You could build it.
Do you want to own it?
Large, well-resourced IT teams can stand up a PunchOut endpoint, parse cXML, and generate invoices. But, should eProcurement integration become a permanent operational function inside your company, owned across dozens of buyers, for years?
5000+
GLOBAL BUSINESSES
$100B+
TRANSACTIONS PROCESSED
220+
PROCUREMENT SYSTEMS
It’s not about capability.
It’s about commitment.
In-house integrations look orderly on paper: defined formats, documented specs, predictable test cycles. In practice, the gaps in the spec don’t surface until the integration is live and real transactions start hitting them.
The commitment compounds over time. It does not end when the first integration goes live. It expands with every buyer you add.
TradeCentric vs. DIY
Five dimensions decide what integration really costs you: onboarding buyers, absorbing variability, seeing transaction health, managing ongoing change, and where your engineering capacity goes.
DIY Integrations
DIMENSION
With TradeCentric
Every buyer is a fresh project. Documentation
review, payload mapping, testing, and validation
from scratch, each time. And the docs often don’t
match the buyer’s current configuration.
01
Onboarding New Buyers
Pre-built connectors and expertise across 220+ eProcurement and 75+ eCommerce systems. Managed configuration shortens the cycle from custom build to deployment.
Custom logic per buyer. One sends full identity and
ship-to; another sends only an employee ID and
location code. You build and maintain the
variations, often after go-live.
02
Handling Buyer Variability
Variability handled as configuration across cXML,
OCI, EDI, JSON, and custom formats, not new code
you have to write and own.
You build the integration. You also build the monitoring.
Dashboards and monitoring become a separate
build. Teams learn about failures when buyers
escalate, not before.
03
Visibility into
transaction
health
Analytics is infrastructure. Transaction volumes,
failure rates, return-cart rates, and trading partner
performance surface from day one, with no custom
reporting work.
Every change is a sprint priority. Schema updates,
browser releases, evolving tolerance rules. An
invoice can transmit successfully and still fail
reconciliation silently.
04
Maintenance &
change
management
Managed change, owned for you. We absorb the
maintenance as buyer integration requirements shift, so your team isn’t reacting to every external update.
Integration competes with your roadmap. Backlogs
grow. A 30-day effort stretches to 60 or 90 days
when customization is required.
05
Where
engineering
capacity goes
Runs outside your roadmap. A managed function,
not a buyer-by-buyer maintenance burden. Your
team ships features and new products instead.
Two Suppliers ran the numbers on building it themselves
One priced the build before starting. The other lived with it for years. Then they both came to TradeCentric.
Quartzy
“Start with a blue sky version in terms of what state you want to reach. Think about that state and try to break that journey into phases, then ask what the ROI is for each phase, and whether you will be able to attain that ROI by building something in house or by buying something off the shelf.”
Labelmaster
“We said no to customers because it didn’t have the capabilities and the functionality that they were seeking. It created friction and slowed down our ability to sell.”
Robert Finn
VP, Labelmaster
Read the case study
“Can’t you just use AI to build this?”
Yes, AI can review documentation, scaffold mapping structures, and help structure configuration logic. It could accelerate the build.
But it doesn’t remove ownership. Once code is generated, you still own testing, version control, deployment, monitoring, and incident response.
It’s also important to call out that financial transaction processing can’t be probabilistic. A purchase order must map the same way every time, and an invoice must transform deterministically, with no hallucinations allowed.
AI could accelerate the build.
It doesn’t eliminate the need to operate the system.
PROBABILISTIC
Calculates a distribution of possible results. Fine for design and scaffolding.
DETERMINISTIC
No element of chance. What financial documents actually require at runtime.
eProcurement Solution Suite
Automate the complete transaction cycle
Built to scale, not just connect once
PunchOut Catalog
Let buyers shop your catalog from inside their procurement system, authenticated, with negotiated pricing and a clean cart return.
Explore the PunchOut solution
Purchase Order Automation
Turn approved requisitions into supplier-ready POs automatically, no re-keying, fewer errors, consistent as connection volume grows.
Explore PO Automation
Invoice Automation
Translate, validate and deliver invoices straight into buyer AP systems for faster, cleaner PO-to-invoice reconciliation and payment.
Explore Invoice Automation
The question was never whether you can build it.
It’s whether you want to own the operational burden across dozens of buyers, for years. If the answer is no, that’s exactly what we’re built for.
Talk to an integration expert