TRADACOMS

TRADACOMS is an early electronic data interchange (EDI) standard developed for the United Kingdom's trading community to facilitate automated exchange of business documents in retail supply chains. It emerged in the late 1980s as a practical, industry-led alternative to international standards and became the dominant UK EDI format for many years.

The standard defines a family of message types used to transact common business documents, including purchase orders, order acknowledgments, despatch advices, invoices, and related communications. It supports both message-level envelopes and data elements organized in either fixed field lengths or delimiting separators, and is designed to run over traditional value-added networks (VANs).

In practice, TRADACOMS was closely associated with UK retailers, suppliers, and the networks that serviced them, enabling automated ordering, tracking, and settlement processes. The format is text-based and ASCII, which eased adoption on existing computer systems of the era.

With the global adoption of EDIFACT and newer EDI standards, TRADACOMS gradually declined in prominence from the late 1990s onward, though many organizations maintained legacy interfaces or used TRADACOMS-to-EDIFACT mappings for interoperability. Some systems and VAN providers continue to support TRADACOMS for legacy trading partners.