How it works
One form to add a dealer. Nothing for them to install.
Your trading partners connect the way they already connect. You add them from a single form, and everything that moves is recorded.
Your dealer needs nothing new
They connect over SFTP or Web Services — whichever they already use — with credentials issued to them alone. There is no software for them to buy, no portal for them to learn, and no project on their side. Most dealers are trading the same week.
Adding a dealer is one form, and it either completes or unwinds
Behind that form, seventeen objects are written: the dealer record, the SFTP username, the jail path, the inbound and outbound folders, the permissions, the address allowlist. Every value is listed before a single one is written, with its before and after. If any step fails, the earlier ones reverse. You never end up with a half-built partner that looks fine on screen.
You can always answer “where is it?”
Every stage carries a timestamp and — unusually — a record of which system observed it. When something stops, the first question is always whose problem it is. Most systems make you guess.
- 01 You send a document
- 02 it is recorded, checksummed, and its envelope read
- 03 your dealer collects it
- 04 your dealer acknowledges
- 05 the acknowledgement is matched to the original by control number, in the opposite direction
- 06 and it is archived verbatim
The check that prevents an expensive mistake
In EDI, a catalog is the whole list as far as the receiving dealer is concerned. Send three of the eight colours you make in a style, and the other five are discontinued on their side — silently, with nothing anywhere reporting it.
So the counts are read back to you, per style, on screen, before you walk away.
It is the single most useful thing an upload does, and most catalog tools will not mention it at all.
Errors are reported the same way — located by row and column, with the reason, so a correction is a spreadsheet edit rather than an investigation. Nothing is partially accepted. A submission is taken whole or refused whole.
When a version can't express something, we refuse
fcB2B has more than one live version and they do not spell every concept the same way. Where a target version has no way to carry a field you supplied, InformB2B refuses and tells you, rather than dropping the segment and shipping a document that looks perfectly well formed.
Most converters truncate. You find out from your dealer.