Name: How manufacturers and suppliers can automate dropshipping for scale and agility with iPaaS
Uploaded: 2025-08-26T18:03:38.503Z
Duration: 45 min 4 s
Description: How manufacturers and suppliers can automate dropshipping for scale and agility with iPaaS

Transcript for "How manufacturers and suppliers can automate dropshipping for scale and agility with iPaaS": Hello, everyone. Welcome to our webinar, today. My name is Ebru Salaam. I'm a director of product marketing at Celigo. So before we start, I would like to give you some information on our housekeeping items. First of all, if you have any questions, we will have a a q and a session at the end. So you can just type your, questions in the q and a window, and we'll be answering them at the end. And, so my colleagues, Nate and James, will run the show today. So but before, you know, bringing them on stage, so let me just kick off, today's topic. It is drop shipping. And, so as you all already know, I mean, drop shipping has become a popular ecommerce business model both on the supplier and the retailer side over the past years. Right? It is great for retailers that don't wanna hold inventory and also, similarly great for suppliers that want additional revenue streams without any added marketing span. But, you know, what we have been see seeing is, for brands, manufacturers, suppliers with high order volumes and large number of, retail customers, supporting dropshipping at scale, has been a big challenge. And, especially, you know, as business needs and technologies are continuously evolving, and there's always a need for, some, you know, changes and a need for agility. So today, we are going to talk about, how to automate dropshipping for scale and agility, with an iPaaS. And, presenters are, Celigo solution consultants, Nate Bryant and James Roth. They're experts in, integration, automation, and also in b to c, b to b commerce business processes. But, before I hand it over to them, let me also give you a quick introduction to, Celigo. So if you're not familiar, with the company or with the platform, Celigo is an iPaaS. It's an integration platform. So we have, a lot of adoption across manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors, brands, and retailers. And, all the, successful well known, companies you see on the screen here with the logos and also thousands of more are our customers. And they use Celigo to drive, excellence, across their b to c and b to b commerce operations. So they automate business processes across applications, across departments, and, across partners. And when I say business processes, you can think about order management, shipping and fulfillment, inventory management, and, others. So and just to also give you an idea, you know, of our platform scalability, so it currently connect more than, 6,000 unique endpoints. And, it processes over 40,000,000,000 records, every month, and it doesn't end there. So our AI based error resolution auto resolves, more than 762,000,000 integration, errors per month and gives time back to IT team so they can, you know, focus on, driving, the, integration automation strategy instead of, you know, dealing with troubleshooting errors every day. So, that is, you know, an introduction, and now I will hand it over to my colleague, Nate. It's all yours, Nate. Thank you. Yeah. So, I'll first kinda lay the scene, what we've seen at Celigo, like, what is drop shipping? What is that as a business process, as a business model? What are some of the issues and problems that we've seen our customers come to us with? And then what does it look like to solve it with a platform like Celigo? And then James and myself will walk through a demo of our solution, different aspects of it for how it's kinda solved the different issues that our customers came to us with. So when you talk about drop shipping as a business model, there's really two perspectives, you can think about that that we often see. Right? There's this retailer's perspective, the one that owns the ecommerce channel or the marketplace listing that consumers are interacting with. And then there's the vendor, the one who has the physical products, the warehouse, the fulfillment, relationship, the one that's delivering it to the last mile to to the consumer, the one who's purchasing. So both of these perspectives are very much linked together as and especially when you talk about a business process where you have multiple parties that oftentimes need the same data. And from a consumer's perspective, they want a seamless experience. So they don't necessarily want to know or need to know that their product is being drop shipped to them. They've come with an expectation that when they place an order online, the product is gonna show up at their front door, and how it gets there is is not as important always to the consumer. So, from a business process, right, the the retailer is creating this listing, consumers interacting with it, they're placing that order. And because the physical inventory isn't often with the retailer, that order needs to end up at the vendor. And the vendor receives that order in whatever system they have, whether it's their ERP, their WMS, their warehouse, maybe a custom application they've been they've built. And then using that that order, they pick, pack, and ship that product to the customer. And then to close the loop, they need to send back that same details back to maybe the retailer because that's the point of contact for the consumer where they wanna come in and say, hey. Has my order been shipped? Has it been delivered? What's its status? And so at each kind of link along the way here, integration and automation is often needed. Otherwise, it causes a lot of friction and pain, especially from a consumer's perspective, but also from a business perspective. So what is automating that process looks like and what what is the landscape look like for for drop shipping whether you're a retailer or a vendor. Right? So, this is a typical landscape we see where there's a a retailer, whether they're listing on a website, that they own, maybe Shopify or Magento, or maybe they are working on a marketplace like an Amazon, like a Walmart, where they're listing the the products that ultimately consumers are buying. And then once those orders are placed, they need to end up at the the vendor, the retailer, or the vendor or the supplier, whether that's their ERP, whether receiving these orders, maybe it's their WMS or they're working with a three PL where, the fulfillment process begins. And then, you know, data flows back the other direction. Shipment and inventory details, needs to be available both on the the website so that when someone's buying something, that inventory is actually available, as well as information, you know, post purchase. And there's a lot of things to consider when you're talking about this landscape. Like, what type of integration is being used, which we'll definitely break down here in a second, whether it's an API based integration, more application to application, or EDI. What direction does this data need to flow? How often does it need to flow? You know, especially in today's world where consumers are expecting, you know, instantaneous updates on their things that it's something that definitely, needs to be considered. And and what type of fields or data is relevant at each part of the process. So maybe data captured at the point of sale doesn't necessarily matter later down the line or maybe it's crucial. These are all kind of considerations that need to be, taken into the view when you're building integrations or talking about automating this entire process. So, you know, at Celigo, we we work with, customers that come to us and we've seen what the common challenges that they have, had in their business process, whether they're the retailer or the vendor. So, there's operational challenges, there's IT challenges. The biggest obviously in in everybody's mind is this inventory management. Right? Because you have multi parties involved, and products live differently than from the retailer. How do you manage inventory? How do you make sure that inventory that is in a warehouse is properly listed, properly tracked? When purchases are made, that inventory is deprecated so that someone doesn't go in and try and purchase something, they pay and then they don't have that inventory available. And throughout all this, because you have multi parties, multi systems, multi applications, there could be delays whether that's delays in the shipping, the actual fulfillment, or delays in the data being exposed to the consumer or the business itself. And all of that is done, you know, how do you manage this relationship whether you're a vendor or retailer, and how do you prevent roadblocks? Whether they're roadblocks from, you know, humans being involved in the process, having to pick, pack, and ship, or whether it's, customers coming to you with their needs. How how does how do all these operational things add up? And oftentimes, they're attempted to be solved through the IT applications that you purchased. But these come with, you know, high maintenance, whether you have to have a developer work in those applications like a warehouse management system or an ERP. They have their own cost associated with them, and that prevents things like if you're trying to expand, bringing on new vendors, new retailers, that can slow down the process, permit growth. And through all this, when you have multi parties involved, how do you maintain control over your own data or visibility into the process downstream once an order has left you or once you fulfill the product? What does visibility and control look like to make sure that your customers are having the experience that that you've built? So when, customer comes to us or comes to Celigo, they say, you know, we need to solve these problems. And so that's when the, you know, using iPass like Celigo, the goals for automating the drop shipping whether they're a retailer vendor, it it does a couple of things. Right? It improves those IT processes, whether it's scalability by, allowing, you know, a higher volume of orders, more customers, more retail centers or ecommerce channel that you can sell on. It also reduces costs so you don't have to when you use an iPaaS like Celigo that's that's easy to maintain and easy to build, you don't have to rely on heavy development in the applications. That creates agility, reduces costs, and and ultimately, you can retain control over both the business process as well as your customer's experience. And all of that kind of accumulates and you remove those operational challenges by, you you know, improving your IT structure and automating the process itself. So this is an example of a landscape that we've actually seen. Once you bring in something like Celigo and iPass that that can solve all of those issues that I just listed before. Right? So, you know, at a base level, it could just be the the marketplaces, the ecommerce stores, to the to the WMS or the warehouse. But once you have an iPaaS, you're able to automate and create this concept of intelligent commerce, beyond just the simple order to cash process. So you can work with your social media channels to bring in leads and drive customers to the same e commerce channels. The the ads you run will have accurate information because you're connecting to your source of truth with your product information, through your ERP or product management tool. You're able to store data within a data warehouse and run analytics so that the customer experience is improved and you're pushing data to the right place, whether it's, more accurate marketing, more accurate inventory forecasting. And then on the other end, you can fulfill faster. You can have greater customer success, when people come to you with problems, return management. So it's creating this full ecosystem through integration and automation, so that you have that control, that agility, and the ability to steal your business. So, through all that, there's, you know, different ways that that integration and automation can take place. So, we talked a little bit, you know, about ecommerce channels, ERPs, WMSs. Right? But the way you integrate and the pattern that you use to integrate are not the same, and it's very dependent on both the use case, maybe the vendors you're working with, maybe the demands of the supplier or the dealer. So there's three big buckets, and we'll break these down. There's application based. So you could think of, like, a Shopify to your ERP, whether it's, NetSuite, SAP, Business Central, or you can think of it going, you know, from a WMS software back into the ecommerce channel. These synchronize data vary directly between the two, and this can be, you know, orchestrated on this legal platform. You can also have an EDI based integration pattern using, you know, contacting your trading partners, using transactions, you know, orders, responses, acknowledgments, that comes with its own set of rules and requirements. And then there's, API based where, the a business process can be exposed or data can be exposed by an API, in which the API owner is choosing what process they expose, and then it's on either the vendor or the retailer to actually orchestrate make that call. And each have kind of pros and cons and and, all of them can be solved on Celigo, really based off of your needs and we'll kinda walk through that in the demo as well, each of the solutions we have for that. So to just quickly kinda break down each of these more, application based automation, the pros of this. Right? These are often common frameworks, common use cases or business processes. So you can have things like an out of the box integration that's easy to install and easy to stand up. And you have total orchestration control over that. And and these that's because these are these are common use cases that we've seen. Some cause with this and a lot of these cause that I'll go through are actually mitigated by using an integration tool, like Celigo. So, when you talk about application to application integrations, you can be limited by what the application itself can provide, from a scalability perspective, from a performance perspective, from a process perspective. And oftentimes, you need to customize it per application, so that limits the scalability of the entire process. There's maintenance involved with that. But it's a common, framework that we see. Right? Because, oftentimes, this is a key pinpoint. That's why someone needs to solve this immediately. And they have a that that pinpoint might be limited in scope and scale or they need to solve. When you talk about API based automation, right, this you you might be thinking there's some overlap here because, you know, oftentimes application to application integrations are API based. The difference here is the API in this in this framework is is being built and exposed, to be used by another party. So there's, control in the sense that the the API, it it has whatever process or use it's been built for. But it's on the, you know, the user of the API to actually orchestrate it. So they'll say when they wanna call it, they can tie it to whatever application they need. So it it's this is a very modern approach. You have a lot of control and security, especially when using our Celigo API and API management tool. But this is it can be a more developer centric, approach. There can be complex maintenance and we'll talk about actually how Celigo mitigates a lot of that with our with our builder tool. And you would use this when you're thinking highly about scale. You're like, I need to build a API that can be used by any number of suppliers or retailers. It's a it's a very modern approach. It's how all all applications typically talk with each other now. And so this is, while you might be using APIs and application to application based integration, this is a a different approach to that. And then there's EDI. Right? It's a widely accepted industry standard. Right? Many people work with, EDI. It's often a requirement when working with big box stores. There's it's reliable, it is scalable, and ensures compliance when you're talking about it because it's such a well known framework. There can be cons, if you don't use a tool like Celigo where there's complex setups, there's specialized maintenance, as well as knowledge just to even use them. And people would use this, right, because it is well known. It's it's an industry standard and and oftentimes required when you're talking to, high volume, partners. So I'm gonna pass it over to James to kinda walk through the demo of two of the frameworks, and then, we'll come back to me to talk about, API management. Perfect. Thank you, Nate. Let me get my screen shared out. Okay. Alright. Thank you again, Nate, for all that great information. I'm gonna cover off the EDI portion of the demonstration and also talk about how the application integrations work as well, And then I'll kick it back over to Nate. But with EDI, electronic data interchange, if you were wondering what that acronym meant, we're talking about x 12 EDI as well as EDIFACT, the European standard. So x 12 EDI is the North American standard as and and then you have the EDIFACT standard, which is European. We we handle both of those using our solution b to b manager, which is our self-service EDI solution. And and we'll we'll kinda get dive into that today at a very high level very quickly. But our jobs here at solution consultants is to really dive deep into a business's relationships with their suppliers or their vendors, and kind of uncover exactly what integration touch points are needed or what are necessary. A lot of the times with, EDI relationships, there is a requirement from someone. Right? And it's usually, it's up to the larger company who drives that requirement. So it's good to know who owns the requirement of EDI, what documents you're exchanging back and forth, what the connect connection methods may be because we can support all three, whether it's a s two, FTP, or value added network. So uncovering as much as we can about, that relationship is really gonna help us drive into what integration we're gonna, you know, support. And, you know, we're gonna be able to support whatever your your supplier, or your customer is going to be able to to configure on their end. Okay? When we're talking about EDI, we're talking about exchanging data files or business documents. So every business document has an EDI equivalent. Alright? So when an order is is coming in from a, say, Shopify and you need to send that to your your drop ship supplier or your vendor, you're going to be able to do that, automatically without having to go in here and touch any buttons. But you'd be able to drive that, from the ERP or from the e commerce channel. Okay. Whatever your preference may be. Best practice is probably going to be from the ERP, most likely, because when that order comes in from, say, an Amazon, marketplace where you have to fulfill the order or Shopify or BigCommerce, Magento, whatever it may be. Right? You're gonna probably bring that into the ERP and create a sales order. And the sales order, you can send to a three p l if you wanted to. But if you're working with a drop ship supplier, most likely that that sales order will generate that purchase order and be available to send now to, you know, the supplier so that it can be fulfilled. And when we're talking about EDI, we're talking about kind of a rigid language. You know, it is a standard. It's been around since the seventies. So it's it's adopted by many, but it's going to vary depending on who we're talking to. Every trading partner will have their own requirements or their mapping specifications. And I have an example I'll show you here momentarily of just what that would look like, and then I'll compare it to like an API document, that you would find online. But they're pretty they're they're very different. Okay? But the beauty with Celigo and iPaaS would would be that you can, you know, build, manage, and monitor all of your b to b integrations regardless of edifact or x 12 or, you know, an API with ShipStation. Right? For an example. When I start talking to folks about EDI relationships with suppliers with their drop ship suppliers, it's always good to start with inventory, in my opinion, because it's good to know what you can sell. Right? You don't wanna start putting product on your website, if you if your supplier can't fulfill it. Right? That that will cause some unhappy customers, I'm sure. So here's an example of me receiving, an inventory file from, from from a vendor, from a supplier three m, right, where I'm getting an eight forty six inventory file and I'm creating a CSV or or maybe I wanna also update an a custom record on the on my ERP side. Right? Because I don't I don't wanna show that my accountant said I own this inventory. Right? Because it's over at my drop ship supplier. So maybe I I do wanna work with NetSuite but just set a custom record capacity. And you can do that. Right? You can create really any type of data file or hit any API here when that EDI file comes in. But again, the beauty here is it could be an EDI file or it can be an API call. It's gonna look very similar, if not the same, on Celigo. Okay? So here we have the source coming in. This is the eight forty six inventory file. I'm not gonna go super deep into EDI today and how we parse it out and everything, but it's good to at least show you kind of the behind the scenes is what what EDI looks like. Maybe this is the first time you're looking at EDI, right, and you're wondering, you know, what yeah. I know what that acronym now means. But what does it mean when you look at it? And this is what it looks like out here, in the upper right hand corner. Right? So the inventory file coming in, it could look pretty pretty funky. Right? It's it's asterisk limited text. It's it takes a translation of sorts to convert this into something that a system can read. And that's what we're doing here. We're taking this data and we're normalizing it and producing JSON, which is the native language of our platform. Alright? Now you can map that data that EDI data is parsed out into a JSON format, and you can map that into a system just like you're mapping in, you know, like a Shopify order via an API call that you use. Okay? So, you know, getting eight forty six or EDI inventory detail, that's very important and it's good to know what you wanna do with that information. K? Because that's coming in from your supplier. How do you wanna reflect that on your end? Maybe it's a data warehouse and you can plug your data warehouse in here as well if you wanna connect it to your Snowflake table for inventory, or whatever it may be. K? So here's an example of just receiving an inventory file. Now when the order is ready to go out, you know, let's just use the example of, you know, taking the order from, NetSuite. Right? The an ERP. Or it could be Business Central. It could be anything. Right? It could be QuickBooks. Here in this example of this flow, we're getting the purchase order data from the ERP. Right? And this is calling out you safe search is gonna, you know, tell us what orders are available to send outbound. In this flow, I'm I'm communicating to two different suppliers or two different vendors. So if in that data from NetSuite, it's one big search but you have multiple vendors, you can create specific conditions and input the criteria to tell us whether or not to move that to three m or to Honeywell. Right? So one flow can handle multiple trading partners, multiple sources of data. So in this example, again, I'm taking orders from the ERP and I'm moving it out to, the supplier. Okay? And and again, these documents that we're mapping to are based on the trading partners documentation or requirements. And this is just an example. It's not the example for this scenario, but just to show you what an, EDI mapping specification looks like. Right? It it defines from whoever owns this requirement what connectivity method we're talking about. Right? AS two FTP or a secure FTP, or a value added network if if we need to, what documents are supported. So again, every relationship is going to be a little unique, but with the beauty of Celigo, you're gonna be able to adhere to all of those, requirements that are dictated down. Some of the documentation even give you a nice little flow diagram that show you not not only the documents, but where they fall into this, to this process. Okay? When to receive, when we send back status adjustments, when we send back shipping detail, etcetera. So a lot of information comes from EDI. It's an old standard, but it's still relevant today. So definitely, you know, take advantage of EDI if you can. Get some some suppliers you speak to, they may require EDI. Others may offer EDI or API. Maybe it's maybe it's a c you can also work with that. Sorry. My microphone auto muted there. Okay. Alright. That was my example. We'll get to that example with the with the API. So So here's the example of sending orders outbound. And and not all of your suppliers will adhere to the common four documents, order, order acknowledgement, ship notice, invoice. It could just be order, ship notice, invoice. Maybe they don't send invoices through EDI. You know, if they if they don't send invoices through EDI, it's probably, you know, some some email going somewhere, but we could probably find a solution for you if it's not EDI. But, you know, in the example of an invoice coming in from a supplier, you'll probably wanna create a vendor bill. Right, on the ERP side. Or or maybe you wanna just send a a notification via Slack to your accountant and then post a CSV file to an FTP that they can then, you know, grab and and do whatever they need to do with. But ideally, going straight to the ERP or business system will be will be, will be great. Running flows, you can do that, obviously, automatically with the scheduler tool. So you can get down every five minutes set up, and then if you wanna run it on demand, you can. And you can also set up a lot of these EDI flows in a real time type capacity. So instead of waiting for a scheduled batched event, you can have it set up to kinda listen for the transaction coming in from the from the supplier. Right? So you can you can have, the flow execute you know, so you'll probably have different flows and different flow groups for each supplier that you're working with because, again, they can be a little different. In this example, I'm having, you know, my Shopify orders. Right, coming in instead of going from ERP to the re to the supplier. Excuse me. I'm actually taking orders directly from my Shopify store and I'm sending those to my EDI supplier via a s two. Okay? And then it'll be a simple mapping exercise. But again, set it, forget it. But some of these flows, you can set up in a real time capacity, others on a scheduled batch basis. And then having complete visibility is also important. So anytime, you know, if if you did run, the flow, you know, manually or if it's running automatically, it's good to have visibility as to what's going on. And we do have a an EDI dashboard where you can check out all of the EDI data going to and fro of FTPIS two or value added network. Alright? But you can also get that data programmatically through the platform. So if you wanted to get your EDI data through an API call using Celigo's API, you can do that and you can send that information into a custom dashboard, or whatever it may be. So this is that invoice record we just pulled down. Right? You're seeing all the detail related to it, all the identifiers, etcetera. And you can push that data to your Slack channel, to, custom records, to a CSV file, etcetera. So there we go. So there's a lot more to uncover about b two b manager, our self-service EDI portal. And, again, it does handle both x 12 and EdEffect. So just for the sake of time, I am gonna jump over now and and discuss the, the application based, you know, kind of using, like, prebuilt APIs that are already available and how that kinda fits into the into the play here. So with, with dealing with a a supplier that says, hey. Just connect to my ship station. Connect to my WMS. I'm using three PL central. Okay? You can do that using, you know, hundreds I think we have close 500 plus prebuilt connectors that you could utilize. Those span from ERPs, WMSs, ship shipping solutions, accounting solutions. And and that would look very similar. Again, the beauty of the platform, whether it's EDI or API based, the flow and and flow builder is going to look very similar. Right? So if you wanna take a look at, you know, getting orders from an ERP or FTP and posting directly to ship station, right, this isn't going to an EDI file that has to be, you know, parsed out and translated on your supplier side. This will go directly into their system, which can provide some some value. Right? Maybe the supplier wants to have a little more control. Maybe that's why they're requiring EDI. But if they're okay with just how ShipStation works with their API calls, that would be where you can go in, you know, and just check out the the ShipStation API. If your if your supplier is using ShipStation and their the inventory quantities are available there, then just call out, get the SKUs, with the inventory quantity availability, you know, and pull that down and and enter that into, you know, that NetSuite custom record or a custom record for snapshots, etcetera. So this looks very similar except the difference would be there isn't a, you know, a file translation occurring behind the scenes. It's a little more direct. And again, there are positives and negatives to all of these different scenarios that we're talking about. And, you know, we're talking solely about drop ship suppliers, but you can also think of this with your raw materials suppliers as well if they're shipping to, say, your three p l. So I just had a call this morning. The raw material scenarios are a little more complicated. They can be a little more complicated depending on the relationship and the product, especially if, you know, lot numbers, serial numbers at the, you know, component level are required for a sub record. You can get pretty creative and complicated here. So, you know, we're talking about drop shipping. This is gonna work great in that, in that capacity. And then I have just one other example I'll show you here. Yeah. Just, you know, if you if you see something like this where we're getting estimates from QuickBooks online, which is an accounting system. Right? If you needed to add a step or add a source or add a destination to look up or whatever it may be, again, I did mention we have all of those prebuilt connectors available, and you can go out here and you can take a look and peruse the the list. Right? Recently used, obviously, we can just kinda go through that. Database connectors. Right? We don't need to go through all of those, but SQL, Snowflake, etcetera. Universal connectors are great, you know, to connect ASU FTP or any, you know, rest or soap based API. GraphQL connectors is ideal. So a lot of universal connectors. EDI trading partners have pre built trading partners for the EDI, the x 12, and the edifact relationships. So this will have pre map trading partners available, which is pretty slick. And then we have all of the named connectors that you can peruse. So, you know, close to 500 pre built connectors that you can drop into a flow. So that's it. I'm sorry. I probably took a little too much time there, Nate. My apologies. I'll stop my screen and I'll kick it back over to you if that's cool. Yeah. No. That's perfect, James. Thank you. Alright. Lovely. Yep. Thank you. Great. So the the third one that we kind of listed and talked about is this concept of of a pure API integration. And you can think of this when, that your business requirement is you want to expose, a business process or an application to maybe, if you're the retailer, you're exposing it to your three p l, or your vendor that has the supplies so they can retrieve orders, they can retrieve information about orders. Maybe if you're the the vendor or the supplier, you're saying, hey, retailer, here's our API. When you have an order come in, you call this to deliver the order to us. So you can actually think of this as you're building the component that gets used in the flow that James was just talking about. So we talked a little bit about, you know, the the maybe a con of this is it can be a little bit more technical, a little bit more developer centric, but, just like how James was showing a a simple UI, we've also built that into our product so that you can still create this pretty complex and scalable process and still, very easy to build and very easy to maintain. So what I'm showing here on my screen is an example of our API builder, where a a real use case where a warehouse needed to offer an API to to their retailers, and this they were able to take the component part within the same kind of UI and framework of the connectors and put this into an API that can then be exposed and both, securely and maintain that in the long run. So, this looks very similar to the flows that James was just showing and that's, of course, by design. So, using the same UI, you add the component parts. The difference with, API builder, honestly, the platform is, the first part is the request step. So this is built on every API builder flow that you create, where you, the user can come in here, name your request, determine what type of method, define the URI that comes in, create, you know, query parameters or path parameters or headers, the request body, all of the specifications that you would provide to, the the recipient of the API, and then you can come in here and create the process yourself. So in this case, they're going and reaching out to a Shopify store, to get additional information about the order. When someone tries to post an order, they're pushing it into their order fulfillment process, a custom application on a on a database in this case with the database back end. And this could use any of the components that we talked about whether it's a file based integration, a warehouse, a database integration, or, you know, invoking another API within process. And then you can define the responses on the back end. So when someone tries to post an order, you can just send them a success response with the response, like, maybe your own internal ID, or if there's an error or missing data in their request, you can respond that with custom messages and that sort of thing. So, unique about this Celigo platform and our offering is it's both the engine where you can build your APIs and then the maintenance layer as well. So, this API that, I built here can can be exposed immediately. I can, you know, give someone a API key to authenticate against this. I can give them the invoke URL. That's at a very, basic, level. But with our API management layer, you're both able to socialize that, create policies, monitor the integration very directly. So you can see here I was I'm able to view this API that I built in API management, and that's this tab here. So this is our dashboard where I'm getting a dashboard of all the APIs that I've exposed. They're all listed here, from within a list. So if I, you know, look up that that API that I created, I can come in here. This is my warehouse request, API that I've exposed. I can create key plans, which are ways that people can authenticate it as well as how you can apply policies. So rate limiting policies, geolocation policies, transformation. I can store my documentation from within the dashboard and expose that to the recipients. So if someone says, hey. How do I authenticate or how do I what fields are required for your API? It's all available to be shared through an over portal, and you store all this within within your account management dashboard. And then, of course, you have, analytics and logs where I can track, you know, what calls are being made against this API. I can see the the health of all of my APIs, across my dashboard. I can see, you know, what calls are being made, what statuses, were returned, to to the users. So from a central place, I can both bill, my APIs as well as expose them, to to to the consumer of that. So you can automate that process as well. So you can see here this, I have request coming in. I can see what application is making the request, what status was returned, if they hit rate limiting, or gateway issues. So all again available to to be built and then and then worked with the platform. So that's kind of the third, model for, the the integrating with drop shipping, whether it's, application based, whether it's, EDI based, or whether it's it's API based. So, just some key takeaways, before we wrap up here. You know, we've gone through a lot. I think a big one, right, is everybody has different requirements. It's just based off of maybe the industry, the vertical, the products that are offered, even just the business model of the different, retailers or vendors. And so with an iPaaS, right, we've we've built a tool that can handle all of the different patterns, whether it's, EDI, API, application to application. It's it's available to be to be configured. And when you bring an iPaaS in, one, it it accomplishes the immediate technical need, but it also, with Celigo's iPaaS, because it's low code, no code, it's it's UI based, it it can be flexible and agile to handle, you know, different requirements upfront, the the immediate need. But also when you talk about scaling long term, like bringing on new suppliers or new vendors, with an iPaaS, you have the flexibility to handle really any of the use cases that come up. So as a business, you can always say, yes, we can support that, even as business requirements change or new ones come up. And with an iPaaS, it's it's not just about, the technical build, it's also about the maintenance. So long term reducing the cost, making sure that it's easy to understand if an error comes up, how you resolve it, and how you can work, you know, with different requirements, across, you know, the different whether you're a retailer or a supplier. Great. So now, if you have any questions, please post them in q and a. I'll pass it back to you later to kinda wrap us up here. Yep. Thank you, Nate, and thank you, James. So if you haven't already done so, now is a great time, you know, to to drop in your, questions. And then, so while waiting, you can scan this barcode and register to our upcoming Black Friday Cyber Monday prep webinar. So this will be an upcoming panel discussion, and we'll have experts from well known retailers and, tech vendors that will discuss how, businesses can prepare their tech stack and optimize their workflows for, to get ready for the holiday season. So let's see if we have any questions here. And also one more announcement, actually. So we have a survey available, and it should take you less than a minute to complete. So please make sure, you complete that before you leave. Okay. So now let me take a look at the questions. Okay. So, first question. My dropshipper uses fixed width files, which is their own standard. Can your platform help with that? Hey, bro. I can take that one. This is James. So yeah. Absolutely. It's funny. I just had a call a couple weeks ago where someone was saying, hey. I need to I need to conform to these x 12 standards. Can you please, you know, map this? Sure. Give me the the specs and the the the sample files. And when I received those, it turned out they were fixed with files. So we most certainly do have the ability on our platform to map to those fixed with files. We would just need to add the mappings. So as long as we have, the layouts, schema, sample files, we should be able to get that mapped. No problem. X 12 v d I files or, you know, some kind of asterisk or I'm sorry. Some kind of delimited file type. Right? Fixed position are a little different, but, yeah, absolutely. We can help you out there. The the platform can support JSON, XML, CXML, fixed with files, Excel files, CSV. You know, the list goes on. So absolutely. Yep. Good question. Yep. So another question I see is, do you support fishbowl inventory management or Milipath? That's fine. I'll take this one too just because I used to I I worked with the the folks over there for for a number of years on the on the EDI side. But, yes, I'm pretty sure Fishbowl, inventory now has rest APIs available. So we probably wanna connect via, you know, rest. But I do also know that they do support flat files, and I think they're CSV type files, comma, delimited, but it could be tab delimited. So, yes, whether it's API or or, you know, file exchange, we can we can certainly work with that. And I believe, yeah, Lilypad has some APIs available too. But I I know the guy there, so we can we can find out more. But, yeah, reach out to us for sure. Good question. Okay. Great. And I think we are almost at time here. I see, a question about more introductory info about the API builder tool. So we can, you know, reach out to you offline about that and provide you more info here. And let me just quickly go here because I also would like to highlight the resources we have available for you. First of all, yes, we have an upcoming webinar. We shared the registration link for you, but then you'll also see we have a blog post about NetSuite EDI for drop shipping, a guide for suppliers. And then there's a definitive guide to modernizing EDI and also an on demand session for the future of connectivity, uniting APIs and integrations. And we have also included a customer success story, from La Sportiva. So you can, click on these docs, on the right side and, download those. Okay. I believe, this brings us, to the end of the webinar as we're on time. And if there are any questions that weren't answered, we will reach out to you offline. So thank you so much, for joining us today. And if you would like to, you know, schedule a consultation, discuss further how you can optimize dropshipping, feel free to click on the request a demo button on top or just, you know, reach us, through the chat window on our website at silica.com. Thank you so much. Bye.