CASE STUDY: Southland Medical’s nopCommerce Store with Built-In cXML PunchOut

Summary: This case study covers the nopCommerce store we have built and supported for Southland Medical since 2019. Southland is a family-owned distributor of mortuary, medical, education, and forensic science supplies, and their store is worth reading about if your B2B customers are starting to ask for punchout, or if you want one team accountable for development, hosting, and integrations.

Southland Medical has spent more than three decades supplying funeral homes, hospitals, schools, and forensic labs with specialized products, backed by same day shipping on stocked items. Their customers range from independent businesses placing card orders to institutional buyers who purchase through procurement systems. That mix is exactly the situation nopCommerce handles well, and exactly the situation that eventually forces a store to speak cXML.

Why nopCommerce for a B2B medical supplier?

nopCommerce fit because Southland Medical needed real B2B behavior, not a retail cart with workarounds. Purchase order payment alongside card processing, customer-specific handling, and full control of the codebase for custom integrations are native strengths of the platform.

The store runs on nopCommerce with the integrations a distributor actually needs day to day: Avalara for tax calculation, UPS for live shipping rates, card processing alongside purchase order payment for institutional accounts, and bulk product tooling for a catalog with thousands of SKUs. Because nopCommerce is open source .NET, none of these were black boxes. When something needed to work differently for Southland’s business, we changed the code rather than waiting on an app vendor.

That control mattered most for the integration nopCommerce does not ship with: punchout.

How does cXML punchout work in their store?

Punchout lets an institutional buyer shop Southland’s catalog from inside their own procurement platform, Coupa in their buyers’ case, then return the cart for approval and purchase order processing instead of paying by card. We built cXML punchout directly into the store, so it works with the same catalog, pricing, and inventory as every other order.

The round trip looks like this:

1. The buyer’s procurement system (Coupa, for Southland’s buyers) sends a cXML PunchOutSetupRequest to the store with its credentials and a return address.
2. The store validates the request, creates a punchout session, and hands back a URL where the buyer lands, already signed in.
3. The buyer shops the normal catalog and builds a cart.
4. At checkout, instead of taking payment, the store converts the cart into a cXML order message and posts it back to the procurement system.
5. The order routes through the buyer’s own approval flow and returns as a purchase order.

Building this into the store, rather than bolting on middleware, means one system of record. Products, pricing, and stock live in one place, and punchout orders arrive in the same admin as every other order. This is the same delivered punchout capability we describe on our cXML PunchOut services page, running in production on nopCommerce. If your buyers are on SAP Ariba specifically, our Ariba punchout guide for suppliers covers what that enablement process looks like.

What does ongoing support look like?

The same team that built the store in 2019 hosts it, maintains it, and has carried it through major nopCommerce version upgrades. Version upgrades are where nopCommerce stores usually go to die: custom code and plugins that worked on one version break on the next, and the original developer is long gone.

Southland Medical has never had that problem, because there was no handoff. We upgraded the store across major platform versions, keeping the punchout integration and every customization working through each move. Hosting, monitoring, and support run through our hosting and maintenance practice, so when something needs attention, the people answering are the people who wrote the code.

That continuity is the quiet lesson of this project. The punchout integration is the headline, but the reason the store keeps earning its keep is that one accountable team has watched it since day one.

Talk to Us About Your B2B Store

We have delivered cXML punchout on nopCommerce and AbleCommerce, connected to major procurement platforms, and we support the stores we build for the long haul. If your customers are asking for punchout, or your nopCommerce store needs an upgrade path instead of a rebuild, tell us about your project.