When buying online in today’s world, we often think of a quick and simple process. However, the B2B purchasing process can be more complex, especially when clients purchase from various suppliers and familiarize themselves with each vendor-purchasing platform, or for sellers who are accommodating requests from various buyers. These touchpoints and roadblocks make the commerce experience extensive and tedious, but implementing technology that simplifies the B2B buying process, such as PunchOut, helps companies and customers eliminate extra steps and difficulties, making the interaction between buyer and seller closer than ever before.
What is PunchOut?
PunchOut acts as a mechanism to connect a buyer’s e-procurement system with a supplier commerce site to make purchases. At the same time, both applications remain connected, and data is maintained. With PunchOut, a buyer can access supplier catalogs and make purchases from their own internal procurement platform.
How PunchOut Works for Client and Vendor
Integrating PunchOut is a simple process that begins on the vendor side. The seller must enable a digital product catalog for clients, configure PunchOut within the company’s commerce site, and integrate with the ERP. The PunchOut-configured commerce site then easily integrates into the client’s e-procurement system. With the assistance of an integration partner, such as Perficient, you can allow for seamless interaction between the e-procurement system and your PunchOut website with customizations in buyer and client-specific language.
For the Client
B2B buyers may purchase from hundreds of different vendors, which means having hundreds of different portals and accounts to order from. When vendors offer PunchOut integration for clients, it streamlines and consolidates the functionality of all these platforms. With PunchOut, buyers can make purchases from different vendors and maintain a global view of procurement from their own familiar, internal purchasing system.
For the Seller
By offering the opportunity for PunchOut integration, you’re able to put your product catalog front and center for every one of your buyers. This improves the customer experience with ease of use and streamlined procurement and enables businesses to retain and strengthen customer relationships. Businesses that offer PunchOut have seen reduced procurement costs for both business and buyer and increased sales from current customers.
Other Advantages of PunchOut
- Promotes communication and collaboration between the buyers and sellers
- Low-to-almost-no maintenance – no fees associated to maintain a PunchOut catalog
- Allows buyers to manage the expenditures of your purchases
- Generates invoices every 60 days
- Automates and optimizes the shopping process to streamline the purchase cycle
- Integrates a buyer’s customized pricing module
Simplifying the Buying Process
Once integrated within the client’s e-procurement system, the seller’s logo will display within the e-procurement system, giving the client direct access to the product catalog at any time. Through PunchOut, the seller’s commerce website communicates directly with the buyer’s e-procurement system and quickly returns a pending purchase order to the client’s team. This way, the buyer never has to leave their internal system to purchase products, have better control over spend, visibility with current and future orders across all accounts, and build a more personal relationship with the vendor.
PunchOut makes it easy for sellers to communicate and engage with clients and eliminates unnecessary transactional touchpoints, such as buyers jumping from platform to platform to make a purchase and awaiting lengthy review and approval processes. Overall, PunchOut turns the purchase order into a single use case and provides stronger communication between parties.
How to Find Out More
PunchOut streamlines the B2B commerce journey for both buyer and seller by quickly automating the purchasing process and creating an environment that both parties can easily navigate and understand. For more information on how to integrate PunchOut into your commerce website, contact our commerce experts today.
