Boundless is known for its exceptional products, client service, graphics, and marketing prowess, but there’s one thing that ties our team together: technology.
We offer our clients the latest and greatest technology to turn their visions into reality. These enhancements make being a Boundless client as simple as a drive down Easy Street.
Why? Because we believe in a holistic approach. We don’t use just one technology: our differentiator is that you get a full technology suite on your side. We’ve got the chops to customize to your exact needs when you want more than a simple eCommerce store.
Let’s pop the hood and see how Boundless’s team uses technology to enhance the client experience.
The Portal
The Boundless Portal is our flagship technology. While it has eCommerce-like features, it’s also a spend management platform with eCommerce capabilities sprinkled on top.
Portal is a proprietary platform built by the Boundless team. It has existed in some fashion for 15 years as we’ve fine-tuned it and added more features. Initially, we built Portal to solve tracking, reporting, and invoicing matters. Today, it has evolved into a comprehensive spend management platform.
Every Boundless client has access to Portal, and we can even brand it for your business and follow your brand standards to a T.
We can enable or disable features based on which enhancements you want, but our clients enjoy these five capabilities within Portal.
Order tracking and history
Are you wondering where your promotional products are? Never wonder again—Portal gives everyone the ability to track orders online, including offline orders.
(None of our competitors offer that, by the way.)
We’ve designed Portal to recognize, pull, and send data from our order entry system. This way, you can see all of your offline and online orders in one place.
Every time you place an order, you get an email confirmation. When any product on your order ships, you get a shipment confirmation email, with access to tracking data, too.
Invoicing
Do you need a copy of your invoice? Grab it in Portal. You can also give your accounts payable team access to the account so they can quickly download invoices without so much as a call or email.
Reports
Portal comes with higher-level reporting access if you need it. This is the perfect way for managers and the C-suite to check up on their data across the enterprise. Anyone with administrative permissions can pull reports on departments, locations, regions, and the entire company.
User permissions
Speaking of permissions, we designed Portal to fit different types of buyers, and we’ve customized the platform so marketers can order bulk buys and HR can order employee awards—all on the same platform.
By creating different user groups, we can ensure that each user is exposed to the right features and products.
After all, does your accounting intern really need access to your award selection or order history?
Product catalog
Boundless works with a tremendous number of products (we’re talking millions and millions). It can be hard to parse through these options, so we simplified the process by offering our 20,000 most common products in the Portal catalog.
By integrating with the Advertising Specialty Institute (ASI) product database, we added search engine functionality to Portal so you can find the products you need faster.
But don’t worry: you can still reach out to your Boundless Brand Consultant when you’d like help finding a more unique or bespoke product if it isn’t in Portal.
Buy Now
One issue that large brands often run into is how to streamline standards for things like convention T-shirts or on-site materials. With Portal, that is yesterday’s problem.
With help from a Boundless Brand Consultant and our Technology Services team, brands can create their own Portal Store to allow buyers to purchase brand-approved products curated specifically for your organization. Let's say you have multiple sites or departments that purchase the same products, like pens, polos, tumblers, or lanyards. Keep branding consistent across the entire organization and prices low by featuring these items on your Portal Store.
The best part is that employees, managers, or executives can place an order with easy check-out online whenever they have a need and approved budget to spend. This also helps keep the extras, like awards and signage, in line with brand standards while maintaining expenses.
Group Buy
The second tool in our tech stack is Group Buy, another proprietary Boundless technology you can enable within Portal.
With Group Buy, you can allow multiple departments within your organization to buy into the same product or series of products. This is great if sales needs 150 frisbees and accounting wants 50 of them, but the manufacturer’s minimum order is 200.
Group Buy allows everyone to purchase their needed quantity of the same product during a limited time window. Once everyone has their orders in, you’ll get the reduced rate for a larger request without contacting every department personally.
There’s a lot to love about Group Buy, which comes with awesome benefits like:
- Economies of scale: Bulk buying scores you discounts with manufacturers. Stop paying for small, expensive orders and instead use Group Buy to do one bulk order across your business. These economies of scale can get you some serious price breaks across the entire company.
- Dropship to multiple locations: But don’t worry, you don’t have to ship all of your Group Buy orders to HQ if you don’t want to. Group Buy allows you to drop ship multiple orders to different locations. This is ideal if you have branches in different cities or if you’re hosting events across the country.
- Flexible invoicing: Group Buy allows you to invoice for the entire group or on an individual or department level. Instead of trying to split up the invoice between different department budgets, Group Buy makes it a cinch to track who pays for what in a group order.
- Consistency: As a brand, you don’t want a department going rogue on your marketing standards. With Group Buy, you ensure everyone at your organization is buying the same products, so you don’t have to worry about non-canonical swag floating around.
eCommerce Licensing
Another great technology Boundless leverages for our clients is eCommerce licensing. Many clients seek a public-facing eCommerce store, so we license eCommerce technology from providers like BrightStores and BigCommerce.
We license this tech because, with already robust eCommerce technology out there, we see no need to reinvent that wheel. But if this isn’t a proprietary tech, why don’t our clients just license directly with the eCommerce store?
Well, Boundless brings more to the table than just the eCommerce license. You get access to a robust team that includes developers and designers. We take piecemeal technologies like eCommerce and pull them together into a complete solution for you.
When you want someone to design, build, and maintain your store, we’ve got the chops to do it all for you.
Redemption Stores
Redemption stores are one more neat bit of Boundless technology that our clients love. Boundless builds internal redemption stores for your employees and external redemption stores for clients or the public.
Our clients mostly use internal redemption stores for employee gifts. This tech really blew up during the pandemic as a way for managers to give their team warm fuzzies while they were working apart. And since it allows employees to pick their gifts, it ensures everyone receives swag they truly love.
External redemption stores are a little more complex because they’re available to non-employees. But it’s still simple: recipients get a one-time use code from your team, access the site, select a product, and wait for it to show up at their door. Easy!
External redemption stores are a really common strategy for sales teams, who will often send clients a thank-you gift in exchange for attending a demo, signing a contract, or for simply being a valued client.
Holistic Technology Equals Better Branding
At our core, Boundless is a branded merchandise promotional product company. But we can’t do our work without technology, and we’ve definitely been able to enhance our offerings with a lift from our proprietary tech stack.
Our holistic approach means you get a team in your corner that makes a custom plan based on your challenges.
You don’t have to take our word for it, either. Check out our portfolio to see the Boundless difference firsthand.
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