Always the right service provider at hand: Service provider management with the Local Brand X Local Marketing Platform

Regardless of whether you are just starting to use a marketing platform or are already supporting your partners with a software solution, the selection and connection of the right service provider is particularly important for smooth order processing. Your service providers are ultimately responsible for ensuring that all the planned marketing measures are properly produced or published. Choosing the right service provider, for example for the production of print products, booking in the out-of-home area or warehouse management, depends on various factors and you can freely choose which service providers you would like to work with . In the Local Brand X Local Marketing Platform, you can decide in the administration which service providers you want to integrate. You also have the option of editing existing service providers and adapting them yourself. The choice of your service provider is completely free. You can store all your existing service providers in the Local Marketing Platform or, if you have not yet found the ideal partner*, select the right service provider from the Local Brand X Eco-System.

Important factors for working with service providers

For the cooperation with the service providers and the smooth marketing process, the transfer of the order data is particularly important. To ensure this, all the data required for transmission and the way in which it is processed can be set and configured individually. Only with the right integration can your partners and thus the users of the system use the marketing platform, like an online shop, in which orders are processed automatically and no further activities are necessary. To ensure this, you have to ask yourself a few questions when integrating the service providers: Should the service providers get access to the system? Do you or your service providers maintain the items on offer? How is order data provided to the respective service provider and how do they have to be processed? Which payment options and shipping methods are accepted and which do you want to offer your users?

The forms of data transmission

One of the most important questions here is the transfer of the data and how the orders are to be transferred to the service provider's system. In most cases, this is the order data, but also the print data that are required for the production of the advertising material. The selection of this data depends on the IT infrastructure of the respective service provider and must be specified once at the beginning of the integration. Depending on the needs of the service provider, the data can be easily transmitted by email, for example. In this simplest form, the system generates an email with all the important information after each order and sends it to the service provider along with all files. In addition, it is also possible to forward the information directly to a server of the service provider via an FTP or SFTP connection. To do this, they select specifically which data and in which form they should be transmitted to the respective service provider. You can use the administration to independently compile the structure of the order data in the form of CSV, TXT, XML or jSON files and thus adapt the documents exactly to the needs of the respective service provider. For this purpose, data such as the customer number or the billing address can be set in advance and supplemented by dynamic data such as the order number or the order volume. To work even more efficiently, the Order API of the Local Brand X Marketing Platform is recommended. Via the API, the service provider can call up all orders individually and at will in the form of XML or JSON and process them further in external systems. Status updates from the service providers can also be automatically played back into the Local Marketing Platform via the order state API. This means that the user can immediately see whether the order has already been processed or even sent.

Service provider management at Local Brand X

Thanks to the free design of the service provider administration in the Local Brand X Local Marketing Platform, you can access your service providers at any time, add new ones or manage existing ones. Depending on your individual needs, you can set all the important data and information in the administration to enable your users and partners to make the ordering process as simple and intuitive as possible. Find out now about other functions or about the use of the marketing platform in general.