
Is EDI Going to Eat You Alive This Holiday Season?
If you are one of the many suppliers that have been blessed with large quantities of sales this holiday season, you are probably also suffering a bit from the cost of meeting that demand. According to projections by Deloitte, holiday sales are forecasted to rise conservatively 1.5% up to a more aggressive projection of 3.5%, with consumers starting even earlier this holiday season and shopping through January.
To meet this demand over a short few months, suppliers will have to burden additional operating costs to excel this holiday season. This ranges from extra labor costs with hiring additional people or paying expensive overtime to current employees, to meeting increased demand, to additional costs for the EDI documents that you’ve incurred because of drop shipping.
Why Does EDI Cost So Much?
There are at least four transactions required for every single drop shipped order and can add up to as many as five or six transactions potentially! At a minimum of $.06 per document received or sent, when you start multiplying that by the number of orders it can get very expensive very fast.
The pennies for a few transactions were not a big deal when you were shipping pallet orders, but when you are drop shipping smaller orders directly to customer doorsteps, that is a very different story and can drastically skew your overhead projections and profits.
EDI service companies LOVE IT when that happens. Drop shipping means hundreds of more orders, hundreds of more EDI documents to process, HUGE COSTS to you and HUGE REVENUE for them.
At OPAL, EDI is free!
We’ve never understood why EDI should ever incur additional cost and why your business should be penalized for growing and shipping to additional customers. After all, the internet is essentially free, so why charge for it.
Just as a point of reference – If you were paying EDI rates and streamed a movie online – that movie would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $240,000! Why would you pay for this antiquated process for your business?!
OPAL passes along the cost savings to our clients by utilizing the direct EDI or API links that are now provided by retailers and e-tailers, cutting out the expensive middle man charges and enabling suppliers to process drop ship orders with $0 cost for EDI documents – or an LTL, Full Truck Load or container order for that matter. OPAL downloads POs (Document 850) from retailers and e-tailers, sends back Acknowledgements (Document 997), ASNs (Document 856), Invoices (Document 810) and Product Inventory (Document 846) with no EDI charges and is 100% compliant with each retailer. For additional resources on EDI – click here!
Simplify with OPAL’s 4-in-1 Software Solution
EDI | Order Management |Warehouse Management | Shipping
OPAL is the innovative solution to simplify your business fulfillment needs in today’s rapidly transforming retail world.
As a client of OPAL, the cost for EDI document charges and management are all included, as well as troubleshooting labor, minimizing order processing labor, reduced order exceptions to less than 5% of your order volume, and accomplishes it with a total cost of CENTS rather than DOLLARS per order, wouldn’t that be worth checking into?
To learn more, click here!
Click here to book your customized demo today. We are here to support you through this time of change and are here to help you innovate and thrive!