E-commerce teams

PunchOut for e-commerce teams

You already have a storefront that works. It converts, it is maintained, and you have opinions about it. Now sales has come back from an enterprise account with a requirement involving cXML, and the question is what it does to your platform.

The honest answer is usually less than you fear. PunchOut is a layer in front of the catalogue you already have — a session handshake, an authenticated identity, and a structured cart post on the way out. Your storefront keeps doing what it does.

The part that genuinely touches your platform is per-buyer contract pricing, and that is where B2C-derived platforms tend to run out of road.

What makes this different for you

Procurement requirements arrive as deadlines, not ticketsA protocol requirement lands mid-roadmap with a date already agreed by someone in sales.
Per-buyer pricing is the real constraintMost consumer-derived platforms assume one price per product. Contract pricing per authenticated buyer is the requirement that decides whether this is configuration or engineering.
cXML is a niche competenceIt is a well-documented protocol, but debugging a rejected PunchOutOrderMessage against a specific buyer’s validation rules is a narrow skill to build for one integration.
Buyer testing consumes calendar, not just effortTest cycles run on the buyer’s schedule and are hard to plan a sprint around.

How we approach it

  • We work alongside your existing stack rather than replacing it, and we will say plainly if your platform genuinely cannot support what the buyer needs.
  • The endpoint, session handling and cXML translation sit with us, so your team does not acquire a protocol specialism for one account.
  • Buyer-specific pricing is implemented against your existing catalogue and customer model wherever it can be.
  • We handle buyer technical coordination, which is the part that consumes the most calendar and the least code.

The same published pricing applies regardless of segment: Connect at $199/month for a PunchOut catalogue, Order Loop at $349 if purchase orders and invoices are also in scope, and Full Enablement from $599 where the catalogue itself needs building.

Common questions

Will this require changes to our storefront?

Sometimes, and the honest predictor is whether your platform can already show different prices to different logged-in customers. If it can, changes are usually modest. If it cannot, that is the substantive piece of work and we would flag it before you committed.

Can we build this ourselves?

Yes — it is a documented protocol and a competent team can implement it. The question is whether you want to own buyer-side coordination and ongoing maintenance for it afterwards. We wrote a fair comparison of building, buying a self-serve tool, and outsourcing.

Does this work with Shopify or WooCommerce?

Generally yes. Both can serve as the catalogue behind a PunchOut endpoint. The per-buyer pricing requirement is again what determines how much additional work sits on top.

Further reading

Find out what your buyer actually requires

Send us the requirement your buyer sent you. We will tell you which tier covers it and how long it takes — before you commit to anything.

Start a conversation See pricing