The question every technical person asks second
You keep what you already run. Nothing has to move on day one.
The reason platforms in this industry take a year to go live is that they ask you to move everything before you sell anything. That is backwards, and it is the single most common reason a good decision dies in committee. Brandfora connects to the systems you already pay for, ingests the orders from the store tools your people are using today, and lets you run both side by side for as long as you want. Selling starts in week one. Migration happens on your calendar, or never.
Statuses on this page are current and specific. Where something is in progress we say so, because you are going to find out anyway and we would rather you found out from us.
Answering it directly
“What does that entail on my side?”
What we need from you
- Your supplier account numbers, so purchase orders raise on the accounts that earn your rebates.
- Your payment account connected once, so money settles to you and never passes through us.
- A price list, or the one you already keep in a spreadsheet.
- One customer’s web address, to build the first store on the call.
- Read access to the store tools you run today, if you want their orders in the same view.
What we do not need
- Engineering time from your team. There is no build on your side to start selling.
- Your locations to switch. Nobody is mandated and nothing is turned off.
- Your data migrated first. Stores come over from a list, when you choose, in batches.
- Your production stack replaced. Your layout software, your raster processor, your machines and your enterprise system stay exactly where they are.
- Your suppliers renegotiated. The terms you have are the terms you keep.
"I'm not switching to this when it's going to cause me just as much work to run it than it is to have it."Owner of a decorating company with more than a thousand customer stores, on the platform he walked away from
What is connected
The plumbing that usually takes a year is already built, and it is built to the standard.
The industry already agreed how supplier systems should talk to each other, and we built to that standard rather than to a pile of one-off connections. Purchase orders, inventory and product data move over PromoStandards, on the buyer’s own account number, so terms, rebates and buying-group attribution never move. SanMar runs on PromoStandards and that connection is built and tested today. Every supplier that speaks the same standard is a configuration, not a project, which is the whole reason your catalog does not take a year to light up.
Every brand in the catalogOrders route to on-demand production with the artwork and the decoration method attached, per line, per order. Split shipments across sources come back as one tracking view for the buyer. This is the connection our customers use most and ask about first.
How routing worksMoney settles through your own connected payment account. The split happens at the moment the card is charged, so the organizer, the athlete, the rep, the location and you are each paid to your own account. We never hold your balance and card data is never stored here.
How the split worksThis is the one that changes the timeline. Order ingestion pulls in what your locations sell on the tools they already run, so headquarters sees the whole picture before a single store has been rebuilt. You get the reporting benefit in week one and the migration benefit whenever you feel like it.
Order ingestionYour floor’s orders get a label and tracking writes itself back to the order and to the buyer, without anyone copying a number between two screens.
Shipping and labelsAPI keys and webhooks, so anything we have not connected yet, you can. Several of the companies we talk to have already written their own bridge between a commerce system and an enterprise system, and that work is not wasted here.
Webhooks and API keysDeeper connections into production and manufacturing execution are being built with a partner now. We will give you the date on a call rather than a guess on a web page.
Ask about your production stackA spreadsheet of domains becomes stores and accounts. This is how an estate moves without a project plan: in batches, on your schedule, with the old system still running underneath.
Bulk importWhy this is the whole time argument
Every week you spend integrating is a week you are not selling.
Here is what the work costs in the shops we talk to, in their own words. Every line below is somebody describing what they do right now, today, because two systems do not speak to each other.
| The job that exists because nothing connects | What it costs them now | Here |
|---|---|---|
| Finding out what an order actually made, per rep | Export from the store tool, export from the fulfillment tool, and a homemade program to join the two files | A column |
| Selling an on-demand item | Set it up in the enterprise system, duplicate it into the store, then review, generate and email every purchase order by hand | None of it |
| Closing a store window | Export the orders, run cleanup, key them into the order system by hand | None of it |
| Paying out a fundraiser | Run a report, upload it to the bank, type each amount, click each button | Settled at the sale |
| Changing a price across the estate | Every product, every store, seven columns, staffed with hired hours | One field |
| Standing up one store | A few hours to a full day | Seconds from a web address |
The left column is quoted from recorded calls with owners and operators. The middle column is what they told us it takes them today, not what we estimate.
What we deliberately do not touch
The list of things that are none of our business.
Most platforms in this category fail because they want to own everything. Every system below stays yours, and we have turned down work rather than sit in the middle of one of them.
- Your supplier accounts and the rebates attached to them. Orders go on the account that earns the tier. Not ours, not a pooled corporate one.
- Your supplier relationships. When something goes wrong on a garment, you call your vendor, the same as today.
- Your production chain. Layout software, raster processing, embroidery machines, enterprise systems. We hand off, we do not replace.
- Your shipping rate layer. If you rate through a system today, you keep rating through it.
- Your own commerce sites. If your company already sells on its own site and your technical team is happy, keep it. This is for the network selling under your name, not for replacing what works.
- Brand restrictions. The brands your suppliers will pull your account over are enforced by the system, by store, by customer group. That is not a setting we let anyone override.
| System | Whose |
|---|---|
| Supplier accounts | Yours |
| Payment account | Yours |
| Production and machines | Yours |
| Enterprise system | Yours |
| Stores, catalog, artwork, ledger | Ours to run, yours to own |
The review your buyers will make you pass
What to hand your security reviewer, and what we will not pretend.
In place today
- Per-tenant isolation. Your data is not rows in a shared table.
- Card data delegated to the payment processor and never stored here.
- Supplier credentials encrypted at rest.
- Every administrative action logged, including any impersonation.
- Roles across three tiers, so headquarters, location and store each see exactly what they should.
- Deployment into your own cloud account where a network requires it.
Stated plainly
- Our SOC 2 readiness program is underway. We do not hold the report today and we are not going to imply that we do.
- If your customers put you through a security assessment, tell us on the first call and we will give you what we have, in writing, without a sales person in the middle.
- Where a connection is in progress rather than live, this page says so, and it stays that way until the day it changes.
The reason we are this blunt: in this industry a platform has usually already promised a migration or a connection to the person reading this, and not delivered it. We would rather lose a deal on a date than win one on a date we cannot hit.
Outside the United States
A network is rarely all in one country. The system was not built as though it were.
What travels
- Stores sell in their own currency, with the price list that applies to that region rather than a converted one.
- Stores run in their own language, so a location in Rotterdam is not selling in American English because the platform only speaks it.
- Every store can carry its own domain, which for most networks outside the United States is not a nice extra. It is the requirement.
- Regional suppliers sit alongside the ones you use at home, because the blank that makes sense in Manchester is not the one that makes sense in Austin.
- Purchase orders raise on the local account, so a location keeps the terms and the rebates it negotiated in its own market.
Said plainly
- Duty, import and cross-border tax treatment vary by country and by what you sell. Bring your situation to the call and we will tell you what the system handles today and what it does not.
- Multi-currency and multi-language were in the system from the first release, because the first national network we built for needed both out of the box. They were never a later project.
- If a supplier you depend on in your country is not connected yet, say so on the first call. That list is the roadmap.
The reason this matters for time to market: a network that spans countries usually gets told to run a separate platform in each one, or to accept that headquarters sees only the home market. Neither is necessary. One ledger, every country, in the currencies the money actually arrives in.
Two things worth saying out loud
Your data stays portable, and connecting once reaches every network on the system.
Your data leaves whenever you want it to. Stores, customers, orders, artwork and the ledger are exportable, on demand, in formats a person can actually use. We do not think a platform should hold a company hostage with its own history, and the fastest way to prove that is to make leaving easy and then not give anyone a reason to.
For suppliers and fulfillment partners, the arithmetic is different. You integrate once. From that point every network running on the system can reach your catalog inside the cart, on the buyer’s own account with you, with the volume attributing where it should. You are not building a connection to one distributor. You are building one connection to all of them, and the demand data comes back by product and by region rather than a quarter late.
| Question | Answered by |
|---|---|
| Whose volume was that? | The account on the purchase order |
| Which style is moving? | Sell through, by region |
| Who is restricted from what? | Enforced per store |