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!

Suppliers face many challenges today, with the emphasis shifting away from brick and mortar and towards e-commerce, suppliers need to constantly grow and evolve in ways that improve both relationships with sales channels and with customers. 

Sales channels are also quickly evolving to shift with consumer trends and desire to provide the best online products and customer service to customers who have several competitors to choose from, knowing that the sale comes down to consistency in service, quality products and unique offerings. 

With so many areas of focus for suppliers, what develops a solid relationship and builds trust with your retailers?

The Power of the Score Card
Every e-commerce retailer has developed its own score card unique to its standards and expectations so that suppliers have a clear understanding of its brand reputation, its promises to the customers, and guidelines for success to continue to partner and provide customers with the highest quality products and experience.

In addition to protecting its brand through communicated expectations, the score card provides the retailer the opportunity to provide feedback and take action in the case expectations are not met. Underperforming suppliers are hurting e-commerce retailer’s competitive advantage in the marketplace and are costing them financially due to rework and errors.  Across the industry this can be worth billions of dollars each year in unnecessary costs.

Nurture Your Relationship with Retailers
If you want to be a valued and trusted supplier, it is important to show your reliability and consistency in performance. Retailers are concerned about short shipments, late shipments, missed shipments, invalid tracking information and late deliveries to the consumer because ultimately it is the retailer that will pay the consequences and their brand suffers.

In order to nurture your relationship with retailers, you should focus on:

Compliance with retailer’s business processes:

• This compliance makes you valuable to a retailer by reducing their expenses surrounding order issues and rework. This includes processing a retailer’s orders, complying with all of the necessary transactions, PO pricing, packaging, labeling, shipping documentation and accurate, frequent inventory feeds.

Scalability of your business upward, delivering more on-time orders each day:

• This provides the retailer with the ability to increase sales capacity – especially if you can process orders 24×7.  Once again, this makes you valuable to a retailer and will result in your revenue increasing from that retailer.  However, to do this without also increasing your operating costs, you need real-time order processing software that manages without human involvement, 24×7.  

Maximizing your warehouse’s efficiency:

• To do this requires installing the analytics and tools required to dramatically increase the number of shipments that can be made each day and tracking their accuracy.  To learn more about making your warehouse efficient with OPAL, click here.

Simplify with OPAL’s 4-in-1 Software Solution
EDI | Order Management |Warehouse Management | Shipping

If you want to be valued and trusted supplier to your retailers, it is important to be responsive and meet the expectations clearly communicated.

The bottom line is that OPAL addresses all of this for you and so much more.  It combines all of your order processing and warehouse management activities into one autonomous software platform without the need for all of the multiple software systems.

OPAL is the innovative solution to simplify your business fulfillment needs in today’s rapidly transforming retail world.  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!