Four Painful SAP EDI Problems You Can Actually Overcome with Full-Service EDI
Far too many SAP EDI solutions fall short, leading to wasted resources and lost opportunities. But with the right SAP EDI solution, you can avoid these problems altogether. Osborn, LLC is a leading supplier of industrial brushes. The company faced several challenges...
Manage Any Order with E-commerce, Wholesale and Shopify EDI Integration
Suppliers receive sales orders from more and more channels. But who wants to spend time checking related portals, emails and messages? Wouldn’t it be fantastic if there was one solution that displayed all orders in a single screen, including those from Shopify?...
3 Important Keys to Automation in the Growth Stage of the Product Life Cycle
The growth stage of the product life cycle is where the rubber meets the road for product suppliers. Once you’ve introduced your product, you need to establish your market presence, prove your sales trajectory and improve your margins. As you enter this phase, you’ll...
EDI Software Integration Unlocks Digital Transformation Potential
In a recent study by the Economist Intelligence Unit, 72 percent of enterprises have significantly accelerated their pace of digital transformation. How does Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) fit into a digital transformation initiative? EDI considers the value of...
How to Choose an EDI Provider
Whether you are new to EDI or re-evaluating legacy systems, choosing an EDI provider can be a challenge. But finding the best fit for your business while navigating the confusing jargon has never been more important. Armed with the right information, you can find an...
How to Maximize the Advantages of Cross-Docking for Warehouse Efficiency
Receiving shipments from suppliers and moving inventory to individual stores is complex and costly. If you’re looking to optimize labor costs, maximize space utilization, leverage existing technologies, and reduce transportation costs, cross-docking is a great option....
Help Consumers Find Your Product with a Catalog Management System
When consumers shop, they need product details to find the item from their searches and to give them the confidence to choose one product over another. Product details provide the attributes that consumers look for in store and search for online. They can’t find or...
What is a 3PL Provider and How to Select One?
No matter how complex the need, there are three basic capabilities that sum up what suppliers need to get out of a 3PL: expertise, capacity and technology.
Set Your Staff Free with EDI Integration for NetSuite
What tasks do your customer service staff perform? Do they spend most days (or at least most mornings) entering wholesale or marketplace orders into Oracle NetSuite? If so, you aren’t alone. Most suppliers use their customer service teams to process customer orders....
7 Important Questions and Helpful Answers About GDSN Data Synchronization
High-quality product data is critical for any business that buys or sells products. Many companies we talk to want more information about product data standards, such as GDSN data synchronization. We recently sat down with product manager Scott Williams to discuss...
2021 Retail Priorities: Looking Forward
As the Australian economy reopens and shoppers start to return to stores, it’s time a good time to reflect on some of the things that 2020 has taught us. Better yet, we need to decide where do we go from here and what our 2021 retail priorities will be. In 2021 and...
Top Five Future Retail Trends
Earlier this year, SPS Commerce released its annual industry benchmark survey, Retail Insight 2016, in conjunction with Retail Systems Research (RSR). Distributors, retailers, manufacturers and logistics firms weighed in on their outlook for 2016.
Psychology Behind Cart Abandonment and Ways to Fix It
Pretend for a moment that you’re a store manager for a grocery or retail store. As you make your way around the floor, you run into a cart all by itself with just one or two items in it. You walk a little further and find one with five products in the cart. When you...
Ask The Right Questions: Outsourced Vs In-house Vendor Portals
Web-based vendor portals are popular in Australia, particularly in the grocery sector. Retailers have told us that they are an easy way to ensure all suppliers or vendors are onboarded for electronic exchange of orders, invoices, and shipping documents (ASNs), giving...
Managing the Cost of Returns to Online Retailers
What is the cost of returns to online retailers? In 2020 alone, nearly $50 billion in items were returned either back to the retailer’s return center, retail store or directly back to the retailer’s trading partner. An estimated 30 percent of all products ordered...
Improve the Shipping Documentation Process with 3PL Integration
The struggle to keep up with orders has heightened as suppliers face changing retailer requirements and new order models. Most suppliers’ processes have trouble keeping up and the shipping document process is mired with manual steps. Instead, many businesses are...
5 Product Content Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
Consumers have more choices than ever. Your brand might compete with hundreds of others in its category. Whether your product is sold online or on a store shelf, the right product content is critical to helping your product stand out. But managing your product content...
Using the EDI 945 to Deliver Shipment Details
There are many ways third-party logistics providers (3PLs) communicate shipment details to their customers. The list includes emails, phone calls, texts and even faxes. Most 3PLs find these methods outdated and use the EDI 945 Warehouse Shipment Advice instead. It is...
The Most Eco-Friendly Shoppers in the U.S.
Social responsibility is of increasing importance to consumers. This made the research team at SPS Commerce wonder, what U.S. cities are the most eco-conscious and which eco-friendly products are trending? Thanks to Google, we can compare consumer demand data for the...
What is the EDI 940?
As a third-party logistics provider (3PL), you’ve likely been in conversations about customers using or requiring the EDI 940. But what is it? And why do you need it? In its most basic form, it is an electronic version of an order from your customer. In fact, whenever...
4 Unexpected Benefits of the EDI 850 for Buyers and Sellers
The most crucial step in the retail supply chain is sending and receiving purchase orders. However, our retail experts discovered this document tends to be the most inefficient and difficult to maintain within supply chains. Why? Too many businesses are using email,...
How to Do Drop Shipping: 3 Keys for Retailers
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, e-commerce sales soared to over 16 percent of total retail sales in 2020. The growth in e-commerce sales has accelerated interest in drop shipping and other forms of e-commerce fulfillment. The concept of drop shipping is simple....
Disputing Retail Deductions and Chargebacks with Data
About Guest Author SupplyPike SupplyPike is a leading supply chain software solutions company helping CPGs increase their retail intelligence and profitability with analytics applications, machine learning, and deductions management. SupplyPike’s team helps empower...
The 3 Truths of Product Data Management Components
Online shoppers expect comprehensive product information before they will consider making a purchase. If products have limited or blurry images, missing item details, or the descriptions aren’t engaging, a competitor is just a click away. E-commerce retailers know...
5 Secrets to a Successful ERP Implementation
This time of year, businesses often consider deploying new systems — including enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Considering a new ERP implementation? These 5 strategies will help everything run smoothly within your company and with your customers: Plan for...
All-in-One: Wholesale, Marketplace, and E-Commerce Order Fulfillment
Orders come into a supplier’s business through many wholesale and direct-to-consumer sales channels, including: Wholesale retailers like Target through EDI, E-commerce platforms such as BigCommerce, WooCommerce and Shopify, and Marketplaces like Amazon Marketplace....
Three Common Supplier Onboarding Challenges & How to Solve Them
To satisfy the needs of today’s consumers, buying organizations need to continuously add new products to their assortment. And they need suppliers to fulfill these products as fast as possible. But getting new suppliers ready to fulfill your orders isn’t as easy as it...
Why Merchandising Matters for Suppliers
To succeed in retail, companies need focus, market position, and a strategy to win customers and move products. That’s the importance of merchandising in a nutshell. Retail merchandisers think of themselves as curators at a museum. A curator doesn’t just amass a...
What EDI Automation Looks Like in 2021: An SPS ON>Conversation
“Automation is the name of the game” according to Paul Mann, Director of EDI and Integration at Poo~Pourri, and the audience’s consensus was that he was right. At a recent SPS Commerce ON>Conversation, Oracle NetSuite and SPS experts spoke with Mann and Jarod...
Order Automation: The Easy (and Effective) Way
When your business is experiencing high volumes of retail orders and purchase orders with hundreds of line items, order automation isn’t just a requirement. It’s a lifeline. This was the situation that OZtrail found themselves in. Recently acquired by Adventure...
How Purchase Order Acknowledgements Can Transform Your Supply Chain
With the growth of e-commerce and omnichannel shopping, fulfilling orders has become increasingly complex. This makes communication between buyers and sellers more important than ever, particularly when it comes to exchanging information about the status of...
The Power of Netflix on Consumer Behavior
Part of the attraction to Netflix is that consumers feel like they aren’t bombarded with advertising. While that is true, the reality is that whatever you watch on Netflix, it’s still having a significant impact on your consumer behavior. We are all guilty of binge...
Drop Shippers Turn to 3PL EDI Integration
As suppliers expand beyond e-commerce and begin to sell their products in stores or through a drop-ship model, their supply chains become more complicated. Retailers have very strict trading requirements, and each is very different. Especially for drop shippers. It...
Choosing EDI Software Over Vendor Portals
Ask any Australia supplier, and they know have a business decision if they sell through national retailers. They have to access orders from a retailer’s vendor portal or invest in EDI software. Yes, vendor portals are free. But as the saying goes, there is no such...
How to Never Miss Retailer P.O. Acknowledgement Expectations
Purchase order acknowledgements, also known as EDI 855 documents, communicate your intent to fulfill an order to a retail customer. Retailer expectations for lightning-fast purchase order acknowledgements can be daunting, but the latest automation technology makes the...
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EDI Automation Advice from 3 Small Businesses [EVENT]
In November, SPS hosted an online event featuring retail experts at Glamos Wire Inc, JLAB Audio and Design Resources Inc. They shared why they started using EDI, tips on embracing automation, and how their businesses have adjusted in 2020. The lively discussion was...
Be Ready All Stages of Business Growth with EDI, Xero & SPS
The No Nasties Project was founded a little over two years ago. Today, the supplier has sold more than 30 million Sugar Free-zies stix across Australia. No Nasties evolved from a start-up in 2018 to a nationally recognized brand by 2020. Their staff know how the...
Product Forecasting for 2021 and Beyond
With all the change and uncertainty in the market this year, many customers have asked us for advice on how to plan for 2021. Companies are finding that 2021 planning is particularly challenging because they can’t use historical data in the same way they have in the...
A Guide to E-Commerce Fulfillment for Retailers & Distributors
According to a recent study, 63 percent of consumers expect to continue to do more online shopping, even after the pandemic. The acceleration of e-commerce also has massive implications for how retailers and distributors fulfill orders. Yet fulfilling e-commerce...
Trading partner onboarding and discovery for retailers
Trading partner onboarding and discovery can be a challenge. When expanding product assortment, retailers are used to the process being an incredibly slow one. It’s not atypical for them to spend as many as eight weeks just sourcing vendors for a particular new...
7 Inventory Management Metrics to Track and Improve Business Operations
About Guest Author Nick Shaw Nick Shaw is the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) of Brightpearl, a leading provider of inventory, warehouse and Omnichannel retail software. He is responsible for Global Marketing, Sales and Alliances for the leading retail inventory...
Looking for an EDI developer? Think about full-service EDI instead
It’s no secret that technology talent is hard to come by these days, and an EDI developer is no exception. EDI developers are a rare breed with specialized and broad skills that make them especially difficult to find, such as: Implementing and monitoring EDI systems,...
4 Surprising Benefits of a Full-Service EDI Solution for QuickBooks
About Guest Author Dave Rosi, VP of Marketing at Right Networks Dave is responsible for the planning, development and execution of Right Networks’ marketing initiatives including new growth, customer loyalty, building the organization’s overall marketing capabilities,...
![2020 Drives a European Data Evolution [EVENT]](https://www.spscommerce.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Screen-Shot-2020-10-23-at-9.58.52-AM-1-1080x675.png)
2020 Drives a European Data Evolution [EVENT]
More and more retailers and suppliers across Europe are seeing the value of shared sales and inventory data. They are unlocking new opportunities to boost sales, optimize assortments and reduce stock outs. As the pandemic hit the continent in 2020, data proved its...
How EDI Service Providers Help Unlock EDI Success
Like many technologies, EDI services are not one-size-fits-all solutions. EDI need to be implemented in a unique manner for different businesses. Full-service EDI providers are staffed by experts in multiple disciplines who work behind the scenes to make your EDI...
How to Crush Walmart OTIF Requirements
If you’re a supplier working with Walmart, chances are you’ve heard of Walmart’s on-time, in-full (OTIF) requirements. According to Walmart, the program will “ensure that customers can purchase the products they want, when they want, in-store and on-line.” What’s new...
5 Product Bundling Tips to Increase Sales and Customer Satisfaction
About Guest Author Nick Shaw Nick Shaw is the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) of Brightpearl, a leading provider of inventory, warehouse and Omnichannel retail software. He is responsible for Global Marketing, Sales and Alliances for the leading retail inventory...
5 Ways to Build a Resilient Retail Supply Chain
2020 has been a wild ride. It stretched retail supply chains to their limit with factories and stores closing and reopening. Then, online shopping accelerated, and pickup or delivery options were needed more than we had ever seen before. This year will be remembered...
Save Big Money with Order Automation
Automated order management is a multi-million dollar opportunity for many organizations, but where will these savings occur? If your company is willing to make an investment of time to secure trading partner data, you need to know its worth the effort. Luckily, order...
Tips on Automated Order Management, from 20 Years of Expertise
Managing orders from dozens of retailers across retail, e-commerce and other channels can be daunting for suppliers. Retailers expect replenishment orders to be fulfilled quickly. And, next season’s orders are queuing up fast. Manual order management takes up valuable...
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