What Is EDI (Electronic Data Interchange)?

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is the standardized exchange of business documents between trading partners — most visibly between suppliers and retailers. Common transaction sets include the purchase order (850), purchase order acknowledgement (855), advance ship notice (856), and invoice (810), moving over networks and protocols such as VAN and AS2.

Why it matters

EDI looks like a file format problem and behaves like a business workflow with deadlines and penalties. A retailer's purchase order starts a clock: acknowledge in time, ship complete and on time, send an accurate advance ship notice before the truck arrives, invoice consistently — or absorb chargebacks. Treating EDI as data plumbing rather than an operational lifecycle is the failure mode examined in EDI Is Business Workflow, Not File Transfer, and the full lifecycle is traced in the Retailer EDI Lifecycle case study.

EDI in the modern stack

APIs and dropship networks such as Rithum have absorbed some flows, but the large-retailer trade still runs on EDI, and the operational requirements — acknowledgement discipline, ship-window compliance, document accuracy — are identical regardless of transport. Item-data prerequisites increasingly flow through GDSN before the first order.

Related concepts

See GDSN, GTIN, and Rithum.