Why your trade customers need your data in real time

Every NZ wholesaler has a story about a sale that died on the phone. A customer rings on Tuesday to confirm an order they’d quoted on Monday. The quote was based on Friday’s stock report. By Tuesday the quantity has moved. The customer has already promised it to their customer. Now there’s a problem on every side of the chain.

The problem isn’t your stock system. It’s that your trade customers can’t see what your stock system says.

Closing that gap — giving your customers your live data, not last week’s printout — is one of the highest-leverage moves a B2B Accredo business can make. Done well, your customers sell more, you take fewer “is this in stock?” phone calls, and the credit notes for “out of stock after order” stop happening.

Here’s what it actually looks like.

Two delivery mechanisms, both still relevant

FTP / SFTP file feeds

The classic. You publish CSV (or XLSX, or fixed-width if you must) drops at a scheduled cadence — usually nightly, sometimes hourly. Customer’s system picks them up and ingests them into their PIM, their ERP, their website, or their pricing engine.

It’s old. It works. And in 2026 it’s still the only thing many of your channel partners can actually consume.

Specifically: most NZ retailers running older POS/ERP systems, most franchise networks, most government and council buyers, and most overseas distributors who buy off you. They have ingestion pipelines that take a CSV and update their database. They do not have engineering teams that can call an API.

If you tell those customers “we have an API now,” they will say thank you and continue asking your sales rep for a price list once a quarter.

A weekly FTP drop with current pricing is a 10-minute job from your end and the difference between landing in their next catalogue update and not.

The shape is well-trodden — Stats NZ counts roughly 617,000 enterprises in New Zealand at February 2025, with 97% under 20 staff. A meaningful share of those are running ERP, POS or e-commerce systems whose only safe ingestion path is a scheduled file drop.

REST / JSON APIs

The modern path. A customer’s developer (or their Shopify, their headless storefront, their procurement portal) calls your API and gets back JSON. They build it into their checkout, their cart, their product page.

What it unlocks:

Real-time stock badges — “3 in stock at warehouse, 12 in transit” on the customer’s product page, updated when you post a movement in Accredo.
Sub-minute pricing — your customer’s website shows the price your customer pays today, not the price they were quoted last month.
New-product propagation — a SKU goes live in Accredo IC, it appears on the customer’s storefront within minutes.
Confidence to quote — your customer’s sales rep can quote against your stock, in real time, on a phone call.

Under the hood, the modern path runs over Accredo’s Web Service API — an OData v4 / JSON endpoint introduced with Accredo v5 and now at release 8.x on both Mercury and Saturn. That’s what makes sub-minute freshness genuinely possible: the read path goes straight to the company file, not an overnight export.

API is the future. FTP is the present for half the customer base. The right answer is to publish both.

What goes in the feed

For pricing and stock specifically, the table stakes are:

SKU
Description
Stock-on-hand by location (per warehouse if you’re on Saturn)
Stock-on-order (incoming POs you’ve raised against suppliers)
Sell price (per customer’s pricing tier — Special Pricing applied)
Effective from / effective to dates
Pack size, weight, classification
Status (active, discontinued, replaced-by)

Nice-to-haves that move the needle:

Lead time for items you don’t hold stock of
Substitutes — “if RHS-50×50×3 is out, suggest RHS-50×50×4”
Product images and PDFs — so the customer’s storefront doesn’t have to source them separately
Customer-specific pricing — applied per file/per token, not generic rates

Refresh cadence

Three patterns work. Pick the right one per customer:

Daily FTP drop (overnight). Default for legacy customers. Cheap to run. Good enough for most.
Hourly FTP drop. For customers who care about same-day stock changes but don’t have API capability.
Live API with sub-minute freshness. For customers running modern storefronts where stale stock costs them sales every hour.

Most Rapido customers run all three concurrently — different downstream customers have different capabilities, and each one gets the freshest data their system can swallow.

What changes for your trade customers

Three things, measurable:

Their conversion goes up. Customers don’t drop out of carts when they see a stock figure. They drop out when they have to email or call to check. A live stock badge — even one that says “out of stock, available [date]” — converts better than no information.

Their order accuracy goes up. Quoting against stale data means quoting against fiction. Quoting against your live feed means the orders that come back to you are real, fillable orders.

Their listing breadth goes up. When new SKUs propagate automatically, your customers list more of your range. The 80/20 problem (they only carry your bestsellers because the rest is too much manual work to maintain) goes away.

What changes for you

Two things:

Inbound “is this in stock?” calls drop. Roughly in proportion to the share of customers using the feed. We see customers reduce stock-check calls 40–60% within 90 days of switching one channel to a live feed.

Out-of-stock credit notes drop. Because customers stop accepting orders for items they’ve sold out from under you. The single biggest source of margin leakage in distribution is invoicing-then-crediting, and stale data is the primary cause.

How Rapido does it

Two productised primitives:

Customer API — a clean REST/JSON API your customers can build against. Authenticated per customer (so each one sees their pricing tier), rate-limited, documented. Same source of truth as your portal.
FTP / SFTP pricing & stock feeds — scheduled drops in CSV/XLSX/fixed-width to whatever endpoint each customer needs. Per-customer pricing, per-customer cadence.

Both wired into the same Accredo company file via the Rapido SDK. When stock changes in Accredo, the API reflects it within seconds and the next FTP drop reflects it on schedule. No double-keying, no Excel exports, no manual intervention.

Get started

Book a 30-minute call. We’ll connect to your Accredo, walk through which of your customers want which delivery mechanism, and scope the engagement. Most customers go live with their first FTP feed in a week and the API shortly after.