TrueCommerce vs. Lobster

Choosing an EDI provider for the first time can be confusing for many companies. In fact, switching to a new EDI provider can be just as daunting due to the business-critical nature of EDI. However, choosing an EDI provider does not have to be a painful process if you know what to look for.

TrueCommerce offers fully managed EDI, pre-connected trading partner networks, and integrated solutions that can simplify onboarding and long-term scalability.

For more information, visit our EDI Buyer’s Guide: How to Choose the Right EDI Provider

There are a number of key factors that should be considered when reviewing your EDI solution, many of these can have a serious impact on business-critical processes within your business. With this in mind, it’s important you choose the best solution for your organization.

If your current provider struggles with onboarding, support, or scaling, it’s time to evaluate alternatives. TrueCommerce offers fully managed EDI, strong ERP integration, and access to a large pre-connected network to help reduce complexity and improve performance.

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

Define Your EDI 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.

Solutions like TrueCommerce offer fully managed EDI, pre-connected trading partner networks, and ERP integrations, which simplify both onboarding and long-term scalability.

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.

Integrate With Your Systems

Determine which systems you would like to integrate with, such as your ERP system, accounting system, and/or 3PL warehouse. TrueCommerce streamlines ERP and 3PL integrations through a single solution.

Set up Trading Partner Connections

Connect your systems with your trading partners’ systems, such as your customers and suppliers, 3PL. Working with a provider that offers a large pre-connected network, like TrueCommerce, can significantly reduce setup time.

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.

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, minimizes errors, and provides real-time visibility into supply chain processes.

TrueCommerce offers ERP-integrated EDI that connects directly to your business systems, automating order processing, invoicing, and inventory updates without manual intervention.

Yes, absolutely. The TrueCommerce 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.