Two companies that specialize in helping businesses engage in electronic commerce are working more closely together to expand their services.
ChannelAdvisor Corp., which helps manufacturers and retailers sell through online marketplaces, is working with TrueCommerce, a provider of supply chain commerce services, to help client companies more quickly connect with widely distributed customer bases.
David Spitz, CEO, ChannelAdvisor Corp.
ChannelAdvisor has for years provided software connections to help its client companies link electronically and share product and order data with customers and third-party providers of fulfillment and related services, says David Spitz, the company’s CEO. But by now offering “out-of-the-box” pre-built integration with TrueCommerce’s technology platform, ChannelAdvisor and TrueCommerce will reduce the complexity and cost of such connections, he adds.
“We’re confident of a strong return-on-investment for customers on this,” he says.
TrueCommerce serves some 12,000 business customers across multiple industries, providing such services as connections to other companies’ e-commerce sites and enterprise resource planning systems, fulfillment providers and e-marketplaces. The integration with ChannelAdvisor will let TrueCommerce customers sell through the more than 100 online marketplaces worldwide that ChannelAdvisor supports, with the option to use such services as ChannelAdvisor’s dynamic pricing for products listed on marketplaces. “It gives TrueCommerce’s customer base access to these marketplaces, and they don’t have to separately log into ChannelAdvisor,” Spitz says.
ChannelAdvisor’s marketplace connectors provide immediate integration to its global network of marketplaces, for synchronizing inventory, order and fulfillment records with TrueCommerce’s Nexternal e-commerce platform and TrueCommerce-supported ERP and order management systems.
For ChannelAdvisor, with about 3,000 customers worldwide, the integration with TrueCommerce provides its customers with pre-integrated connections with some 30 ERP systems and other applications for transacting and fulfilling orders with other companies.
Hub-and-spoke system
Ross Elliott, president, TrueCommerce
Ross Elliott, president of TrueCommerce, says his company’s integration with ChannelAdvisor operates like a hub-and-spoke system for managing orders between product suppliers and marketplace customers. “Their information comes into our hub, and we form the routing engine in the middle to route the order from point A to Z.”
In addition to providing connections with fulfillment providers, TrueCommerce also provides spend management tools client companies can use for managing such things as purchase orders and multiple levels of purchasing authority for online buyers.
Services from TrueCommerce include using ERP adaptors for:
- Integrating order-to-cash documents, providing records of activity from the time a customer places an order until the seller receives payment;
- Synchronizing inventory records with ERP systems and marketplaces;
- Integrating procure-to-pay workflow with a company’s supply network, maintaining records of procured products and payments.
Elliott says it generally takes about two days to set up a company to use the integrated services, with fees starting at about $75 per month.
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