One of the newest methods for Buyers to place orders against a Seller’s catalog is

Punchout.  Punchout is a process where the Buyer (from within their e-procurement system),

selects a Seller and with a click, opens the Seller’s e-commerce site.  The Buyer can

search and filter for desired products and upon selecting, review all posted

features/benefits and chose whatever quantity is needed.  Once completed, the Buyer may

review the order like any other e-store experience before “checking out”.  One of the main

visible differences between a ‘normal’ s-store and a punchout enabled site is that instead

of seeing “Checkout” on the shopping cart page they see “Transfer Cart”.  Upon clicking

this button the contents of the Buyer’s shopping cart is transferred to the Buyer’s e-

procurement system [In real time] where their Purchase Order is populated.  At that point,

the Buyer simply follows their normal internal purchasing workflow and transmission

(Whether Fax, e-mail or B2B/EDI).

Oddly, more companies in Retail, WD and manufacturing are not using Punchout.  Enabling a

web-store for Punchout is far less costly than paying kilo character or hosting fees month

over month to VANs to either; host, provide access or transmit the same data to different

clients.  What’s more, Punchout being done in real-time means Buyers can have up to the

minute information and when using Hubspan don’t have to pay transactional fees on the

system.

More and more companies are starting to use Punchout because it enables them to leverage

pre-existing e-store platforms as a method or providing customers with a real-time view of

their products.  Customers select goods/services and “Punch-out” meaning automatically pull

data in their procurement system.  Hubspan provides these services to support thousands of

SMB and billion dollar enterprises. 

To learn more about Punchout and other Hubspan services, please join us on February 16th at

Noon Pacific for a webinar and demonstration. http://bit.ly/yYyJ6F