For growing companies on NetSuite, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s a fundamental requirement for doing business with major retail and distribution partners. But the EDI landscape hasn’t kept pace with the modern needs of flexibility, speed, and transparency.
Too often, teams get stuck with rigid systems, hidden costs, and cobwebbed integrations that require constant maintenance. As your operations scale, those limitations only multiply. Fortunately, there’s a better way through the MindCloud and Orderful partnership.
What EDI Does for NetSuite Customers
EDI automates the exchange of key documents like Purchase Orders (PO), Invoices, Advance Ship Notices (ASN), and Inventory Updates between you and your retail or distribution partners. Instead of manually retyping orders or emailing PDFs, EDI enables NetSuite to send and receive this data instantly, system-to-system.
Bottom line: EDI helps you meet retail requirements, eliminate manual errors, and speed up your entire order-to-cash process.
The Problem with Traditional EDI
Legacy EDI systems were built decades ago for slower, manual workflows. Today, they typically come with:
- Rigid NetSuite customizations that are hard to maintain.
- Transaction-based pricing that spikes as volume grows.
- Multiple vendors piecing together different parts of the process.
- Slow onboarding for each new trading partner.
This outdated model becomes a roadblock to growth, consumes your team’s time, and introduces risk to every integration point.
What Modern EDI Should Look Like
For businesses scaling fast across wholesale and e-commerce, EDI needs to be:
- Flexible: Quickly onboard new trading partners without starting from scratch.
- Predictable Costs: Avoid unpredictable, transaction-based fees as you scale.
- ERP-Centric: Keep NetSuite as the single source of truth without excessive customization.
- Omnichannel-Ready: Combine EDI, marketplaces, and ecommerce into a single system.
- Scalable: Add new partners or channels without a full system rebuild.
How Orderful + MindCloud Work Together — and What You Get
Together, MindCloud and Orderful offer a streamlined, modern approach to EDI that enhances NetSuite without the complexity of legacy systems.
What Orderful Does
Orderful is your EDI backbone. It simplifies trading partner communication by:
- Managing onboarding and compliance for each retail partner.
- Normalizing document formats across partners.
- Offering flat-rate pricing (no per-transaction fees).
- Enabling scalable, cloud-native connections without point-to-point chaos.
It ensures documents like 850s (POs), 856s (ASNs), and 810s (Invoices) are delivered correctly, with none of the maintenance headaches.
What MindCloud Does
MindCloud connects EDI documents directly to and from NetSuite without invasive ERP changes by:
- Mapping Orderful’s data into your NetSuite fields and saved searches.
- Enabling real-time, API-based syncs (no batch delays).
- Managing one connection per document type—Manage 850s, 810s, 856s, 997s, 820s, and 846s across all trading partners.
The result is a seamless, unified system where NetSuite remains your operational source of truth.
What You Gain
- Minimal NetSuite lift – Add saved searches or fields without deep ERP changes.
- One-to-many setup – One integration per document type across all trading partners.
- Real-time syncs – Data flows instantly between NetSuite and your partners.
- Shared responsibility – Orderful handles onboarding; MindCloud manages NetSuite mapping.
- Zero retyping – EDI data flows straight into NetSuite.
- Clean ERP setup – No messy scripts or hard-coded fields.
- Scalable onboarding – Add new retail partners in days, not months.
- Unified visibility – One source of truth for orders, inventory, and payments.
Beyond EDI: Unifying Your Commerce Stack
Business today isn’t only about EDI. You need to serve customers across multiple channels—and do it efficiently.
MindCloud doesn’t stop at EDI. Its platform also connects NetSuite to leading ecommerce and marketplace platforms, including:
- Shopify
- BigCommerce
- Amazon Seller Central
- Walmart Marketplace
- Retailers like Ulta, Target, and more.
With this unified commerce stack, you can:
- Eliminate fragmented, one-off integration tools.
- Centralize orders, inventory, fulfillment, and payments.
- Scale both DTC and wholesale operations without rework.
Instead of patching together tools, you get a single integration fabric that simplifies your entire business.
White-Glove Integration: No Integration Headaches
You don’t want to be an EDI or integration expert. You just want everything to work. That’s exactly what this setup delivers.
- Orderful handles trading partner onboarding and ongoing compliance.
- MindCloud manages NetSuite-side integration, mapping, and real-time data flow.
- Both teams provide go-live support, testing, and troubleshooting.
A Practical, Future-Proof Path Forward
Modernizing your EDI stack doesn’t mean doing no work. It means doing the right work once, so you can scale with confidence. By shifting to a platform approach with MindCloud + Orderful, businesses can reduce costs, speed up partner launches, integrate new marketplaces, and keep NetSuite at the center of their operations.
Schedule a call to see how we can help.
