by ArcESB Marketing | February 19, 2019

ChannelApe Embeds ArcESB for Ecommerce EDI and MFT

From small and medium-sized businesses to companies with millions of customers, businesses of all size use the ChannelApe E-Commerce direct-to-consumer (D2C) suite for building web stores, connecting warehouses, managing product catalogs, and handling inventory & order management.

For many of their D2C E-Commerce customers, electronic data interchange (EDI) and partner file exchanges are a core part of doing business, especially for selling to major retailers. ChannelApe saw an opportunity to fill a fundamental customer need by adding EDI and managed file transfer (MFT) capabilities.

Their vision? A seamless user experience, where D2C customers could handle EDI and MFT without leaving ChannelApe.

Adding Core EDI and MFT — Without Major Development Costs

For ChannelApe, building these EDI and MFT capabilities into their platform was tricky.

Developing these capabilities would be difficult and costly. Between upfront development, certification & interoperability testing, ongoing support and maintenance, the total cost of integration would be very expensive.

At the same time, most other off-the-shelf solutions could not be easily embedded or provided a sub-optimal integration experience for their customers.

ChannelApe needed a solution that could:

  • Do the work for them with a ready-made middleware layer they could plug in
  • Eliminate custom coding for EDI standards, MFT protocols, security, and AS2 retries
  • Work with their existing infrastructure — running Java-based containers in Docker
  • Allow them to deliver custom business logic on top of the middleware
  • And embed directly into ChannelApe to avoid customer confusion

Instead of attempting to build their own middleware layer, ChannelApe sought a powerful, modern EDI solution with an API that they could embed.

EDI & MFT Microservices

After researching the solutions available, including those from some of the biggest technology companies out there, ChannelApe selected ArcESB. And in 2018 alone, they processed more than 2 million EDI transactions.

"ArcESB has helped our business focus on solving the core problems of D2C supply chains rather than rebuilding proprietary connections and transports for EDI and MFT."

— Michael Averto, CEO, ChannelApe

Read the full case study to learn how ArcESB's unique microservices infrastructure, developer APIs and rigorous testing unlocked EDI & MFT for ChannelApe and their customers.

 Read the full case study