EDI was never built for independents

Electronic Data Interchange has existed since the 1970s, and for large retailers and their approved vendors, it works well. If you ship into a major retail supply chain, you're almost certainly exchanging EDI documents through a provider like SPS Commerce or TrueCommerce today.

Built for a different scale

Traditional EDI was designed around a small number of very large trading partners, each with the engineering budget to stand up and maintain the integration. That model breaks down for an independent 3PL operator connecting with dozens of smaller partners, none of whom have an EDI team of their own.

The result is that the operators who'd benefit most from structured data exchange — the ones still coordinating everything by fax and phone — are priced and engineered out of the tools built to solve exactly that problem.

What accessible looks like

An accessible alternative doesn't require a VAN subscription, a mapping specialist, or a six-week integration project. It should feel like signing up for a SaaS product: connect with a partner, and the data exchange just works, because both sides are on the same platform rather than translating between two incompatible ones.