Our Web EDI solutions enable easy online data exchange, simplifying EDI transactions and enhancing connectivity with business partners.

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EDI Integration of B2B E-commerce for Small Companies

Navigating B2B E-Commerce: A Small Company’s Guide to Seamless EDI Integration

More and more companies in the B2B vertical, are expanding their business to the web and doing more of what is called today B2B e-commerce. Those companies of all sizes are realizing the importance of automation and the value of exchanging EDI with their business partners, suppliers, and buyers.

For small companies in the B2B market, trading with large retailers such as Costco, Wal-Mart, Target or Home Depot is a great opportunity for their business. However, many small and medium-sized enterprises are missing out on this chance due to the fear of large retailers’ requirement to comply with their EDI rules.

In most cases, EDI is the de-facto protocol to communicate and exchange business documents between big-box retailers and their suppliers.

EDI is used to automate the process of exchanging business documents between trading partners. Essentially, it is the solution for B2B and is quite popular amongst retail, manufacturing, transportation, health care, and other industries. By automating documents exchange process, companies can benefit in many areas.

To those who do not know much about Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), it sounds quite complicated at first. There are different EDI standards, requirements, EDI formats, communication protocols such as AS2, sFTP, VAN, different documents / transactions (i.e. 850, 810, 846 856, etc.) which differ depending on company and industry.

EDI Integration projects seem daunting and expensive, which can explain why many smaller businesses still do not communicate with their trading partners through EDI. However, the key is to find the right EDI provider who can offer solutions and services that are simple, affordable and quick to onboard.

An EDI provider like EDI2XML offers 2 options for EDI integration projects:

Fully Managed EDI

This option is a “turn-key solution” where our team at EDI2XML, takes care of all the project: setup, configuration, testing, certification with your EDI partners …

Our monthly pricing packages are dynamic, they go up and down based on the volume and you are not locked in in any tier. Following is a diagram illustrating the flow of information with our EDI as a service offering.
EDI integration platform

By using our EDI Web Service, you can enhance efficiency, reduce errors, and improve collaboration with your trading partners.

EDI2XML Web Services

This option is meant for companies who got their own technical resources to work with REST API (call and consume HTTP Rest Web services); In such a scenario EDI2XML web services is the way to go for the following reasons:
  • Self-service solution,
  • Low cost,
  • Quick entry: you can be up and running in less than an hour, and it is proven; we provide everything to your developers to get started, a java client with its source code and instructions on how to work with it.
  • We offer the xml schemas (xsd) of the XML format our API expects, and all that you need to do is to format your data according to that format and you will be up and running.
  • We offer 15 days free trial, without any commitment.

Advantages of Using EDI
B2B edi Integration

Integrating Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) into B2B e-commerce can bring significant benefits to small companies. EDI allows for the automated exchange of business documents and data between trading partners, streamlining communication, reducing manual effort, and improving efficiency.

Integrating Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) into B2B e-commerce can bring significant benefits to small companies. EDI allows for the automated exchange of business documents and data between trading partners, streamlining communication, reducing manual effort, and improving efficiency.

With EDI, orders, invoices, and other business documents can be sent straight from your ERP management system to the EDI Provider, where they can process this XML file into EDI format and then sent to the Trading Partner.

Orders come in as EDI, get translated into XML format and then get sent straight to your ERP system (if integration was done). In most cases where integration to your ERP solution is done, no human intervention is even needed. This saves so much time and effort and finally allows your employees to get a lot more time on their hands for other important tasks, eliminating so much of the manual data entry.

When it comes to EDI, every case is different. It’s all about finding the right EDI provider that can help you with this process and ensure it’s simple and efficient as can be. Automating B2B processes with EDI can help companies stay profitable by letting them keep up with market changes and trends.

Look at EDI2XML, and book a free consultation with one of our EDI experts!
EDI price

Seamless EDI implementation through Web Services

EDI is used almost everywhere regardless of industry or company size. The most extensive use of EDI is in the retail industry. EDI compliance is mandatory in order to trade with big retailers such as Target, Costco, Walmart,… even giants of electronic commerce like Amazon are heavy users of EDI.

There are a lot of different types and approach of implementing EDI in your company. It can fully managed EDI service, or gaining popularity lately EDI Web Service, because, service architects and developers want EDI to be easy to implement, maintainable, extensible, and scalable.

What is web service?

Web service is a network technology that provides inter-program interaction based on web standards. More specifically, it’s client and server application that communicate over the World Wide Web’s (WWW).

The W3C consortium defines a web service as: “A Web service is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network”.

Thus, the web service is identified by a URI string. The Web service has a User Programmatic Interface (UPI) that is represented in WSDL format. Other systems interact with this web service by exchanging SOAP or REST protocol messages. HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol is used to transport the messages. The description of Web services and their APIs can be found by UDDI.

♦ WSDL (Web Services Description Language) – is an XML-based interface definition language that is used for describing the functionality offered by a web service.

♦ UDDI (Universal Discovery, Description and Integration) – is an XML-based registry for business internet services

Web services are rich in functionality and extensibility, as well as their machine-readable descriptions through the use of XML. Web services can be combined to achieve complex operations.

web service diagram

The diagram above shows a very simplified view of how a web service works. The client invokes a web service call by sending a request to a server which hosts the actual web service, then get the response from the web service.

What are different types of web services?

Web services can be deployed in several ways. The following web-services are the most commonly used http web services:

♦ SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) — in fact, it is a triple of standards SOAP/WSDL/UDDI

♦ REST (Representational State Transfer) – quite often called as RESTful API (Application Program Interface that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data) or RESTful web service – is based on (REST) technology.

Actually, SOAP originated from XML-RPC (XML Remote Procedure Call) and is the next generation of its development and evolution. While REST is a concept, based on an architectural style.

Of course, there are other types of web services, but since they are not widely used, we will focus on these two in this brief review: SOAP and REST.

A Quick Overview of SOAP Web Services

SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol. It is an XML-based protocol for accessing web services.

It is platform and language independent. It means that by using SOAP, you can interact with other programming language applications.

Initially, SOAP was primarily intended to implement a remote procedure call (RPC). Now SOAP is used to exchange arbitrary messages in XML format, not just to call procedures.

Like any text protocol, SOAP can be used with any application layer protocol: SMTP, FTP, HTTPS, etc., but more often SOAP is used over HTTP.

All SOAP messages are structured as an envelope (is the root element in every SOAP message), including the following elements:

  • Message ID (local name)
  • Optional Header element
  • Mandatory Body element (message body)

Structure of SOAP message:

SOAP message structure

The expanded list of SOAP message elements is shown in the data schema (for SOAP version 1.2).

A Quick Overview of REST Web Services

REST stands for Representational State Transfer. As it was mentioned above, REST is not a protocol but an architectural style built on existing standards that are well known and controlled by the W3C consortium, such as HTTP, URI (Uniform Resource Identifier), XML and RDF (Resource Description Format).

In a REST services, the emphasis is placed on access to resources, and not on the execution of remote services; this is the fundamental difference from SOAP-services. However, the remote procedure call is also applicable to REST. It uses the PUT, GET, POST, and DELETE methods of the HTTP protocol to perform tasks. The cardinal difference between REST and SOAP is that REST remains an HTTP request.

According to many developers, SOAP is cumbersome and difficult to use. REST is an easy alternative.

REST is using the URL approach. Often, to make a request, REST relies on a simple URL Instead of using XML.

Advantages of REST Web Services

REST is more flexible and easier to use for the most part. There are following advantages when:

  • Agile: Unlike SOAP, there is no strict specification for REST Web services and it consumes less bandwidth and resources, thus, REST Web services are very fast.
  • Language and Platform independent: REST web services can be written in any programming language and run on any platform.
  • Can be used with different data format: REST web service permits different data format such as Plain Text, XML, HTML, and JSON.

SOAP vs REST what to choose?

SOAP is more applicable in complex architectures where interaction with objects is beyond the scope of the CRUD model. In applications having the CRUD model, it can be quite applicable to REST due to its simplicity and transparency.

In fact, if any objects in your service do not need a complex relationship than: “Create”, “Read”, “Update”, “Delete” (usually in 99% of cases is enough), it is possible that REST will be the best choice.

In addition, REST compared to SOAP can be more productive because it does not require parsing complex XML commands on the server (regular HTTP requests are performed — PUT, GET, POST, DELETE).

EDI2XML HTTP service

EDI2XML Web Service, is an HTTP (based on REST) service running over the internet, on EDI2XML private cloud platform that is capable of receiving HTTP requests to translate EDI messages to XML, and XML messages to EDI (based on EDI2XML’s proprietary XML format). Advantages of using EDI2XML HTTP service:

⇒ You can start with less than an hour

⇒ No contract: pay as you go

⇒ Very simple and dynamic pricing scheme

⇒ Availability and reliability

⇒ Based on proven technology in the field for over 18 years now

⇒ Outstanding technical support

Our EDI Web Service solution solves developer’s problem because we have over 18 years of expertise in EDI, that is difficult for every developer and integrator to acquire quickly.

You can start with the free 15 – days trial of EDI2XML Web Service to see how real-time translation services works.

EDI Web Service for edi integration

Related Posts:

What is EDIFACT? | UN / EDIFACT standard overview

EDI ANSI ASC X12 Standards – Technical Overview – 2020

EDI Integration of B2B e-commerce for small companies

Integrating EDI into your Management System


This post was updated to reflect current trends and information.


EDI Communication is one of the best ways to exchange important business documents with Trading Partners. Documents such as Purchase Orders, Invoices and ASNs can be safely exchanged electronically with business partners, like retailers, in a matter of seconds. In many cases however, Small and Medium Enterprises do not have the budget for some of these EDI communication solutions out there and do not have any in-house staff experienced with EDI exchange. What should these businesses do?

EDI Solution as a Service for SMEs

After over a decade of working hand in hand with Small and Medium Businesses, we’ve come up with a solution. Our EDI specialists realized that it might not be realistic to have SMEs hire in-house EDI experts or purchase expensive EDI communication solutions on the market. This is when our experienced team designed and developed a tool that can be implemented as a Service – no need for any setup or equipment on premises – called EDI2XML as a Service. Here’s how it works:

  1. We communicate with your EDI Trading Partner in order to pick up any incoming EDI documents from their mailbox
  2. We convert all EDI documents into XML or CSV format (whichever works best to be integrated into your management system (ERP suite, CRM system, etc.))
  3. We push all XML documents to you, to be integrated into your system
  4. You will be notified every time EDI documents are sent and received
  5. The opposite process (from XML to EDI) works for outgoing documents.

Click here to view an infographic on EDI2XML as a Service.

Converting from unreadable formats like EDI x12 or EDIFACT (for those companies in Europe) to XML or CSV, allows for easy integration into ERP suits or CRM systems out on the market. On top of this, XML format is easy to read by any businessperson. Our goal was and continues to be to simplify the EDI communication process for Small and Medium Enterprises that are looking to increase efficiency. It’s time SMEs eliminated manual data entry (or human intervention) and enjoyed a smooth, continuous order processing flow.

 

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