#tech-talk

Perhaps this is a contrarian opinion, but I’ve been on the retail side, the manufacturer side, and now we run a 3PL for dozens of companies doing exactly this.

For brands with less than 8 figures of wholesale/EDI eligible shipments, the effort to make all these connections communicate with each other effectively is rarely worth it.

SPS is expensive and the lead times on new connections are routinely more than 6 weeks.

Additionally, many wholesalers don’t accept EDI, or they have their own proprietary portal.

The effort required to consolidate all these connections into one platform for the sake of consolidation doesn’t actually net significant benefit.

Belaboring this a bit more. If you don’t have a decent ERP, then you’re going to be reconnecting most of these connections when you finally implement one. That’s another expense and management of continuity that is difficult to justify.

My recommendation for most brands is to do it the hard way: Hire a VA and hand-key these orders. Update inventory routinely. Manage the flow of supplemental documentation to the 3PL manually.

The likelihood that middleware drops key information when you’re connecting so many platforms is quite high. In the long run, you’ll probably hire a VA to double check the systems anyways.

More than likely you’ll need to hire one to input the misc retailer orders that don’t use EDI.

Finally, EDI doesn’t manage nuance. The orders will likely have some human intervention anyways.

But if you HAVE to go with EDI, or your volume justifies it, you can make it easier on yourself by checking out GoodDaySoftware.com (ERP) and/or Crstl.ai (EDI intermediary).

They’re low-lift and easy implementation, and most importantly, they won’t need reconnected and reconfigured as your business grows. They’re accessible from the start and scalable for the long term.

I’m sure @Dipti Desai will have good contributions to the topic 😄

Great insights, thanks!

The initial retailers I'm working with all require EDI to process everything (Walmart, Army, Navy, iHerb) so it's moreso just a question of 1) how to process everything and then 2) how is it getting to the 3PL so they can read/process it.

@Chad Michael Carleton as a 3PL, how do you receive wholesale orders to process currently? Is it an email that contains all the purchase order details plus the shipping/EDI labels?

There are several other really good EDI providers out there that are much cheaper than SPS. Depending on the relationship with your broker they may offer a managed service as well

Yeah honestly I've already lost enough brain cells dealing with EDI over the last few months and it's finally at a good spot. Just looking for efficiency now with regards to providing it to my 3PL in the best way possible.

lol yeah it’s amazing how 3 simple letter can cause so much stress.

If you’re looking for some folks to manage the day to day I’m happy to connect you there as well.

Appreciate it. I'm first just trying to explore what/how people are communicating this to their 3PL and if it is truly just always a manual process & emailing the 3PL contact with the wholesale order details/instructions/labels.

In terms of a routing guide, yes. There is a new company called retail ready that is launching that tries to do this systematically. Seems really promising but haven’t used it yet personally

Interesting, thanks

Yes. Email (or slack message). We have our clients create the order in Shiphero and upload the supplemental docs

Thanks @Chad Michael Carleton; @Curtis Rummel looks we got introduced via email a short while ago - talk soon!

Thanks @Chad Michael Carleton; @Curtis Rummel someone from our team should be reaching out shortly, thanks!

And at Crstl, we are also partners with the great folks over at GoodDay!