UN/EDIFACT is the United Nations standard for electronic data interchange for administration, commerce, and transport. It defines internationally agreed message structures for cross-border trade documents.
EDIFACT
EDIFACT — UN/EDIFACT, the United Nations rules for Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Transport — is the international standard that lets trading partners exchange structured business documents without a shared application. Ratified in 1987 and maintained by UN/CEFACT, it defines a compact, rigidly formatted syntax for purchase orders, invoices, shipping notices, and customs declarations. For decades it has been the backbone of cross-border commerce and supply-chain messaging.
- Standard message types - Named messages like
ORDERS,INVOIC, andDESADVgive every common trade document a fixed, agreed structure. - Segment-and-element syntax - Data is packed into terse segments and data elements rather than the verbose markup of modern formats.
- Cross-industry, cross-border - A single UN-governed vocabulary spans retail, logistics, healthcare, and customs worldwide.
- Partner agreements - Interchanges run over agreed transports and message profiles negotiated between trading partners.
In today’s API landscape EDIFACT is the legacy that modern integration has to meet halfway — platforms like Stedi wrap EDI in REST APIs and webhooks so that a decades-old message format becomes a modern, event-driven OpenAPI workflow. It remains mandatory in large stretches of global trade, so translating between EDIFACT and JSON is a recurring integration job, and it is a reminder that the API economy is often about giving proven, entrenched data standards a programmable, agent-consumable surface.
Referenced on the API Evangelist blog
Where this standard shows up across sixteen years of my writing at apievangelist.com — how it fits into API design, governance, and the agentic turn.
Stedi and EDI as Modern API Workflows
2026-07-08
