Launch HN: Convictional (YC W19) – Supplier Network for Retailers

Our general feeling is that niche / values based aggregators are where the puck is going, as opposed to everyone being a worse version of Amazon, where people are shopping their values more often.

The other thing I would say, not to pick on any one of those offerings, is that we actually have a bunch of prebuilt seller apps to making onboarding easier. To our knowledge, that's unique, most of them just have an API and CSVs where as part of our product includes the seller side integration. Merely offering an API instead of EDI doesn't necessarily solve the problem, most of the sellers don't have ERPs or in-house IT at all so facing down JSON via API instead of X12 via EDI is equally impossible for them.

* Fill time: time from posting the order to the seller until they ship it as verified by their carrier integration

* Ship time: time from order being placed until ship time

* Complete time: time from order placement to notification of shipment on the consumer side

As time has gone on, we can tell who ships reliably and put those sellers in front of other buyers, etc. So eventually the data we have gives us and buyers and indication of how well vendors are adhering to SLAs around shipping times. Often the expectation is 24 hours, so it's not hard to red/yellow/green people into buckets and manage the buckets. Eventually we can offer our own SLAs for sellers we put in front of buyers but for now we're just gathering data and providing reporting.

Edit: to answer your question directly, we don't currently integrate with them. Generally speaking we can get the same data from the platform we integrate with, so it saves us from having to build N more integrations, but I agree the closer we can get to ground truth the better for vendor SLA.