Retail Vendor Drop-Ship: a bigger vendor catalog at $0 cost to the retailer

It’s the InfiPlex Bridge program for retailers who sell vendor products on their own webstores and want those vendors to drop-ship consumer orders. InfiPlex builds one fully tested integration into your ordering system, then connects, onboards, and supports your vendors — each one live in under a week — while real-time vendor inventory flows to your site and orders flow out to whoever ships them. The retailer side of the program costs nothing.

Yes. There are no start-up costs and no ongoing costs for the retailer on the Retail Vendor Drop-Ship program — that’s right, nothing. The program is funded on the vendor side, where costs are kept deliberately low and scale with each vendor’s monthly order volume, because lower vendor costs are what make retailers’ drop-ship programs succeed.

A vendor’s cost with InfiPlex depends on the number of orders they process each month, plus low EDI VAN costs through InfiPlex if a VAN is required — a very affordable entry point for any size vendor. That matters to you as the retailer: vendors who aren’t bleeding integration fees are vendors who stay in your program, keep inventory current, and say yes to your next category expansion. See InfiPlex pricing for current plans.

InfiPlex creates a set process and documentation that walks any vendor through their setup, and works with each vendor directly to integrate their systems. Because your retailer-side integration was fully tested once up front, there’s no new testing round per vendor — a new vendor is typically connected and processing live drop-ship orders in under a week, without your team project-managing it.

InfiPlex does — vendor support is part of the program, handled by the US-based InfiPlex team. That’s a deliberate piece of the economics: when InfiPlex fields the vendor questions, your merchandising and IT teams aren’t running a help desk for other companies, which is one of the main ways the program lowers a retailer’s support costs as the vendor count grows.

Yes — it’s one of the program’s main audiences. InfiPlex builds the one-time, fully tested integration into your EDI-based ordering system, and from then on the long-drawn-out EDI file testing that normally gates each new vendor is eliminated in favor of real-time data sharing. Your system keeps its EDI; your vendors never have to pass an EDI test to join.

InfiPlex updates every vendor SKU with real-time inventory data, so your webstore always shows what can actually ship. If your vendors stock multiple warehouses, InfiPlex can send per-warehouse inventory levels into your system as well — useful for routing, delivery estimates, and keeping regional availability honest.

The tracking number comes back through InfiPlex to your store to close out the consumer order — no chasing vendors for tracking, no manual entry. Combined with the real-time inventory feed, that gives your customer-service team the two things they actually need on every drop-ship order: an honest stock number before the sale, and a tracking number right after it.