CIF catalogue vs PunchOut
Your buyer said “send us your catalogue”. That sentence describes two completely different pieces of work, and picking the wrong one costs weeks.
The difference in one line
A CIF catalogue is a file you send. A PunchOut catalogue is a door into your website. The question that separates them is where the authoritative price lives — in a file sitting inside the buyer's system, or on your own site at the moment the buyer looks at it.
CIF stands for Catalog Interchange Format — a flat file, essentially a structured CSV, that Ariba popularised and most procurement systems now accept in some form. "Hosted catalogue", "static catalogue" and "punch-in" all usually mean this.
Side by side
| CIF / hosted catalogue | PunchOut | |
|---|---|---|
| What you deliver | A file | A live endpoint |
| Where the buyer shops | Inside their own system | On your site |
| Authoritative price | Whatever was in the last file | Your site, at that moment |
| Price updates | New file, then they reload it | Immediate |
| Product options and configuration | Not supported | Supported |
| Stock and availability | Not shown | Can be shown live |
| Needs an always-on service | No | Yes |
| Effort to start | Low | Higher |
| Effort to maintain | Every change is a resubmission | Your site is already the source |
| Fails by | Going quietly stale | Going visibly down |
That last row is the honest summary. A stale CIF file keeps working and keeps being wrong; a broken PunchOut endpoint stops and somebody tells you.
When CIF is genuinely the right answer
When CIF will hurt you
- Prices that move. Anything indexed to a commodity, a currency, or a supplier surcharge will be wrong in the buyer's system within weeks.
- Large ranges. Tens of thousands of lines regenerated and resubmitted on every change becomes a standing job for someone.
- Configurable products. A flat file has no way to express options, and buyers will order combinations you cannot supply.
- Contract pricing across several buyers. One file per buyer, each maintained separately, each able to drift out of step independently.
The failure mode to plan for is not technical. It is a buyer raising a purchase order at last quarter's price and your invoice not matching it — which is resolved as a contract dispute, not a bug.
Establishing which one they mean
"Send us your catalogue" is genuinely ambiguous. Three questions settle it, and all three are reasonable to ask in an email:
- Do you want to load a file into your system, or have users shop our site from inside it?
- If a file — what format, and how often do you reload it?
- If shopping our site — cXML or OCI, and Level 1 or Level 2?
The answer to the last one determines nearly everything about the work. We wrote up what Level 1 and Level 2 actually mean and how to tell cXML from OCI.
Common questions
Which one will my buyer ask for?
Usually PunchOut, and increasingly so — but not always, and the answer depends on what you sell. Buyers tend to prefer a hosted CIF catalogue for small, stable ranges where the price rarely moves, and PunchOut for anything large, configurable, or priced dynamically. Ask, rather than assuming, because the two are entirely different pieces of work.
Is CIF easier for us?
Easier to start, harder to live with. You produce a file rather than running an endpoint, so there is no session handling and nothing to keep online. But every price change, new product and discontinuation means producing and submitting a new file, and until the buyer loads it their system is quoting your old prices as though they were current.
What happens if a CIF price is out of date?
The buyer raises a requisition at the old price and your invoice does not match their purchase order. That lands in an exception queue and gets resolved as a commercial disagreement rather than a data problem. This is the single biggest argument for PunchOut: your site stays authoritative, so the price a buyer sees is always the price you meant.
Can we do both?
Yes, and larger suppliers often do — a hosted file for a stable core range and PunchOut for everything else, sometimes for the same buyer. It doubles the maintenance, so it is worth doing deliberately rather than by accident.
Is a CIF file the same as a Level 2 PunchOut index?
They are closely related and often the same file format, but they do different jobs. A CIF catalogue is what the buyer orders from. A Level 2 index only powers search inside the buyer’s system, and the actual selection still happens on your site. The distinction that matters is which system holds the authoritative price.
Not sure which your buyer is asking for?
Forward us their email. Working out whether they mean a file or an endpoint takes us a minute and saves you a fortnight.
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