iPaaS vs Pipe17: Choose the Solution Built for Ecommerce
Pipe17 is the fast and reliable way to make omnichannel order flows touchless and cost-efficient, scaling effortlessly as your business grows.
Set up in days, see results immediately
89% of new Pipe17 customers are fully operational in 2 weeks or less—10x faster than an iPaaS.
An iPaaS has no commerce domain knowledge and no understanding of order operations—everything is just data—so you must design, develop, and program that knowledge into them. This is the main reason why iPaaS implementation projects—the process of programming and configuring an iPaaS to align with your business—regularly take longer than the initial 3-6 month forecast and go well over budget.
Pipe17 delivers 10-100x better time-to-value by combining superb selling, fulfillment and back-office commerce connectivity with structured best practice flows and all the advanced functionality commerce businesses need to connect, automate, manage, and optimize omnichannel order flows.
Intelligence through domain expertise
iPaaSes are designed to work with the widest range of apps possible, commerce is just one tiny category. An iPaaS requires you to design, develop, build and maintain all of the commerce knowledge (including data model), omnichannel flows, and order operations features—from order routing and real-time inventory sync to exception notifications and financial reconciliation—that Pipe17 provides on day 1.
Pipe17 is purpose built for ecommerce and has native commerce awareness and order operations intelligence. Pipe17 knows what an order, fulfillment, inventory, product, return, exchange, PO, TO, etc is. Pipe17 knows how each of these objects is represented in every application we connect with, making mapping free integrations practically automatic. Pipe17 knows how commerce businesses need these objects to flow across their omnichannels, and has preconfigured best practice flows—complete with point-and-click rule builders for dyamic customization.
More flexibility, no technical complexity
IPaaSes started in enterprise IT, and highly technical teams remain their core users and gate keepers. For most commerce businesses, this means a dedicated specialist—often third-party systems integrators—will come in to build a custom solution using the iPaaS. This creates an accountability gap, adds layers of complexity, and strips away your control. It also adds a perpetual cost to retain the contractors—who are the only ones familiar with how your iPaaS works. Changing any aspect of your business—expanding channels, switching 3PLs, or adjusting a processes—requires hours of development work to update your iPaaS.
In contrast to a developer dependent iPaaS, Pipe17’s merchant-friendly Order Hub puts ecommerce operators back in control of their order operations. It’s easy—no coding, architecting, or technical expertise needed—to add, swap, or remove channels as your business grows, and adjust your flows as priorities change. Pipe17 enables you to be responsive and agile, without compromising on performance or efficiency.
Great Tool and Team
Pipe17 is super user friendly and easy to use for non-technical people, making it possible for us to know the status of all our ecommerce and retail store orders at a glance. We also use Pipe17 to monitor the status of orders with our 3PL, and determine if they are hitting SLAs or falling behind.
Leslie S. | G2 review
Set up in days, see results immediately
89% of new Pipe17 customers are fully operational in 2 weeks or less—10x faster than an iPaaS.
An iPaaS has no commerce domain knowledge and no understanding of order operations. This is why iPaaS implementation projects regularly take longer and cost more than expected.
Pipe17 delivers 10-100x better time-to-value by combining superb selling, fulfillment and back-office commerce connectivity with best practice order operations workflows that get you live faster.
Helping you succeed with order operations
Unlike iPaaSes, Pipe17 is more than just ecommerce connectivity. From day one, Pipe17 handles order routing, real-time inventory sync, exception notifications, and financial reconciliation seamlessly.
Pipe17 is purpose built for ecommerce, understanding key concepts like orders, fulfillments, inventory, products, returns, and more. Pipe17 automatically maps these commerce data objects (and many more) across connected applications, and comes ready-made with preconfigured best practice flows and point-and-click rule builders for dynamic order operations customization.
Giving you total control and flexibility
iPaaSes require technical specialists and third-party integrators, leading to high costs, complexity, and loss of control. If any aspect of your business changes, an iPaaS will require time-consuming and costly updates.
Pipe17’s merchant-friendly Order Hub eliminates these issues, giving you control without needing technical expertise. Easily add, swap, or remove channels as your business grows and adjust your workflows as priorities evolve. Pipe17 enables you to be responsive and agile, without compromising on performance or efficiency.
Great Tool and Team
Pipe17 is super user friendly and easy to use for non-technical people, making it possible for us to know the status of all our ecommerce and retail store orders at a glance. We also use Pipe17 to monitor the status of orders with our 3PL, and determine if they are hitting SLAs or falling behind.
Leslie S. | G2 review
See why
brands
merchants
3PLs
SaaS providers
ecommerce businesses
choose Pipe17 over an iPaaS
See why ecommerce businesses choose Pipe17 over an iPaaS
Integrate selling and fulfillment channels to an ERP
Get up and running fast with full commerce ERP integrations in less than 2 weeks.
Pre-built connectors for 100s of selling channels—from Shopify Plus and TikTok Shop to Faire and Mirakl—and 1,000s of fulfillment providers—from 3PLs like ShipBob and UNIS to WMSs like Peoplevox and Deposco—with popular ERPs like Acumatica and NetSuite.
No integration mappings required.
Go live in 3-9 months depending on your development and configuration expertise.
1000s of pre-built integrations for IT service management & support systems, human resources platforms, and a handful of commerce integrations to the largest ecommerce platforms like Shopify and marketplaces like Amazon and maybe a few 3PLs and WMSs if you’re lucky.
Every integration requires mapping.
Automate processing orders to the optimal location(s) for fulfillment
Native order routing with all the functionality modern merchants need including:
- centralized order routing logic with point-and-click rule builders
- 100s of pre-built routing filters/criteria (e.g., by SKU, selling channel, location, tags, on-hand inventory, total price, etc.)
- customizable selling channel-specific order holds
- omnichannel shipping method maps
- order, bundle, and kit line-item splitting
Offer low-code workflow automation builders which are just fine for linking a singular selling channel to a singular fulfillment location/provider—but you’ll still have to define what orders and related entities are. When you introduce multiple order sources and/or multiple fulfillment locations/providers, you’ll need to either 1) maintain a sprawling web of point-to-point workflow automations 2) build and maintain your own order data model so you can map every channel to a common data format for centralized order routing.
Fix order errors before they impact customer service and satisfaction
Monitors connector endpoints and alerts you if a channel gets disconnected.
20+ tunable alerts that notify you when, where, and why a problem occurs that requires manual intervention anywhere along the end-to-end order lifecycle.
Monitors integration endpoints and alerts you if an integration gets disconnected.
No out-of-the-box order related exception management functionality. Need to custom code any exception logic, notification system, and resolution frameworks.
What's the difference between Pipe17 and an iPaaS?
The main difference between Pipe17 and an iPaaS is that Pipe17’s Order Hub is much better for ecommerce, while an iPaaS is better for other industries.
Pipe17’s Order Hub is exclusively for ecommerce businesses—from sellers and brands to 3PLs and SaaS applications—and integrates with selling channels, fulfillment channels, and back-office applications like ERPs.
The Order Hub is built for the needs of omnichannel commerce businesses with features for order management and routing, inventory management, product and SKU synchronization, exception management, returns and exchanges automation, and much more.
With Pipe17, every feature helps omnichannel commerce businesses grow more profitably by eliminating costs, order processing errors, manual work, and customer complaints.
iPaaSes are used by companies across all types of industries—from healthcare and financial services to hospitality and transportation—and integrates with health record systems, IT management suites, and human resources applications.
iPaaSes are built for the needs of large non-commerce enterprises with features for automated appointment reminders, employee onboarding, digital marketing management, IT support ticket triaging, and deprovisioning software licenses.
With an IpaaS, you pay for all these departmental enterprise features, while features for omnichannel commerce businesses like yours are deprioritized.
Our merchant friendly UX, productized order operations best practices, and commerce domain expertise—from solution architecting to onboarding and support—gets you live in days.
Pipe17 enables ecommerce operations teams to quickly automate, manage hands-off, and continuously optimize their omnichannel order operations.
Pipe17 integrates only with the applications that omnichannel commerce businesses rely on—selling channels, 1000s of fulfillment providers, and ERPs.
Aware of what commerce data objects are and how they relate to each other at every stage of the order lifecycle.
A single data schema—developed over 500+ implementations and 10,000+ hours—that defines interoperability between order lifecycle applications and eliminates 98+% of mappings.
Pipe17 sells and services in-house, and works hand-in-hand with any SI if a customer wishes to use one, so you always have access to the right expertise.
Vendor changes (3PLs and other logistic partners especially), channel expansion, and process changes happen in commerce. Pipe17 makes it quick and easy to support them.
Pipe17 turns ERPs into an order operations powerhouse with bi-directional selling and fulfillment channels syncs and advanced orchestration capabilities at any order volume.
Commerce is not a side business for us. We stay current with changes and are first to market with Amazon and TikTok Shop.
iPaaS implementation projects are notoriously slow (and costly), the software’s hard to use especially for non-technical teams, and support is technical focused not use case focused.
iPaaSes enable information technology and development teams to build custom integrations between their various enterprise application suites faster.
iPaaSes prioritizes integrations with non-commerce applications like Workday, Zoom, Jira, and ServiceNow which aren’t supported on Pipe17.
Data entities are singular events which customers can build their own custom relational awareness and flows on-top of.
Infinite data modeling and mapping possibilities, but must construct own custom models and map all integrations to custom models or map all integrations point-to-point.
iPaaSes sell and service through SIs, consultants, and partners so you don’t have direct access to the team building the product that your business relies on.
Custom integrations and data models mean that any change or addition to channels or processes require prior setup knowledge and development resources to rework.
With integrations for 1000s of enterprise apps, iPaaS is a good choice for ERP connectivity for industries that don’t need real-time syncs with multiple selling and fulfillment channels.
Partners are IT and direct to enterprise sales, commerce is a small slice of their focus and receives little to no investment.
