Solutions · DistributorsB2B wholesale & MRO

Your biggest customer has never seen your website.

They buy from inside Ariba, Coupa or SAP — punching out into a catalogue rendered under their contract and their approval rules, searched by commodity code. An item without classification is not ranked poorly there. It is not there.

sku
EL-MCB-3P63C
description
MCB 3P 63A C CURVE 10KA
manufacturer
Voltek
list_price
48.20
unspsc
not supplied
etim_class
not supplied
technical_features
not supplied
uom_hierarchy
not supplied
429

ETIM features required · EC000090

Vertical
B2B wholesale
Specimen
EL-MCB-3P63C
Standards
ETIM 9 · UNSPSC
Channel
cXML · OCI punchout
Completeness
4 / 29
Specimen · one line item, two states

A description is not a classification

"MCB 3P 63A C CURVE" contains four technical features, compressed into a string that no procurement system can filter, compare or approve against.

No UNSPSC

Many corporate buyers cannot raise a requisition for an item without a commodity code. The item is not merely hard to find — it is not purchasable under their policy.

No unit-of-measure hierarchy

The buyer wants six. You sell in cartons of sixty. Without UOM conversion the line either fails or ships ten times the intended quantity.

EL-MCB-3P63C · AS RECEIVEDmanufacturer price file row

Miniature Circuit Breaker, 3-Pole, 63 A

sku
EL-MCB-3P63C
description
MCB 3P 63A C CURVE 10KA
manufacturer
Voltek
list_price
48.20
unspsc
— not supplied —
etim_class
— not supplied —
technical_features
— not supplied —
uom_hierarchy
— not supplied —

4 of 8 fields empty · this item cannot be requisitioned by policy

A description string standing in for four technical features · no code a procurement system can act on

ETIM EC000090 features · miniature circuit breaker4 of 29 populated

4

Fields present in the manufacturer price file.

29

Typed features required for comparison and punchout.

PL. 01The standards

Three systems your buyer uses and you never see.

cXML and OCI procurement integration

A punchout session begins inside the buyer's procurement system. They click your catalogue from within Ariba, Coupa or SAP SRM, shop in a hosted environment, and return a cart to their own approval workflow.

Your largest customers may never load your website. What they experience is a catalogue rendered under their contract, their approval rules and their commodity codes — and an item that lacks those attributes is invisible inside that session regardless of how good your site is.

cXML PunchOutSetupRequest

Session initiation and authentication

OCI

SAP's equivalent, still widely deployed

Contract price

Customer-specific, resolved per session

Cart return

Line items handed back with commodity codes attached

Requisition rules

Buyer policy applied to your lines, not yours

Level 2 punchout

Search from inside the buyer's UI, never rendering your site

PL. 02Failure modes

Six ways a B2B line is lost without a single complaint.

01

Invisible in punchout

The item is in stock, priced under contract, and does not appear in the buyer's search because it carries no classification. Nobody reports this — the buyer simply orders the item that did appear.

silent lost line
02

Blocked requisition

The line reaches a requisition and stalls because the buyer's policy requires a commodity code. Their procurement team contacts your rep, who cannot fix it, so the line is dropped.

cancelled order
03

UOM mismatch

The buyer orders 6 and receives 6 cartons. The correction costs a return, a credit, and a conversation about whether you are easy to buy from.

returns + credits
04

Uncomparable specs

Two breakers on one results page with different attribute names for the same property. The filter returns nothing and the buyer calls a competitor.

lost conversion
05

400 suppliers, 400 formats

Each manufacturer sends a different spreadsheet with different column names for the same feature. Normalising by hand is a permanent headcount, not a project.

ongoing cost
06

Contract catalogue drift

A customer-specific catalogue is built once and then diverges from your live range, so the buyer sees discontinued items and misses new ones.

eroded trust
Why nobody escalates it

A buyer who cannot find your item does not open a support ticket. They order the item that was findable, from whoever classified it, and the requisition closes normally. Your revenue report shows a slightly softer quarter in a category nobody can explain — which is why classification coverage is worth measuring by revenue rather than by line count.

PL. 03Rollout

Start with the range your top ten customers buy.

Classifying an entire wholesale range at once is the mistake. Revenue concentration means a fraction of the catalogue carries most of the punchout traffic.

01
Week 1

Classification coverage

We measure what proportion of your range carries UNSPSC and ETIM classification, weighted by revenue rather than by line count.

What you provide

A product export · your top customers' procurement platforms

02
Weeks 2–4

Feature extraction

Technical features are extracted from manufacturer datasheets and mapped to ETIM classes with typed values and bound units.

What you provide

Manufacturer datasheets and price files as you receive them

03
Weeks 4–5

Punchout validation

cXML and OCI outputs are validated in a test session against one customer's procurement platform before anything goes live.

What you provide

One customer willing to run a test punchout

04
Ongoing

Supplier intake

New manufacturer files are normalised on arrival, so classification coverage does not decay as the range grows.

What you provide

Nothing — suppliers keep sending what they already send

Next

How much of your revenue is unclassified?

Send a product export with twelve months of line revenue. We will measure UNSPSC and ETIM coverage weighted by what actually sells, and return the list of high-revenue items that cannot currently be found inside a punchout session.

One export · Revenue weighted · No punchout access needed · 10 working days