Turns the partner's purchase order into a BigCommerce order, priced at the contract rate agreed with the buyer.
It lands through the REST order endpoint, not the storefront checkout, so the retail price list never gets a chance to apply.
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BigCommerce
EDI Integration
A purchase order arrives for a storefront that was built to take one card at a time. It has to land as an order priced at the terms the buyer agreed, not the price sitting on the product page, and the dispatch has to leave as an advance ship notice the partner's system will actually accept. BigCommerce's own event notifications are where that handoff either gets caught or gets missed.
Chargebacks group into six categories on this account.
Six categories cover most of what a partner disputes on a BigCommerce wholesale account. Most of them trace back to the same handoff, an order that priced wrong at creation or a dispatch that didn't match what the advance ship notice described. Cogent² checks the dispute against the original purchase order and the shipped notice before it reaches the partner's deduction queue.
- PO accuracy
- Delivery window
- Invoice discrepancy
- Late acknowledgement
- Late ASN
- ASN non-compliance
Four points get this account trading before the first PO lands.
Onboarding covers the credentials, the pricing terms, the webhook registration and a test run. All four happen before a live purchase order is allowed through.
- Set up OAuth 2.0 client credentials and confirm the channel_id for the Storefront API token
- Map contract pricing per wholesale partner against the storefront's default price list
- Register the webhook endpoints, including store/product/inventory/updated, for event notifications
- Run a test purchase order through to a confirmed order before the partner's go live date
Six documents carry one purchase order from inbox to invoice on this platform.
A purchase order for this account moves through six documents before BigCommerce and the partner agree the trade is closed. Each one lands in a different part of the account, and each one can fail on its own.
Tells the partner what shipped and in what cartons, built from the order as it was actually dispatched.
Built from pick and pack confirmation rather than from the catalogue, since BigCommerce's own inventory writes return a transaction_id with no way to look it up afterwards.
Applies a partner's quantity cut or cancellation to the order already sitting in BigCommerce.
If it arrives after picking has started against the original line, the correction has to be worked by hand rather than flowed through automatically.
Confirms the partner's file was received and structurally sound before anyone acts on it.
Runs ahead of the order import. If it's delayed, the partner's clock on acknowledgement timing keeps running regardless.
Tells the partner what is available to sell, measured after the storefront's own sales have cleared.
BigCommerce applies inventory writes asynchronously, so the advice waits for the store/product/inventory/updated webhook rather than trusting an instant write.
Bills the partner for what the order contained when BigCommerce confirmed it, cartons and all.
Matched against the advance ship notice on the partner's side, so a carton count that changed between pick and ship has to show up in both documents or the invoice gets queried.
Each document assumes the partner's contract terms were attached before the order confirmed, not recovered afterwards.
Event notifications carry the signal, not the storefront's default price.
BigCommerce fires webhook events, including store/product/inventory/updated, and that is the mechanism Cogent² listens to rather than polling the catalogue on a schedule. Authentication runs through OAuth 2.0 client credentials and JSON Web Tokens, with Storefront API tokens scoped to a channel_id and an expiry set in UTC seconds. None of that authentication carries pricing, so the contract rate for a wholesale buyer has to be attached at order creation, because nothing in the platform's default checkout path knows a partner account has different terms.
- X12
- EDIFACT
- AS2
- SFTP
- Cloud storage
protocols
GraphQL, REST, HTTPS
authentication
OAuth 2.0 with client credentials, JSON Web Tokens (JWT), St
webhooks
yes
event notifications
yes
paging
GraphQL cursor-based (bidirectional with first/last/after/be
rate limits
Per-request complexity limits; GraphQL complexity limit of 1
versioning
API versioning via endpoint path (v3); GraphQL versioning th
Confirmed against your instance during onboarding.
Three cards cover what stays managed once the account goes live.
Once the account is trading, Cogent² keeps watching the three places a BigCommerce wholesale order usually comes apart: pricing at order creation, inventory timing, and the acknowledgement clock. Each one gets its own exception handling rather than one shared dashboard.
Order pricing
Every purchase order is checked against the partner's contract rate before the order confirms in BigCommerce, so a buyer never gets charged the storefront's listed price by default.
Inventory timing
Because BigCommerce applies inventory writes asynchronously, the inventory advice waits for confirmation through the inventory webhook rather than trusting the write the instant it is sent.
Acknowledgement clock
The functional acknowledgement fires as soon as a file is structurally valid, and Cogent² tracks how long BigCommerce takes to return that against what the partner's spec allows.
Questions we hear before a BigCommerce account goes live.
BigCommerce moves its order API from v3 to a new path. What does that change for an account already trading?
BigCommerce versions its REST endpoints through the path itself, so a move from v3 sits alongside the old path rather than breaking it outright. The GraphQL side versions through schema evolution instead, which means a field can change meaning without the endpoint changing at all. Cogent² tracks both, because a schema change nobody reads carefully is how an inventory advice starts reporting the wrong field as available stock.
The storefront shows one number for stock and the partner's feed shows another. Which one is current?
Neither is wrong, they're measured at different moments. BigCommerce's Inventory API writes asynchronously and returns a transaction_id with no way to look up what happened to it, so the only reliable signal that stock actually changed is the store/product/inventory/updated webhook. Cogent² builds the inventory advice off that webhook rather than off a write that might still be processing.
A partner wants the ASN filed before the evening carrier collection. Can an order built in BigCommerce get there in time?
It depends on where the order sits before dispatch, not on the platform alone. If the advance ship notice is built straight from pick and pack confirmation rather than waiting on a separate inventory sync, the timing usually holds. Cogent² maps that path during onboarding so the cutoff gets tested against the partner's actual window before go live, not assumed.
Do we need a developer on staff to keep this account's EDI running?
No. Cogent² runs the connection between BigCommerce and the partner's EDI requirements, including the OAuth credentials, the webhook listeners and the document mapping. The brand's team reviews exceptions when something gets flagged, it doesn't maintain the integration code.
Our current EDI setup handles two other retail accounts already. Does adding a BigCommerce storefront mean switching providers?
Not necessarily. Where the integration layer is already built on Patchworks, a BigCommerce account gets added as another connection rather than a replacement. Cogent² works alongside that setup for the documents this storefront needs to trade.
Before the account goes live, what do we actually need to hand over?
OAuth client credentials, the channel_id for the Storefront API token, the contract price per wholesale partner, and the partner's own EDI specification for each document. Cogent² builds the mapping from those four things rather than guessing at terms agreed somewhere else.
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