AIMS360 connects to Dsco natively over EDI, with years of live programs behind it. Peak holiday volume runs on the same platform and the same stock record as your bulk retail EDI.
Dsco is the dropship platform behind a large share of US department store ecommerce, including every drop ship supplier on Kohls.com. AIMS360 has been connected to it for years, over EDI, running live programs through peak season. Orders land in the same queue as your bulk retail orders, availability comes from the same stock record, and nothing switches to a second system when November arrives.
Dsco is a dropship platform that sits between a retailer's ecommerce site and the brands that fulfill its orders. You publish a product catalog and live availability, receive consumer orders, and send back shipments, tracking and invoices. AIMS360 connects to Dsco over EDI, natively, from the same order and inventory record that runs your bulk retail accounts. It is an established connection with multiple years of live programs behind it, not a build we start when you sign.
That last point is the one worth pressing on during an evaluation. Plenty of systems can describe a Dsco integration. Fewer have run one through a Black Friday. The difference shows up in the parts nobody demos: what happens when order volume goes up twenty times in a week, whether availability stays accurate while bulk allocations are moving underneath it, and whether the cost of processing those orders scales with the count.
Four names, one company, and a lot of confusion about which of them are still current. Here is the actual sequence.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| November 2020 | CommerceHub acquires Dsco. |
| November 2022 | CommerceHub acquires ChannelAdvisor. |
| December 2023 | CommerceHub, ChannelAdvisor and Dsco are brought together under one brand: Rithum. |
| Today | Rithum is the corporate brand, but CommerceHub is still the operational one: the supplier portals, single sign on and SFTP endpoints for the CommerceHub side remain on commercehub.com, and OrderStream is a current product name. Dsco is the exception. It keeps its own product, its own supplier login and its own documentation. See Rithum for how the pieces fit. |
Dropship volume is not evenly distributed. A program that handles a Tuesday in March tells you very little about the same program on Cyber Monday, and peak is exactly when a cancellation costs the most.
Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the December run go through the same AIMS360 platform as an ordinary week, including a customer processing over 1.2 million orders per day. There is no separate holiday system to stand up, and no cutover to get wrong in October.
AIMS360 charges no per document or per kilocharacter fees of its own. A peak that multiplies your dropship order count does not multiply an EDI invoice, which is a real difference from per transaction pricing when volume spikes.
Peak is also when bulk retail orders are allocating hardest. Because dropship availability and bulk allocation read the same stock record, a pallet committed on Monday is already out of the number Dsco sees, rather than being reconciled overnight.
On dropship, a stale number does not create a backorder the way it would in wholesale. It creates a cancelled consumer order, and cancellation rate is what retailers score. Accuracy under load is the whole game.
Single unit picking at peak runs on the same handheld scanning and bin locations as the rest of the year, so seasonal staff learn one process rather than a holiday exception.
Retailer bulk EDI does not pause for peak. The same platform carries the 856 ASNs, GS1-128 carton labels and routing for your wholesale accounts through the same weeks.
AIMS360 has been running Dsco programs for brands for multiple years. That matters in three specific, unglamorous ways.
Catalog structure, availability, order intake, ship confirmation and invoicing are configured from patterns that have already been through retailer testing, rather than built from a blank specification while your launch date moves.
Each retailer runs its own Dsco channel with its own catalog requirements, packing slip and service levels. Having done them before is the difference between a two week surprise and a checklist item.
The implementation team configures the ERP and the Dsco connection, so there is no handoff between the people who know your inventory and the people who know the integration.
When something fails mid peak, the useful thing is not documentation. It is somebody who has already seen that failure on this platform, with 24x7 emergency support behind them.
Dsco works as a set of records the retailer reads, rather than a one way document drop. These are the pieces AIMS360 keeps aligned, and where each one comes from in the ERP.
| What Dsco holds | Where it comes from in AIMS360 |
|---|---|
| Product catalog | Your style master, published with the full style, color and size matrix and a UPC per size, which is what a consumer facing retailer site needs and what a flat SKU list cannot provide. |
| Availability | Available to sell, with open orders and allocations already netted out, rather than raw units on hand. |
| Warehouses | Real AIMS360 locations, including a third party 3PL, so a retailer can be pointed at whichever site actually fulfills its program. |
| Orders | Consumer orders from the retailer, landing in order management alongside wholesale, bulk EDI and DTC instead of in a portal someone has to remember to open. |
| Shipments and tracking | Posted as the box is scanned, with the retailer's branded packing slip rather than yours. |
| Invoices | Generated from what actually shipped, so the accounting matches the fulfillment without a reconciliation pass. |
| Returns | Expected rather than discovered, so a return can be received against the order it came from. |
Notice what is absent compared with a bulk retail relationship: no purchase order acknowledgment step, no routing request, no carton hierarchy, no pallet label. Dropship trades all of that for one obligation you cannot get wrong, which is keeping availability honest.
Named here only where the retailer or Rithum has said so publicly. Retailer programs change, so confirm your specific account.
In July 2019 Kohl's announced Dsco as the platform for all drop ship suppliers on Kohls.com. Bulk wholesale still runs on classic X12 EDI, so a Kohl's vendor doing both runs two programs side by side. See Kohl's EDI and dropship.
Nordstrom expanded its partnership with Dsco and invested in the company to build out its drop ship program. See Nordstrom and Nordstrom Rack.
Named in Dsco's own developer material as a dropship destination alongside Nordstrom.
Rithum publishes Dsco documentation for the Macy's Marketplace channel. Note that Macy's bulk dropship, the vendor direct fulfillment program, is a different system: Macy's own supplemental standards name Rithum OrderStream. See Macy's.
These three get used interchangeably in conversation and they are not interchangeable in a build.
| Platform | What it is |
|---|---|
| Dsco | Dropship and marketplace platform, part of Rithum, with its own supplier login. Kohl's, Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus dropship run here. |
| Rithum Dropship, formerly CommerceHub OrderStream | The other Rithum dropship product, and a genuinely separate system from Dsco. Macy's vendor direct fulfillment names OrderStream in its own supplemental standards. Same parent company, different program. |
| Mirakl | Not Rithum at all. A marketplace platform retailers use to run third party seller marketplaces. A marketplace seller sets its own price and the retailer takes a commission, which is a different commercial relationship from dropship, where the retailer sets retail. |
| Retailer X12 EDI | Classic bulk wholesale. 850 in, 855 back, 856 ASN with GS1-128 cartons, 810 invoice. Most department store brands run this in parallel with a dropship program, and AIMS360 runs both from one record. |
The practical consequence: "we are set up for dropship" is not a meaningful statement until you say which platform, for which retailer. For a fuller walkthrough, read the Mirakl, Rithum and Dsco dropship guide.
The inventory number Dsco reads is the same number your bulk allocations, your warehouse and your other channels are working from. That is the whole argument, and it is most visible when things are busy.
A connector sitting beside the ERP has to be told what your stock is. That second copy is what eventually oversells, and it always happens at the worst moment rather than a quiet one.
When a bulk order and a dropship program want the same units, allocation rules settle it deliberately rather than whoever picks first.
ERP, retailer EDI and the Dsco connection are the same system and the same team, so a failure at peak is one call rather than a three way conversation while the clock runs.
Cartons on a pallet for the DC and single boxes to consumers come out of the same warehouse, on the same stock, with the rules applied per program. See native EDI.
What brands ask when a retailer tells them to get on Dsco.
Yes, over EDI, natively, with multiple years of live programs behind it. The connection is part of AIMS360 rather than a separate subscription, so the catalog, availability, orders, shipments and invoices all move between Dsco and the same records that run your bulk retail accounts. It is an established integration, not something scoped from scratch at signing.
Yes, and it does not switch to a different system to do it. Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the December run go through the same platform as an ordinary week, including a customer processing over 1.2 million orders per day. Because AIMS360 charges no per document or per kilocharacter fees of its own, a peak that multiplies your order count does not multiply an EDI bill, which is a meaningful difference from per transaction pricing.
Not any more, and the naming is the source of most confusion. CommerceHub acquired Dsco in November 2020 and ChannelAdvisor in November 2022, and in December 2023 all three were brought under one brand, Rithum. So Dsco is a Rithum product today. Be careful with the inverse assumption though: CommerceHub is still very much in use as an operational brand, with live supplier portals, single sign on, SFTP hosts and product names such as OrderStream. A document saying CommerceHub is not automatically out of date. What is dated is the specific product label "Dsco by CommerceHub", since Dsco now runs under its own name and its own login.
Publicly documented ones include Kohl's, which announced in 2019 that Dsco is the platform for all drop ship suppliers on Kohls.com, Nordstrom, which expanded its partnership with and invested in Dsco to build its drop ship program, Neiman Marcus, named in Dsco's own developer material, and Macy's Marketplace, for which Rithum publishes Dsco documentation. Retailer programs change, so confirm with your own account.
No, and this trips people up because both are Rithum. Dsco and the product formerly known as CommerceHub OrderStream are separate systems with separate programs. Macy's vendor direct fulfillment, its bulk dropship program, names OrderStream in Macy's own supplemental standards, while Macy's Marketplace is documented by Rithum as a Dsco channel. Same parent, different connection.
By publishing available to sell rather than units on hand. Open orders and allocated stock are netted out before the number ever reaches Dsco, so a bulk order already committed to a retailer cannot be sold again to a consumer. That matters more on dropship than on wholesale, because a stale number produces a cancelled order rather than a backorder, and cancellation rate is what retailers score.
Not with AIMS360. The connection runs from the same order and inventory record as your wholesale, your retailer EDI and your ecommerce, with no separate subscription to buy or manage. The alternative, a connector sitting beside the ERP, has to be told what your stock is, and that second copy of the truth is what eventually oversells.
Yes. Dsco lets suppliers define warehouses that retailers can map to, so a retailer can be pointed at the specific location that fulfills its program. In AIMS360 those map to real locations, including a third party 3PL, so ship confirmation and tracking come back from wherever the box actually left.
No. The platform is shared, the program is not. Each retailer runs its own channel with its own catalog requirements, packing slip, service levels and performance rules, and each has its own onboarding. Being live on Kohls.com does not make you live on another Dsco retailer, though the second one is considerably faster than the first.
Commercial control. On dropship the retailer sets the retail price, owns the customer and pays you a wholesale cost, and you fulfill in their branding. On a marketplace, usually run on a platform like Mirakl, the seller sets the price and the retailer takes a commission. They can look similar operationally and they are very different deals.
Yes, and at Kohl's and Nordstrom that is the normal setup. They are separate programs with separate onboarding and separate performance records, drawing on one inventory pool. AIMS360 runs both from the same record, with allocation rules deciding which program gets the units when they compete. See native EDI.
It depends on the retailer's own certification cycle more than on the software, because each Dsco channel has its own catalog and packing requirements to satisfy. What AIMS360 removes is the build: the connection exists, it has been through multiple live programs, and the implementation team has run these onboardings before. Ask for a timeline against your specific retailer during the evaluation rather than a generic number.
Last reviewed 7 August 2026 by the AIMS360 EDI team. The CommerceHub, ChannelAdvisor and Dsco unification under the Rithum brand was announced in December 2023. The commercehub.com supplier portals, hostnames and product names are current live systems, checked 7 August 2026. Kohl's selection of Dsco for all Kohls.com drop ship suppliers is from Kohl's own 2019 announcement. Nordstrom's expanded partnership and investment is from the announcements made by Nordstrom and Dsco. Retailer programs and platform requirements change, so confirm current specifics with your retailer and with Rithum.
Bring your Dsco retailers and your worst peak week to a demo, and we will walk through the catalog, the availability calculation, and how the same stock record serves your bulk accounts at the same time.
