. Without a solid strategy for ongoing maintenance, you risk ending up in crisis mode again and again, potentially losing customers as a result of poor shopping experiences and damaging relationships with vendors.

• Inability to Scale. IT is constantly in high demand, and person-hours are at a premium. If your team is already fielding a constant flow of questions about your data schema or business rules and plowing untold hours into integrations, adding trading partners isn’t tenable without adding employees. Even then, your legacy systems may not be able to handle the increased order volume.

We’re constantly impressed by the ingenuity and tenacity of IT professionals in tackling these challenges. At the same time, we know they’re hungry for solutions that are less labor-intensive and more scalable. No one likes solving problems that have been solved already.

Logicbroker started on the premise that may others are facing these same issues, and built an API first, headless eCommerce architecture. We’ve helped hundreds of retailers, even those with legacy green-screen systems, jump on to a modern and modular drop ship and marketplace platform. Logicbroker provides a single point of connection for all vendors, 3PLs, warehouses and retailers, and even your own acquired company’s IT systems. The result is the freedom of a loosely coupled IT system and the flexibility to upgrade individual internal and external components without disrupting vendors, orders, shipments or the life blood of your business. We do these kinds of integrations every day with thousands of trading partners.

With Logicbroker, you get:

• Easy integrations. Logicbroker allows you to migrate and/or integrate trading partners quickly, regardless of origin (API, EDI, AS2, Email). Integrations that might take months with a homegrown approach take just weeks with Logicbroker. We insulate you from vendor lock-in, translating all data into a common language, so you can change 3PLs, ERPs, eCommerce platforms or suppliers as often as you want. And when it comes to vendors, we manage the onboarding process, so you can increase sales without having to increase the size of your IT staff.

• Proactive monitoring and maintenance. Our team spends more than 100 hours a week exclusively on maintaining our systems to be compatible with updates and changes for our connections. We also monitor the platform and alert the relevant parties to potential issues before they become problems. We enforce data hygiene too, to prevent errors and inconsistencies.

• Infinite scalability. With no limit on the number of connections you can add, and no deterioration in performance as a result of increased sales volume, Logicbroker lets you scale the number of vendors and products you carry without having to scale your IT operation at the same rate.

At Logicbroker, we know firsthand just how challenging it is to manage the complexities of multiple channels and an ever-growing roster of trading partners. Our hats are off to the IT teams who make it happen every day for their organizations. We’re on a mission to make it easier, so IT teams can power growth and enable optimal eCommerce experiences with fewer operational headaches and without having to keep piling on resources.  Connect with us for a free demo.