Communication Channel basics

Communication Channels are the connections that you and Orderful use to send and receive data. Other terms you may be familiar with are "Connectivity" or "Protocol".

Most Orderful customers connect to Orderful using our RESTful APIs, but many of their partners use legacy Communication Channels like AS2, VAN, or FTP. This means that you'll likely need some knowledge of these legacy systems in order to:

Communicate with your partners while onboarding them.
Understand your partner's Communication Channel requirements.
Troubleshoot live delivery issues brought up by your partners.

Pros and Cons of Legacy Communication Channels

Legacy Communication Channels	Pros	Cons
AS2 (Recommended) Transmission over HTTP or HTTPS with certificate to encrypt and sign data	Real time Secure	More complex to set up Maintenance needed with certificate updates
FTP / SFTP / FTPS	Easy to set up	Asynchronous deliveries FTP protocols can be less secure Maintenance for the server host
VAN Third-party services using electronic mailboxes to deliver data.	Only way to connect to some partners	Asynchronous deliveries Additional cost (generally based on transaction size)

Requirements for Legacy Communication Channel set up

Orderful will need different information Communication Channel type requires different information

Legacy Communication Channels	Information required by Orderful	Notes
AS2 (Recommended) Transmission over HTTP or HTTPS with certificate to encrypt and sign data	AS2 ID + AS2 URL + AS2 certificate Encryption algorithm (3-DES default) Encryption encoding (Base64 default) Signing algorithm (SHA-256 default) Any other AS2 specific configuration	Orderful only supports synchronous, encrypted AS2 transmission with no compression using HTTPS or HTTP.
FTP / SFTP / FTPS	Host, Port, Path Credentials Disposition details File naming convention	Orderful supports Self-hosted FTP/SFTP and Orderful-hosted SFTP.
VAN Third-party services using electronic mailboxes to deliver data.	VAN Provider name	Orderful supports VAN