Why Promostandards is Important to the Promotional Products Industry

There has been a lot of talk about Promostandards. What is it? Can I join, sign up or pay to get involved? Unfortunately, very few people still understand the behind it and the importance of being involved.

Let’s start with why you want to be involved. If you are a supplier, you want an easy way to provide access to your products and send/receive electronic order details. As a distributor you want to get real-time information from suppliers and send/receive order details electronically. In the past these were only available by writing unique code for each supplier to build connections. Unique code is expensive and hard to maintain. By using a standard that all suppliers/distributors use, connection to each other is simple and just requires a username and password to access everything you need.

Joining or signing up is simple. Go to promostandards.org and create an account. Once an account is created, you will be able to login and send  requests to suppliers to connect and receive credentials. If you have a business management system in place like Antera’s Advance™, you simply enter your credentials and you will have live connections to all those suppliers.

Once connected you will be able to receive live pricing, inventory, product images and configuration, and you will also be able to receive electronic invoices and submit electronic purchase orders. No more logging in to supplier’s web sites to get today’s pricing, specials and available inventory. It is now all available all online. The question becomes, do you want to receive information for a search engine or from the source? The actual supplier is feeding this information to you. And for suppliers, do you want a third party handling your pricing and product information distribution, or would you prefer to share it directly with your accounts.

In addition, order status and shipping notification keep you up to date with orders and make sure nothing falls through the cracks.

Today, promostandards has become a crucial driving force behind the prosperity of the promotional products industry. The increasing popularity of eBusiness/online shopping means that consumer expectations for faster turnarounds and a better overall experience have increased. By dovetailing the supplier and distributor business processes together in this way, promostandards has not only helped suppliers and distributors to increase efficiency today but will dramatically improve your profits in the future.

If your organization is part of the promotional products/promotional merchandise industry supply chain and you would like to ensure your operation is promostandards compliant, please visit promostandards.org to become a member and download the promostandards specifications to determine the path for implementation in your business, or contact Antera Software USA, Inc. for us to discuss it with you.