TrueCommerce vs. Lobster

Because EDI is a complex technical tool we understand that many organisations struggle to know what to look for when profiling a potential EDI partner. To help out, we’ve put together an essential list of criteria that businesses need to consider before choosing an EDI provider.

Although moving to a new EDI provider might sound daunting, if your current EDI provider is underperforming, then failing to explore alternative providers could be just as damaging. An EDI system that is well designed, secure and reliable, built on sound infrastructure, with a knowledgeable, proactive support team, can deliver substantial cost savings, business benefits and opportunities for organisations at every stage of development and maturity.

The challenge for many businesses is identifying the EDI provider with the blend of technical, commercial and project management expertise that can deliver the EDI platform that can bring those opportunities to fruition.

Take a look at this checklist below. If your current EDI provider is not delivering on any one of these performance areas, then it is time to look for a new EDI provider.

Checklist: Reasons to Change Your EDI Provider
Missed growth targets due to the inability to scale properly.
Loss of customers because of an inability to handle their required capabilities.
Inability to meet ERP or trading partner project deadlines, resulting in delayed payments.
Slow and complex supply chain systems causing monetary losses and wasted efforts on fixes.
Using multiple EDI providers leading to increased costs.
Increased costs from trading partners, such as chargebacks.
Inability to accommodate current or future trading partners, leading to loss of potential revenue.
Manual and resource-intensive processes making the supply chain inefficient and error-prone.
Lack of visibility across the supply chain.
Dependence on multiple disparate systems, increasing overall costs.
Dependency on employee legacy knowledge risking data integrity and potential data loss.
Competitive disadvantage due to current EDI solutions, negatively impacting brand reputation.
Inability to move quickly, affecting mergers and acquisitions or scalability efforts.
By addressing these points, businesses can evaluate whether their current EDI provider meets their needs or if a change is necessary to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and support growth.

To get started with EDI, you need to do some preparatory work and consider key factors:

Define Your Needs

The initial step is to define the types of EDI documents you need to exchange and understand the requirements of your trading partners.

Choose an EDI Provider

Do some research to find an EDI provider that matches the needs of your business.
If you would like to know more about EDI, and what you should look for when choosing the best EDI provider for your business, you can read our EDI Buyer’s Guide here: https://www.truecommerce.com/uk-en/resource/edi-buyers-guide/

Integrate With Your Systems

Determine which systems you would like to integrate with, such as your ERP system, accounting system, and/or 3PL warehouse.

Set up Trading Partner Connections

Connect your systems with your trading partners’ systems, such as your customers and suppliers, 3PL.

Conduct Testing

After integration with your trading partners, testing is conducted to ensure that the data flow runs smoothly and accurately.

Implementing EDI helps companies become more efficient by eliminating the need to print purchase orders, reducing manual work in receipting stock, and decreasing invoice matching errors. This streamlines operations and saves valuable time. One customer explained their experience:

“Our merchandising team is more efficient as they no longer need to print purchase orders, less time is spent receipting stock in our distribution centre and we’ve seen a reduction in the number of invoice matching errors.” – Jim Pears, Ecommerce Systems Manager, Feelunique.

EDI delivers benefits to businesses that are in line with how advanced the EDI system is. Web EDI Often, businesses will begin using EDI to meet their customers’ immediate requirements. This usually involves logging into individual customer portals, which can be time-consuming and difficult to manage as your business grows. Fully managed EDI When businesses use fully managed EDI they experience a vast number of commercial benefits. By outsourcing EDI to a fully managed provider, companies can focus on their core competences and leave EDI to the experts. They are free from the burden of keeping ahead of new innovations and the need to stay on top of increasing trading partner complexities. Fully managed EDI providers allow organizations to experience all the benefits of EDI without having to invest time and headcount into the day-to-day upkeep of the system. TrueCommerce provides fully-managed EDI with ERP integration and access to a large pre-connected trading partner network, enabling businesses to scale without adding internal resources or complexity.

EDI can effortlessly integrate with your ERP system to enable smooth data exchange between your ERP and trading partners. This integration enhances efficiency, minimises errors, and provides real-time visibility into supply chain processes.

Yes, absolutely. Our solution integrates seamlessly with your ERP to deliver e-invoices automatically. No printing, scanning, or manual data entry required. You get clean, accurate invoice data delivered directly to your finance system, saving time and reducing errors. It’s fast, secure, and fully compliant with local e-Invoicing regulations.

We manage the technical side, working closely with your ERP provider, so you don’t have to juggle multiple contacts or systems.

EDI and APIs are both methods for exchanging data between business systems, but they serve different purposes and work in different ways. Understanding the distinction helps you choose the right approach, or the right combination of both.

EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) is the longstanding standard for B2B document exchange. It uses structured, standardized formats to transmit business-critical documents, orders, invoices, shipment notices, acknowledgments, between trading partners. EDI is highly reliable, widely required by major retailers and distributors, and purpose-built for supply chain compliance. When a trading partner mandates EDI, there is no substitute.

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) allow systems to communicate using modern web protocols. APIs are more flexible than EDI and better suited to dynamic, developer-driven workflows. They let teams retrieve data programmatically, trigger actions across systems, and integrate business data into internal tools and dashboards without manual file handling.

The key difference is not which is better. It is what each is designed for.

EDI handles the structured, compliance-driven exchange between you and your trading partners. APIs handle how your internal teams access and use that data within your own systems and workflows. Most organizations benefit from using both.

How TrueCommerce supports both

TrueCommerce manages EDI compliance, document translation, and trading partner delivery on your behalf. TrueCommerce API gives your development team direct, programmable access to that B2B transaction data so you can integrate it into your own systems, build visibility into internal dashboards, and automate workflows, all without replacing the EDI foundation underneath.

The TrueCommerce API lets customers connect their own systems to TrueCommerce the way modern software works: programmatically without replacing what already works.