CHRIS: Some of the vendors are going to be doing things manually. Some of them will use bulk upload techniques, some will leverage EDI or other API models. And ultimately, we need to be able to aggregate the data across all the different vendors that are part of this network. And this is an opportunity to set a standard with your vendors who are going to be part of this network, part of this buying group that they can sell into. In order to be part of this group, you have to actually provide your data at this level of integrity, in this level of detail, and this much accuracy, kind of like a tolerance of B2B inventory management accuracy.
And, you know, these are opportunities that you can take on. But, you know, one of the other things that is really important is just to keep in mind that in order to offer the most value to the members within the buying group, they have to actually be able to work with the different vendors that they really need to work with.
So if some of them just don't have the ability to invest in the APIs, we need to be able to meet them where they're at. So the eCommerce platform that we implement and, we encourage you to kind of look for this as a baseline, it has the ability to allow the vendors to do things really intelligently in their portal so they can manually go do things, they can clone records, they can update, and they can make changes pretty easily on a manual basis.
Now, typically, this isn't going to be the rule that someone's going to want to do this, but as an exception, it's nice to be able to go and do something manually when needed. Now, in addition to that, we can also set basic logic so that, you know, we were talking about this earlier on offline, that a lot of buying groups, you know, they may work with different vendors that, relatively speaking, have unlimited inventory.
And for the purposes of the buying group, you know, we can set something simple like that. So again, we can do things that match the vendor where they're at. But then you also have the situation where a particular vendor may have multiple warehouses, multiple locations, and this can get really challenging to be able to do manually. So we have the ability to bulk upload and this is as the name implies, we can use kind of a template that the vendor can use.
They can download their products and then update the accounts in the B2B inventory management software, then bulk upload that data. Although this is manual, it's a little bit more efficient than doing it one by one. They can also, of course, what we typically recommend, leverage the APIs, EDI, you know, literally the list goes on. We can take advantage of CXML, other formats that make sense.
And so depending on the scenario, we've worked with a lot of buying groups who actually require or recommend certain ERP configuration for their vendors. And this is a pretty aggressive step. But depending on the size and clout of the buying group, they can enforce this with the different vendors as a means to standardize the data. I typically wouldn't recommend going that extreme, but we can at least enforce data formats that we we require in order to be part of the buying group.
And then finally, you get into the different locations and the different forms of listing all of this data so we can look at, "do they have multiple locations." For people that are not familiar with Amazon, Amazon has essentially providing this concept for a lot of users. In a lot of ways, Amazon provides a form of buying group for their end-users. Not exactly the same, but they will accumulate inventory within a distribution center on behalf of the sellers.
This is something that quite a few buying groups will do. Now, this can be really expensive and it may not make sense for your buying group, but the point is that we have the mechanisms in place to be able to handle this type of logic, whether it's the seller who has multiple locations all over the country or all over the world, and being able to independently track all of the inventory at all of the different locations and the time it will take to fulfill those items from those different locations. We can manage that on an individual seller level within this buying group platform, And that is really, really powerful to be able to accurately represent this inventory data.
It's kind of what you're doing. Ron, with the inventory data, is you're really having to not just show the inventory data, but also some other key meta information. Where is it located? How much reliability do we have on this data? Because, you know, maybe they're selling it in other kinds of inputs that they have within their business to sell these products. How accurate is the data? How often is it updated, this kind of a thing.
RON: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Yeah, a couple of points. You know, Riley, my son, just bought something and he needed it relatively quickly and he went and looked and it said the lead time was two to five days. And so he bought it. And as they promised, it was shipped within two to five days. But they didn't tell him it was shipped from China. And it's been sitting in customs now for three weeks and now it's three and a half weeks later. He still doesn't have the item. So, same kind of thing, and that's just one particular item.
Another thing you mentioned just real briefly, whether the items is in stock or not, one of the things we have in our eCommerce platform that we use for this a lot, we use for digital downloads and we literally have a toggle where you can go into a product, and, if it's a digital download where it's never going to run out of stock, you can flip it to not counted and then we can display by default, we display in stock. So any time they go for a digital download product, it just says "in stock" and they're like, great, it's not out of stock. They buy it. They don't know how many there are because it's a digital download. There is no limit.