Can AI read purchase order PDFs from email and create orders in my store?

Yes. Modern extraction models read emailed PDF purchase orders reliably, including scanned and inconsistent formats. The harder work is everything after extraction: matching line items to your SKUs, applying the right customer pricing, and creating a real order in your store. That full path is what Dynition automates for Shopify and BigCommerce. At First Place Supply, 95% of purchase orders completed with zero rep touch.

How accurate is AI order entry, really?

At First Place Supply, the order error rate came in under 0.5%, down from roughly 3% with manual entry, and 100% of pricing, address, and payment-term errors were caught before an order went out. Accuracy holds because the system is designed to flag anything uncertain for human review instead of guessing.

Do I still need to review every order?

No, but you stay in control. Orders the system is confident about complete on their own; at First Place Supply that was 95% of purchase orders. The rest are flagged for review, and a rep approves or fixes them in minutes. Dynition is built around review by design. We would rather ask than push a wrong order into your store.

What happens when a PO price does not match my price?

Dynition checks every line against the price your store holds for that specific customer, including customer-group pricing on BigCommerce and price lists on Shopify B2B. Mismatches are surfaced to a rep before the order is created. At First Place Supply, 100% of pricing errors were caught before the order went out.

Should I just build this with the GPT or Claude API?

You can get a demo-quality extractor working in a week, and many teams do. The grind is everything after extraction: SKU matching against your catalog, customer-specific pricing, address and terms validation, exception handling, and writing a correct order into your store, then maintaining all of it as formats drift. If engineering time is not your scarcest resource, building is defensible. For most distributors it is not.

Is Zapier plus an AI parser enough?

For simple, consistent, low-volume POs it can work. It typically breaks on the messy middle: multi-page PDFs, unit conversions, partial SKU matches, and customer-specific pricing. A parser hands you fields, and you still own turning fields into a correct order. If your volume is a handful a week, try it. Past that, the exceptions eat the savings.

What does manual order entry actually cost?

First Place Supply measured about 15 minutes of rep time per emailed purchase order before automating, and each rep got roughly 6 hours a week back afterward. At a few hundred POs a month that is most of a full-time role spent retyping orders your customers already wrote. Against that, per-order automation pricing is small.

Does Dynition work with my store or ERP?

Dynition creates finished orders in Shopify and BigCommerce today, including Shopify B2B and BigCommerce customer-group pricing. If you run a different platform or an ERP-first workflow, we are probably not your tool yet, and one of the enterprise vendors above may fit better. Bring your setup to a demo and we will tell you straight.

Will my customers have to change how they send orders?

No. Your customers keep emailing purchase orders exactly as they do today, as PDFs, spreadsheets, or plain email text. That is the point of this category: the buyer does not change behavior, and the seller stops rekeying. Every serious vendor in the space, Dynition included, works this way.

How is Dynition different from Conexiom?

Different customer, different motion. Conexiom serves large manufacturers and distributors on enterprise ERPs through a sales-led process, and it is good at that. Dynition is built for Shopify and BigCommerce merchants whose customers email PDF POs. Pricing is published, you start self-serve, and your first purchase orders are free. If you are enterprise scale, Conexiom is a credible choice. If you are not, that is exactly who we built Dynition for.

PO Automation When Conexiom Won't Quote You

Updated August 2026

The biggest names in purchase order automation sell to enterprises. Conexiom and Esker do not publish pricing, a price arrives through a sales conversation, and Rossum's published entry plan lists at $18,000 per year (all checked July 2026). Dynition is the alternative built for Shopify and BigCommerce distributors: it turns emailed PDF POs into finished orders in your store, with a published per-PO rate and your first 15 purchase orders free.

Who is Conexiom built for?

Conexiom is the category flagship for enterprise sales order automation, and it is genuinely good at that job. Its site describes capturing orders in almost any format, validating them against enterprise ERPs, and processing high-confidence orders touch-free, and it cites SOC 2 Type II certification and a 30-day average implementation (conexiom.com, July 2026). It holds a 4.6 out of 5 rating on G2 across 66 reviews as of July 2026.

Look at who it showcases: Exxon Mobil, Arrow Electronics, Fastenal, Graybar, Parker Hannifin. Look at what it lists as integrations: SAP, Oracle NetSuite, Infor, Epicor, Microsoft Dynamics. If you are a large manufacturer or distributor running one of those ERPs, with an IT team and thousands of orders a month across many trading partners, Conexiom is a credible default choice, and this page is not for you.

Where does the fit break down?

If you run your wholesale business on Shopify or BigCommerce and your customers email you PDF purchase orders, you are shopping in a different category than the one Conexiom's motion is built around.

Start with the buying process itself. As of July 2026, Conexiom does not publish pricing on its website; its calls to action are demo requests, and a price arrives through a sales conversation. A third-party software directory describes the model as a custom quote, typically an annual subscription per trading partner, per-document pricing, or a hybrid (Zoftware Hub, updated November 2025).

None of that is wrong. Custom-quoted annual contracts are how enterprise software is bought. But if you process a few hundred POs a month, you cannot budget against a price you cannot see, and a procurement-shaped sales cycle is a strange way to buy a tool whose whole point is removing a quarter hour of typing per order.

What does PO automation actually cost?

Public numbers in this category are rare, which is itself the story:

Conexiom: does not publish pricing (as of July 2026).
Esker: publishes no pricing for its order management product (as of July 2026).
Rossum: one of the few vendors with a public price. Its entry Starter plan lists at “Starting at $18,000 per year” with a one-year minimum contract (rossum.ai/pricing, July 2026).
Nanonets: publishes usage rates of $0.02 to $0.30 per block run, its unit for a single workflow step, and says a typical invoice processing workflow runs 4 to 6 blocks per document (nanonets.com/pricing, July 2026). It is a general-purpose document platform though: you still assemble the extraction workflow, the product matching, and the store write-back yourself.
Dynition: pricing is published at dynition.ai/pricing. Your first 15 purchase orders are free, then $2 per PO, dropping lower at volume, with no setup fee.

That is the floor problem in one list. For an SMB or mid-market distributor, the honest choice today is an $18,000-a-year entry point, a price you have to request, a developer platform you build on yourself, or a published price you can start on this afternoon.

Run your own numbers: how much manual PO entry is costing you today, and what per-PO automation would save.

What does manual PO entry cost you? Run your own numbers.

Purchase orders per month200Minutes to key one PO by hand15 minFully loaded hourly cost of order entry$30/hrShare of orders with an entry error3%Average cost to fix one error$200

$2,700

monthly cost of manual entry, $1,200 of it from errors

$370

Dynition at this volume, $2 per PO after your first 15 free, less at volume

Your net monthly saving

$2,330

630% ROI

$27,960 a year, every dollar spent returns $7.30

Defaults are what First Place Supply measured before automating: 15 minutes per PO and a ~3% error rate. Dynition pricing uses the published rate: your first 15 POs free, then $2 per PO, dropping lower at volume. We show the $2 rate here, so your real bill at volume only comes in below this. Error cost sits on the manual side because Dynition catches pricing, address, and term errors before the order is created. Every input is your own estimate, and the math is just arithmetic on it. See it run on your own POs.

What does Dynition actually do?

Dynition does not hand you extracted data. It turns the emailed PO into a finished order in the store you already run.

It reads the PDF or email your customer already sends, matches every line to your catalog, applies that specific customer's pricing, including BigCommerce customer-group pricing and Shopify B2B price lists, validates addresses and payment terms, and creates the order in Shopify or BigCommerce. Anything it is not sure about gets flagged for a rep to review before the order is created. It asks rather than guessing, by design.

At First Place Supply, a janitorial and sanitation distributor:

95% of POs processed zero-touch, no rep involvement
Order entry went from 15 minutes to 20 seconds
Each rep got about 6 hours a week back
Order error rate fell below 0.5%, from roughly 3% manual
100% of pricing, address, and payment-term errors were caught before an order went out

Read the full story at First Place Supply.

Dynition is built by the team behind B2B Ninja and BigCommerce B2B Edition. We are building for the merchants enterprise pricing left out. New to the category? Start with our guide to automating purchase order processing.

Conexiom alternatives: which one should you pick?

Your situation	Better fit
Enterprise ERP (SAP, Oracle, Infor, Epicor, Dynamics), dedicated IT, thousands of orders a month across many trading partners	Conexiom or Esker
Shopify or BigCommerce store, customers email PDF POs, tens to hundreds of orders a month, you want a price you can see and a start you can do yourself	Dynition

This is a fit table, not a feature comparison. Both sides of it are good software for the company they were built for.