The Hidden Cost of Doing It Yourself – GetConnect

Many promotional merchandise businesses build their first order integrations themselves, and on paper, it’s the obvious choice. There’s no integration fee, no specialist invoice, just a developer’s time and a willingness to get stuck in. The trouble is that this comparison rarely accounts for what happens after the first connection is built, when the orders, products, and client systems involved in promotional goods e-commerce start throwing up the edge cases that a quick build wasn’t designed to handle.

Ask most operations teams in this sector how much time they spend manually managing order data, and the answer is usually higher than they expect, because the work has crept in gradually rather than arriving all at once. A missing field gets corrected by hand. A currency mismatch gets fixed before it reaches finance. A supplier’s product feed gets reformatted in a spreadsheet before it goes anywhere near the website. None of these takes long in isolation, but across a week of orders, client portals, and supplier feeds, the hours add up into a job that nobody planned for and nobody is accounting for in the cost of the “free” integration.

In our work with distributors and suppliers across promotional goods, three integration failures come up more often than any others. The first is product data, where poor quality data from suppliers, especially differences between suppliers, translates poorly to the user’s experience of your website. The second is order data that does not sync cleanly with your ERP system, leaving someone to re-key details that should have transferred automatically. The third is procurement system connections, particularly PunchOut, that work in testing but fail under the conditions of a live corporate buyer, often at the exact moment a new client is forming their first impression of the relationship.

Agencies face a related version of this problem. Where a distributor’s integration challenge tends to centre on one product catalogue, an agency managing several supplier relationships often has to reconcile several feeds, several sets of edge cases, and several points of failure at once. Just as in personal relationships, more parties involved creates more opportunity for misunderstanding, and with automation, those misunderstandings could affect hundreds of orders before you realise something’s wrong.

That last point about onboarding matters more than it might first appear. When a corporate client signs with a new promotional goods supplier, speed to connection is often part of the pitch, and a slow or fragile integration during onboarding can undermine the relationship-building work your account managers are doing. A DIY integration that has been patched together to cope with one set of conditions is rarely built to onboard a new, larger client quickly, and the businesses that win that growth tend to be the ones whose systems can absorb a new connection without a lengthy project behind it.

None of this happens because a business made a bad decision. It happens because each fix, each workaround, and each new tool was a reasonable response to the problem in front of it at the time. The result, a few years on, is a tangle of connections that nobody fully understands, supported by documentation that has not kept pace and knowledge that sits with one or two people rather than the system itself. When something breaks, fixing it tends to surface a problem somewhere else, and the team ends up playing whack-a-mole!

Working with a specialist integration partner does not remove cost, it relocates it, from ongoing internal maintenance and the slow accumulation of edge cases, to a single, predictable relationship with someone who has already solved these problems for other businesses in the sector. A properly built integration handles the shipping addresses, the currency formats, and the procurement quirks that are specific to promotional goods, because that pattern recognition has been built up across multiple clients rather than learned the hard way on one account.

A joined-up approach looks different in practice. Rather than treating each connection as a separate project, it starts from a single framework linking e-commerce, ERP, and procurement systems, with visibility over every transfer and failure point in one place. That visibility is what turns integration from a recurring cost into something that actively supports the next stage of growth.

The full cost comparison between DIY and a specialist partner rarely favours DIY once development time, ongoing maintenance, the risk of failed orders, and the cost of slow onboarding are properly accounted for. For promotional goods businesses preparing to scale, that comparison is worth running properly, because the systems supporting growth need to be assessed on more than the price of the initial build.

Five Questions to Ask About Your Current Integration

1. Do you know how many hours a week your team spends manually correcting order or product data?
2. Could you onboard a new corporate client’s procurement system within a week, with confidence?
3. If the person who built your current integration left tomorrow, could anyone else maintain it?
4. Do your product feeds update automatically, or does someone reformat them by hand first?
5. When something breaks, do you know which system caused it, or does it take hours to trace?

About GetConnect

John O’Rourke is Director of GetConnect, which helps promotional merchandise distributors, suppliers, and agencies connect their e-commerce, ERP, and procurement systems. For more information, visit getconnect.net/contact.