Many people don't realize that when you book a hotel room on Expedia, anywhere in the world, it gets delivered via fax machine. For Expedia, it was the least common denominator to ensure they could book a room with any hotel in the world, in the right amount of time.

We took a page out of the Expedia book when we built the ordering tool. At the time, 99.9% of vendors accepted email orders from dealers. Some still accept fax, some have websites (and some don't), etc. Email was the least common denominator that allowed us to load ANY vendor in the industry for dealer accounts and allow the dealer to place orders from one place. If we waited until every vendor could tie into their ERP systems for automated order delivery (ignoring the fact that many, yes - many, vendors in the industry run their business manually on Quickbooks and couldn't even do this), it would take us 10 extra years with little value to dealers in the meantime.

That said, we recently completed support for EDI (electronic data interchange), a standard for electronic ordering. We did this specifically for some large vendors who we are onboarding as Portal Select, but are offering it to any vendor who supports EDI (most of the larger vendors do) as part of our Supplier Services. Eventually, I anticipate many vendors will move over to EDI which will only improve the dealer experience on Portal.