Why Your Order Portal Is Costing You Money – GetConnect

Across the promotional goods sector, investment in e-Commerce has grown steadily – but for many distributors and suppliers, the returns have not kept pace with the effort. Orders come through, the portal functions, but the manual workload refuses to shrink. John O’Rourke, Director of GetConnect, has spent over twenty years working on integration challenges in the promotional merchandise industry. Here, he explores where the most overlooked hidden costs are, why that’s changed in the past 10 years. An Order Portal Is Not the Same as Integration Most promotional goods distributors now have some form of online ordering capability. That’s the first step – typically in this industry, we either build something with an agency, or take an off-the-shelf site pre-populated with products, such as those from Sourcing City and Pinpoint. Later, we get a requirement from a contract client, and build something with their products and their prices, and receive the orders by email. Then we take an important step – wanting those orders to reach our order processing or warehouse system automatically. That’s our starting point – how do you balance your past investment in, say, a CRM system, with investment in new technology that may not connect to your existing system?

When a buyer places an order through your portal, what happens next? If the answer involves manually copying that order into other systems, checking it against a pricing file, or sending a message to the warehouse to confirm availability, then you may be one of the frustrated many who know that technology can help, but when you have a limited budget and a working process, it’s hard to see what the benefits of automation are, versus investment in sales or a warehouse system.

Research suggests that businesses with fully integrated e-Commerce and back-office systems process orders up to 40% faster, with meaningfully lower error rates, and in a sector where promotional goods orders can involve complex product specifications, client-specific pricing, and time-sensitive delivery windows, those gains translate directly into capacity, accuracy, and the ability to take on more work without increasing the manual load on your team.

“How do you balance your past investment in, say, a CRM system, with investment in new technology that may not connect to your existing system?”

The Manual Workaround That Nobody Talks About

Here is a comforting thought: manual re-keying of order data is still the hidden norm across a significant portion of the promotional goods sector. Buyers place orders digitally, and someone on the supplier or distributor side then transfers that data – manually – into the system that fulfils it. It happens because it works, at least up to a point, and because workarounds for managing lower volumes tend to become routine before anyone has formally decided they should be.

The costs of that arrangement accumulate quietly. Time spent on manual re-entry is time not spent on higher-value work, errors introduced in the transfer create delays and client queries that take further time to resolve, and as order volume grows, a process that felt manageable at lower scale becomes genuinely unsustainable. Research suggests that around 26% of businesses operate with only partially integrated e-Commerce systems, relying on manual reconciliation between platforms, and in the promotional sector, that figure often feels conservative rather than generous.

What makes this particularly worth addressing now is that the clients placing those orders have changed their expectations – we’re dealing with buyers and marketing managers who’ve grown up with e-commerce, apps and rarely having to pick up the phone. The gap between what they want and what a disconnected system can deliver is widening.

What Corporate Clients Actually Expect

B2B buyers now spend just 17% of their purchasing journey talking to a supplier, according to Gartner research, with the remainder being independent – researching, comparing, and in many cases placing orders without any direct contact at all. For promotional goods distributors whose largest and most valuable clients are corporate organisations with their own procurement teams, that shift has a specific implication: those clients do not necessarily want to order through your portal. They want to order through theirs.

Punchout catalogue integration is what makes that possible. It allows a corporate buyer to browse and select from your product range from within their own procurement platform, with the order data flowing back to you cleanly and without manual intervention at either end. For procurement teams working at scale, with approval workflows and budget controls built into their own systems, this kind of connectivity is not a feature they will admire from a distance – it is increasingly a requirement they will specify when choosing between distributors.

Forrester research puts the broader dynamic clearly: 74% of B2B buyers say they would switch distributor for a better digital buying experience, not better products, not better pricing, just a more straightforward way of doing business. The promotional goods distributor who can connect to a corporate client’s procurement system is solving a real operational problem for that client’s team. The one who cannot is, quietly, asking them to work harder than they need to.

“74% of B2B buyers say they would switch distributor for a better digital buying experience – not better products, not better pricing, just a more straightforward way of doing business.”

Where to Start

If any of this resonates, the practical starting point is usually simpler than it first appears. The promotional goods businesses we work with rarely need to rebuild their e-Commerce setup from scratch – they need to close the gap between what their current portal does and what their business, and their clients, need from it. That typically means connecting the portal to the back-office systems around it so orders flow without manual steps, adding Punchout capability to existing or new portals for the clients who require it, and ensuring product data stays accurate across all channels without someone manually maintaining it.

A useful first exercise is to map your current order journey honestly, from the moment a buyer submits an order to the moment it is confirmed in your fulfilment system and count how many manual steps sit in between. Where does data get transferred by a person rather than automatically? What happens to that process when the person who manages it is unavailable? The answers tend to be instructive, and in our experience, the gap is almost always smaller to close than it initially looks.

A follow-up exercise is to look at the systems you currently have. It’s easy to think that modern systems mean having the most efficiency, but changing a twenty-year old in-house system with years of data and staff who understand it is a very costly exercise. It’s surprisingly possible to connect older and newer systems together, and start seeing savings before investing in newer systems.

About the Author John O’Rourke is Director of GetConnect, a UK-based e-Commerce integration specialist with over twenty years of experience helping promotional goods distributors and suppliers connect their systems and grow their digital operations. GetConnect’s platform, GetConnect Hub, is built around the specific requirements of the promotional merchandise sector.