Guide
PunchOut catalogs, explained without the acronym soup.
A PunchOut catalog lets a buyer leave their procurement system, shop in a supplier catalog, and return with a structured cart — without leaving the procurement process.
Concepts and trade-offs · Protocol support to be confirmed
What a PunchOut catalog is.
In a hosted catalog, the supplier’s items are loaded into the buyer’s procurement system and browsed there. In a PunchOut catalog, they are not: the buyer is handed over to a catalog experience that the supplier side controls, shops there, and is handed back with a cart.
The value is that the catalog can be richer and more current than a periodic upload — configurable products, live availability, deep assortments — while the requisition, approval and purchase order still happen in the buyer’s own process. The cart crosses the boundary; the process does not.
02The round trip
Where the boundary sits.
The steps below are the conceptual sequence. Two of them happen inside Kelqio; the first and last stay in your systems.
- 01Your existing systems
Procurement system
A buyer starts a requisition in the system they already use.
- 02Inside Kelqio
Supplier catalog
A catalog session opens with that buyer’s contracted assortment and pricing.
- 03Inside Kelqio
Shopping
The buyer searches and compares across suppliers in one consistent interface.
- 04Inside Kelqio
Cart returned
The cart is handed back as structured lines — references, quantities, prices.
- 05Your existing systems
Procurement workflow
Approval and the purchase order run in your existing process.
03Responsibilities
Who has to implement what.
The round trip is easy to draw and harder to divide. This is the same sequence read as an obligation on each side — which is where PunchOut projects usually stall.
- 01Your procurement system
Open a session
The buyer’s system requests a catalog session on behalf of an identified user.
The buying system must
Hold the credentials and identify which buyer, entity and site is asking.
The catalog side must
Accept the request, recognise the customer, and refuse anything it cannot identify.
- 02◇ DecisionKelqio
Agree who the buyer is
The identity established at this moment determines the assortment and the prices for the rest of the session.
The buying system must
Send enough context to distinguish an entity or a site, not just a company.
The catalog side must
Resolve that context to a contract, or the session shows the wrong prices convincingly.
↳ Identity not recognised · Your procurement system
No session opens
Entitlement is settled before anything is shown. An unrecognised buyer gets no catalog rather than a default one.
- 03Kelqio
Browse the entitled assortment
The buyer searches and compares inside the catalog session.
The buying system must
Hand over the screen and stop trying to mirror the supplier’s data locally.
The catalog side must
Show that customer’s assortment and contracted prices, and nothing else.
- 04Kelqio
Return the cart
The session ends by handing back structured lines rather than a page of HTML.
The buying system must
Accept the returned lines and map them to your item and account structure.
The catalog side must
Return references, units, quantities and prices that survive the mapping.
- 05Your procurement system
Approve and order
Approval and the purchase order happen entirely on the buying side.
The buying system must
Keep the process, the approvers and the order numbering.
The catalog side must
Receive the resulting order as data, tied to the lines that were selected.
04Choosing
PunchOut or a hosted catalog?
The right answer is usually per supplier, not per organization.
Hosted catalog suits
- Stable assortments that change a few times a year
- Simple items with no configuration
- Suppliers who can produce a reliable catalog export
- Categories where offline search inside the procurement tool is enough
PunchOut suits
- Large or frequently changing assortments
- Configurable or variant-heavy products
- Categories where availability and lead time matter at selection
- Suppliers whose catalog experience is genuinely better than an export
What Kelqio adds either way
- One search across suppliers instead of one supplier at a time
- Contracted assortment and pricing applied per customer and site
- Structured carts returned to your procurement workflow
- Visible connection state and catalog freshness per supplier
Support for specific PunchOut protocols and standards is published only once verified. [TO BE CONFIRMED]
05Failure modes
Where PunchOut implementations go wrong.
None of these are exotic. All of them are ordinary, and all of them are visible in advance if you look.
The cart comes back unusable
If returned lines do not carry references, units and prices your system recognises, someone re-keys them and the benefit is gone.
Pricing is not customer-specific
A catalog session showing list prices instead of contracted prices moves the compliance problem rather than solving it.
One session per supplier
If the buyer must choose a supplier before searching, cross-supplier comparison never happens.
No visibility when it breaks
A catalog session that fails silently looks to the buyer like the supplier has no stock.
The long tail is excluded
PunchOut favours capable suppliers. Without another route, smaller suppliers stay outside the catalog entirely.
PunchOut questions we get asked.
- Does PunchOut mean the buyer leaves the procurement process?
- No. The buyer leaves the procurement system’s catalog browsing for a supplier-side catalog experience, then returns with a cart. The requisition, approval and purchase order remain in the buyer’s process.
- What comes back in the cart?
- Structured order lines — references, quantities, units and prices — so the requisition can be created from data rather than from a copied description.
- Which PunchOut protocols does Kelqio support?
- We publish named protocol support only once it is verified and demonstrable. Ask us directly and we will tell you precisely what is confirmed today.
- Can we mix PunchOut and hosted catalogs?
- Yes, and most organizations should. The right choice is usually per supplier and per category rather than a single organization-wide decision.
Next step
Bring your supplier list. We’ll show you the flow.
A working session with our team, using your systems and your supplier mix — not a generic slide deck.
- 01
Where your suppliers sit today: connected, semi-connected, or not at all
- 02
How each channel would route through Kelqio into your ERP and procurement platform
- 03
What connecting the next twenty suppliers would actually involve
Enterprise integration product. No credit card, no self-serve trial — a conversation with someone who knows procurement systems.