Be Orderable From Inside Ariba and Coupa, at Full Catalog Scale

MRO distribution has two problems that look like one, and most website projects only solve the smaller of them.

The smaller problem is the catalog. A hundred thousand items or more, each with technical attributes, cross references and substitutes. Without real faceting it is not a catalog, it is a warehouse with the lights off. A maintenance manager looking for a specific bearing, glove or cutting tool gives up and calls, and your inside sales team becomes the search engine.

The bigger problem is that your best customers are never going to use it. Plant procurement raises a requisition inside Ariba or Coupa, routes it for approval there, and turns it into a purchase order there. If you are not punchout-enabled, you are not in that workflow, and a competitor who is will get the line even when your price is better.

Underneath both, the revenue nobody digitizes.

Vending and vendor managed inventory run on data the website never sees. You are managing stock on the customer's site, and the usage data that should drive replenishment lives in a separate system or a spreadsheet on somebody's laptop.

Reorder points and min max levels are invisible. The customer knows what they consume. Your site treats every order as if it were the first one.

Blanket purchase orders do not fit a cart. A release against an existing blanket PO is not a checkout, and forcing it through one creates reconciliation work for both sides.

Tool crib and branch network complexity gets flattened. Which branch, which crib, which cost center, billed to which department. A storefront that only understands one shipping address cannot express any of it.

And the line card matters more than the storefront. Which manufacturers you are authorized to sell, at what level, into which territory, is the commercial reality your catalog has to reflect.

Treat this as what it is, which is an integration program with a storefront on the front of it, not a website build with some integrations attached.

Punchout into the systems your buyers already use. cXML punchout so a requisition raised in Ariba or Coupa reaches your catalog, at that account's contracted pricing and approved assortment, and returns the cart into their approval workflow as a purchase order. Uncap builds and owns this layer as part of the engagement rather than introducing a separate procurement vendor for your team to manage alongside the build.

Search that survives the catalog. Faceted filtering across the full assortment, tuned to your attribute model. Uncap has delivered this at a scale well beyond most MRO catalogs: ULE Group runs over a million SKUs on Shopify, with Epicor as the ERP, Akeneo holding product information and Algolia handling search, and published outcomes of a 6X increase in online sales and a 559% year on year increase in traffic.

Account structure that matches the plant. Uncap Portal provides the account layer, published as real multi-user accounts with roles and permissions, each buyer seeing their own assortment and pricing, and budgets, approvals and limits per user. The branch, tool crib and cost center hierarchy underneath that, and the contracted assortment scoped per account so a buyer sees the line card you actually sell them, are built on top of it during implementation.

The replenishment programs, fed from real data. Uncap Connect keeps Shopify and the ERP in sync in real time, embedded in Shopify rather than sitting in middleware. Reorder points, min max levels, blanket purchase order releases and the usage data behind your vending and vendor managed inventory programs move between the systems that own them, with the ERP remaining the system of record.

A note on that last point, because it is where projects go wrong. Industrial vending and VMI are not storefront features and no platform ships them. They are inventory and usage data flowing between your ERP, the customer's site and your replenishment process. The commerce layer's job is to expose that data where a buyer or a rep needs it and to make the release orderable. Any vendor telling you their platform does VMI natively is describing something else.

cXML punchout to Ariba, Coupa and the rest. Level 2 punchout into the procurement platforms your accounts run, with contracted pricing and approved assortment applied, and the cart returned into their requisition and approval flow. Built and maintained inside the engagement.

Faceted search across a hundred thousand items and up. Filtering on the technical attributes that identify an MRO part, with substitutes and cross references surfaced, at catalog scale Uncap has already delivered.

Contracted assortment and line card scoping. Each account sees the manufacturers and products you are authorized to sell them, at their pricing, so the catalog reflects your line card rather than your whole warehouse.

Blanket purchase order releases. A release against an existing blanket PO is handled as a release, with the remaining balance visible, rather than forced through a checkout that creates reconciliation work.

Reorder points and min max visibility. Consumption-driven replenishment surfaced to the buyer and the rep, so the reorder happens on the data rather than on somebody remembering.

Vending and VMI data flows. Usage and stock data from vending units and managed inventory move through Uncap Connect into the ERP and back out to the storefront, so the program runs on current numbers.

Tool crib, branch and cost center structure. Multi-level account hierarchy with the crib, the branch and the cost center modeled properly, so material is ordered, delivered and billed the way the plant is organized. Built during implementation on top of Portal's multi-user account structure rather than shipped in it.

Rep-assisted ordering. Your inside sales team builds and places orders on behalf of an account, seeing the same pricing and availability the buyer sees.

Shopify Platinum Partner, on Shopify since 2013, with 380+ storefronts launched. Shopify B2B supplies company accounts, company-specific catalogs and customer-specific price lists enforced at login. Punchout, catalog-scale search, the account hierarchy and the replenishment data flows are what Uncap builds around it.

ULE Group. Over a million SKUs on Shopify, with Epicor, Akeneo and Algolia. 6X increase in online sales and 559% year on year traffic growth. This is industrial distribution at a catalog scale most MRO distributors will never reach, and it answers the only real question about Shopify in this category, which is whether it holds up at size. It does, and the systems that make it work are named rather than implied.

Named industrial and janitorial customers, published. WeldingStore, a welding supply business of more than half a century, on quote-to-order with Uncap: "Ultra professional, receptive, and helpful during the entire process. Creating a web store for my business was a new venture and unknown territory for us, Uncap has made it a breeze." Brandt DeVries, Director of Operations. Sanitaire, a commercial cleaning equipment manufacturer of nearly fifty years, on their Shopify Plus build with ERP integration: "They delivered the project before the deadline, and it was just an exceptionally smooth experience." Christiane Gevorkyan, Senior Manager.

Punchout is owned, not subcontracted. Across this category, punchout normally arrives as a third-party middleware layer bought separately and coordinated alongside the build. That works, and it also means a second vendor, a second contract and a second party to call when a procurement platform changes its handshake. Uncap builds the cXML layer inside the engagement so it belongs to the same team as the catalog and the ERP connection.

Selling machinery and equipment parts as well as MRO supply? The buyer is different enough to need its own answer. A parts manager or an end user keeping a machine running starts from the machine, not the part, and needs an exploded view or a serial number lookup to get to the right component, with supersessions resolved. Dealers need their own portal and their own pricing. The commercial conversation is fitment and availability rather than punchout and contracted assortment. If that is the half of your catalog you are trying to fix, start with machinery and equipment parts. Distributors carrying both run them from one Shopify store and one ERP connection.

The orders you are losing are not lost on price. They are lost because the requisition was raised somewhere you could not be reached, or because the part could not be found in a catalog that contains it.

Book a free strategy session. We will look at which procurement platforms your largest accounts run, the real size and attribute model of your catalog, how your vending and VMI data moves today, and your ERP, and show you what it takes to be orderable from inside their systems.

Not ready to build yet? Uncap Blueprint maps the integration architecture and the phased plan before a dollar goes into development.

• Safety and personal protective equipment. High-frequency consumables usually bought against a standing agreement, and the most common vending category. Issuing PPE to named workers against a site allowance is covered on Safety and PPE.
• Electrical and automation components. Attribute-heavy items where the wrong specification means downtime, not just a return.
• Vending and inventory programs. The on-site replenishment business, run on usage data rather than on ordering.
• Test, measurement and instruments. Longer consideration, calibration and documentation requirements, often quoted.
• Janitorial and sanitation. A named category here, because the buyer, the account structure and the replenishment rhythm overlap with MRO. Distributors whose business is jan-san have their own page at Janitorial and Sanitation.