A plain-English guide to why GetConnect Hub is built for B2B trade, not general automation
By John O’Rourke, Technical Director, GetConnect
It usually starts with someone outside the day-to-day operations team hearing about an online automation product, Zapier being a well-known example, at a conference, in a supplier meeting, or from a friend running a completely different kind of business, and bringing it back with a simple instruction: we need something like that. On the surface, the logic makes sense. These platforms are well known, look straightforward to set up, and promise to connect the different bits of software a business relies on without hiring a developer. For plenty of businesses, that promise holds up well.
For a promotional merchandise distributor, supplier or agency, though, the request usually reveals a gap between what the business actually needs and what a general automation tool was designed to do. The systems involved, purchase orders, ERP platforms, procurement portals, product data with customisations attached, sit closer to the financial and operational core of the business than a marketing automation trigger does, and that changes what is required of the tool doing the connecting. This guide sets out where tools like this fit well, where B2B trade tends to expose their limits, and what GetConnect Hub does differently.
What tools like Zapier are good at
Platforms like this earned their reputation by making a genuinely difficult problem, connecting two pieces of software that were never designed to talk to each other, accessible to people without a technical background. A trigger happens in one system, an action follows in another: a form submission adds a contact to a mailing list, a new deal in a CRM posts a message to a team chat, a calendar booking creates a task. For workflows like these, where the data involved is relatively simple and an occasional missed or duplicated step is an inconvenience rather than a financial problem, these tools tend to do exactly what they say on the tin.
Where it runs into trouble with B2B trade
Purchase orders, invoices, stock levels and product data behave differently. A missed automation step in a marketing workflow means a contact does not get an email; a missed step in an order workflow means a client does not get their delivery, or gets the wrong one. The systems on either end, ERP platforms, e-commerce stores, procurement portals, were often not built with the same assumptions in mind, and the data passing between them needs to be handled the same way every time, with product customisations, currencies, address formats and account-specific pricing all captured correctly rather than approximately.
This is where a general-purpose automation tool tends to need heavy customisation before it can be trusted with anything commercially important. Someone still has to work out how a purchase order field maps to the right place in the ERP, how a customisation such as a print area or material choice gets captured without being lost, and what happens when a supplier’s product feed does not quite match the format the website expects. None of that is really a shortcoming of tools like this, they are simply not built to already understand promotional merchandise or B2B distribution. It is a blank canvas, and someone still has to do the painting.
Why this often lands on the wrong desk
It is common for people without a background in software to end up in the middle of this problem, regardless of their job title. A supplier says its platform has an API and can be integrated with. Another system says the same. Someone internally is left working out what an API is, and how two systems that both claim to be simple to connect only seem to talk to each other with a lot of manual help in between. It is a reasonable place to get stuck, and it is exactly the situation GetConnect Hub is built to sit inside, whether a business has anyone dedicated to managing its systems.
What GetConnect Hub actually is
GetConnect Hub sits at the centre of a business’s integrations in a similar way, one system connects in, another connects out, and the Hub handles the translation between them. Where it differs is in what it already understands before a single connection is built. Rather than starting from a blank canvas, GetConnect Hub is built around the patterns that come up repeatedly in promotional merchandise and B2B distribution: purchase orders with product customisations attached, multiple currencies and languages, account-specific pricing, and procurement systems that expect a particular structure of data. It is a translation layer designed around how this sector trades, rather than a general tool asked to learn the sector from scratch.
How the pieces connect through the Hub
Every integration a business has, whether that is SSO Integration for client logins, PunchOut for procurement platforms, ERPBridge for order and stock data, or ProductSync for keeping product information consistent across systems, connects through GetConnect Hub rather than being built as a separate, standalone project. That matters more than it sounds. A set of point-to-point integrations built individually tends to work well while nothing changes, but becomes fragile the moment a business needs to update or replace one part of it.
Say a distributor changes ERP system in a couple of years’ time. With individual, bespoke integrations, that usually means starting again on that connection from scratch. With GetConnect Hub, the knowledge of how the business’s website, procurement systems and product data are structured stays in the Hub. Only the connection to the new ERP needs to be rebuilt, not the whole picture around it. It tends to be a smaller job, and it means the value of earlier integration work is not lost every time one part of the technology stack moves on.
Built-in knowledge rather than a blank canvas
A general automation tool has no memory of the promotional merchandise sector unless someone builds that memory into every workflow by hand. GetConnect Hub is built around years of handling the situations that come up repeatedly in this kind of trade: capturing product customisations accurately, supporting the currencies and languages that come with international clients, and connecting with the procurement platforms that larger buyers already use. None of this removes the need for a properly scoped setup for each business, since every company’s mix of systems and customers is different, but it does mean the starting point is closer to a working solution than an empty template.
Where AI fits in, and where it deliberately does not
It is a fair question to ask, given how much of the conversation around automation now involves AI. GetConnect uses AI to help build the translation logic that sits inside an integration, working out how a field in one system should map to a field in another, and how variations in formatting or wording should be handled. That is a design and configuration task, carried out once when an integration is being set up.
What does not happen is live purchase orders, invoices or customer data being interpreted by an AI model each time they pass through. Once the translation logic has been built, it runs the same way every time a piece of data goes through it, which matters when the information involved affects what gets delivered, invoiced or paid. The aim is for the outcome to stay consistent and predictable, rather than something that could vary from one day to the next.
Visibility over what is happening, not a black box
One of the more common problems with a fragmented set of integrations, built up gradually rather than planned as a whole, is that nobody has a clear view of what is actually happening across them. Something can break quietly, and the first sign is a client asking where an order has gone rather than an alert telling the business something needs attention.
GetConnect Hub includes a dashboard that shows the data flowing between systems, so errors and failed transfers are visible and can be corrected rather than discovered later. It is worth being clear that the Hub itself is not the authoritative source of order or sales information, that role sits with the ERP or sales order system, since that is where changes made directly with a client are recorded. What the Hub supports is clearer visibility over where information is moving and where something has gone wrong, which tends to matter as much as the integration itself once a business is relying on several connections running at once. The same visibility can also give a business a more useful picture of what is happening across its trade generally, order volumes and product movement among them, than piecing that together from separate systems after the fact.
Frequently asked questions
Is GetConnect Hub the same thing as Zapier?
Not quite. Both act as a central point that connects different systems, but GetConnect Hub is built specifically around B2B trade in promotional merchandise and related sectors, with customisation handling, currency support and procurement platform connections already in place, rather than needing to be configured from a general-purpose starting point.
Do I need every GetConnect product, like SSO or PunchOut, to use the Hub?
No. It does not require the full suite of products to be useful, though additional products such as SSO Integration, PunchOut, ERPBridge and ProductSync do connect through the same Hub if a business adds them later.
What happens if I change one of my systems in future?
The knowledge of how your systems and customers are structured stays within GetConnect Hub. Replacing one system, such as an ERP or e-commerce platform, generally means rebuilding that one connection rather than the integration as a whole.
Does GetConnect Hub replace my ERP or e-commerce platform?
No. It sits between the systems a business already uses and translates information between them. The ERP, e-commerce platform and procurement systems remain the systems of record; the Hub is what keeps them talking to each other properly.
Summary
A general automation tool like Zapier has its place, and for straightforward workflows outside the core of order processing, it can be a sensible choice. Once purchase orders, product customisations, procurement platforms and multiple systems of record are involved, the requirements change, and a tool built specifically around B2B trade in promotional merchandise tends to hold up better than one built to be useful for anything. GetConnect Hub exists for that reason: a central point built with the sector’s patterns already understood, so that adding, changing or replacing a connection does not mean starting from nothing each time.
