The Five-Legged Stool with Ethan Giffin of The B2B eCommerce Agency
Scott Ohsman of Always Off Brand and I recorded our Slightly Off Commerce collaboration at Shoptoberfest in Nashville on September 15, and Ethan Giffin waited about four hours for his turn at the table. He runs The B2B eCommerce Agency, formerly Groove Commerce, and the rebrand describes a change that happened to the business before it happened to the name.
“And so, we, over the last three or four years, had slowly, slowly, slowly gotten pulled into manufacturing and distribution,” he says.
The change started with one client request.
“And one of our biggest direct-to-consumer brands asked us for help with their wholesale site,” he says.
Uncle Bob and the Spreadsheet
Ethan wrote a book in April titled Closing the Digital Revenue Gap, and I asked him about the complicated situations in it. He corrected the premise.
“Well, yeah, it’s interesting is most of the stories are not complex. The solutions can often be complex, but the stories themselves are, you know, as simple as it comes,” he says.
Then he gave two examples that got an audible reaction from both of us, because everyone in commerce has met them.
“It could be too much of your revenue is being typed by hand into a system,” he says.
“It could be that, you know, Uncle Bob is the keeper of the product pricing and, you know, no one knows,” he says.
“He’s been doing it for 50 years and he’s got some convoluted spreadsheet that only he knows how to operate,” he says.
The book itself was a casualty of the same instinct toward less. He wrote three hundred pages and published ninety.
“I actually wrote a 300-page book. And some of my advisors, my lawyer, was like, that’s too long. You’re giving away too much information,” he says.
The Buyer Who Does Not Turn It Off
Scott raised the generational handoff, and Ethan’s framing of it was the most useful arithmetic of the conversation. He starts from a date.
“Well, you know, if you think about it, the iPhone was released in 2007, right?” he says.
“And the average 23-year-old college graduate entering the workforce, you know, was five years old when the iPhone was released,” he says.
What follows is a claim about habit rather than technology.
“And so those people entering the workforce have Amazon in their pocket. They’ve had Uber in their pocket. They’ve got Starbucks in their pocket. And when they go to work, those types of tendencies don’t turn off,” he says.
Then he moves the clock forward, which is where it lands on a manufacturer.
“So how is that going to evolve when that 23-year-old is 29 or 30, you know, in the next five years, and they’re the head of purchasing, you know, like, in that role?” he says.
Alignment Before Anything Gets Built
Companies arrive at Ethan’s door for a handful of reasons, and the most common is a customer applying pressure, a major account requiring punch-outs, EDI or an API. What they ask for is a website. What he sells them is something else.
“And they’ll start with, hey, I just need to build this website. And what we push back on is we’re actually like, this is more about alignment internally than it is just building a website,” he says.
He has a name for what has to hold.
“You’ve got to have alignment between sales, marketing, IT, operations, and finance. And if you can’t get that alignment, you know, it usually doesn’t end well,” he says.
His evidence is a call with a manufacturer, and the numbers are the reason this section exists.
“You know, I was on the phone recently with a $400 million manufacturer that did, they had spent seven figures on building a portal and did $153,000 of sales in the first nine months,” he says.
“Like, not in one month, but in nine months total through this system,” he says.
His point is that this result is harder to achieve than success would have been, because at that size some customers prefer not to talk to a human at all.
“You ought to, like, get a, you know, you ought to get, like, $2 or $3 million just by accident,” he says.
The cause was not the software.
“It took three or four weeks for finance to approve a new account,” he says.
Scott summarized it as silos equals sadness, which Ethan accepted.
The Discovery Day a CEO Tried to Skip
The agency runs a three day in person discovery in Baltimore for every client, and Ethan told a story about a chief executive who tried to skip it. The reframe he used on him is the same one he uses on the whole category.
“And I’m saying, listen, you ought to have at least 10% or 15% of revenue, like, flowing through this thing. Isn’t it worth you coming for the first day and a half for a $15 or $20 million revenue channel within your organization?” he says.
“And that changed his mindset of, hey, this isn’t just a website. This is actually a revenue channel that we need to think about in this way,” he says.
He came.
What Ethan thinks these companies are short of is not a platform.
“And I think that that’s, like, these folks need, they don’t just need a technology solution. In fact, that’s probably, like, further back. They need a coach. They need a personal trainer. They need a consultant to help them think about, like, what this is going to look like,” he says.
He puts a number on how long it takes, which is longer than a software timeline and shorter than it sounds.
“We do say it takes about three years,” he says.
“To go from, like, no catalog on your website where it’s, like, digital revenue is operating and governed. And you’ve got a steering committee. And you’ve got a weekly scorecard and all those things,” he says.
“It takes a couple years to get yourself there, but you can have incremental gains,” he says.
Why Shopware
Ethan is a ginger who blames the Magento ecosystem for his gray hair, and his standard for a platform now is a low one stated plainly.
“And so, you know, what I like is that Shopware doesn’t cause us gray hair. It’s a fantastically engineered system. It’s scalable. It’s flexible. And so, it allows us to put together complex solutions,” he says.
Which matters because of what his clients carry.
“And manufacturers and distributors have complex catalogs and complex requirements,” he says.
Readers can request a free copy of Closing the Digital Revenue Gap at b2becombook.com, and the agency is at b2becommerceagency.com. Ethan also runs an invite-only B2B eCommerce Summit in Baltimore each May for thirty organizations, with Shopware involved and travel covered for those who qualify.
The B2B Commerce Trends and Opportunities Report goes deeper on digital revenue channels and on selling in regulated markets, with nine experts who advise B2B sellers. It was written and researched by Content Cucumber, presented by Shopware, and it is free at contentcucumber.com.