Podcasts

Sander Mangel

Commerce is Custom

Have you ever wanted to do something out of the ordinary in your Shopify store and then found a small application to do it? When you use SaaS, you don’t own or control any third-party code, and you depend on a small army of developers to host and maintain all your applications on Shopify. Sander helps us understand the benefits of a hosted solution and how Shopware will help merchants run their stores more effectively and less expensive than a SaaS-based solution. He talks about “Flow Builder,” which lets merchants customize specific workflows on their system without needing a developer or a third-party application. We talk about how easy Shopware is to start developing for a developer and how the tech stack is “Developer Friendly.”

Sander gives us some 2022 tips for merchants. Tell your story, make sure you have robust product information, own your customer relationship, and make videos! If you can’t make all your videos, encourage your customers to make them for you. We finish with ShopwareUnited.com, a global community for Shopware users.

Sander Mangel is a Solutions Architect on the Global Market Development Team for Shopware

Learn more about PIMS and how they work with commerce by clicking here.

Rick West

B2B Product Led Marketplace

Rick West, CEO of Field Agent, envisioned a new type of product-led B2B marketplace, one where you could shop for specific services and buy that service all in the same place. We discuss his vision and how he made it a reality. Rick tells us about his experience as a 20-year start-up and the journey he took to make Field Agent a success. He tells us how unique it is in the industry. Your traditional B2B marketplace is going to take you to a connector to have two or three other phone calls, two or three other meetings. Field Agent can take you right to check out. By the time you check out two or three minutes later in near real-time, you’re getting data and results coming back your way.

Field Agent has reimagined B2B retail solutions to help CPG and retail professionals solve common challenges at retail. Our on-demand marketplace contains a full suite of fast, simple, cost-effective tools to help companies evaluate in-store conditions, drive sales, understand shoppers, generate ratings and reviews, and more.

Rick West is an experienced CEO and co-founder of multiple start-ups with an emphasis on technology, innovation, and CPG. As a leader in the Retail Industry for seventeen years in the United States, Hong Kong, and Thailand he has been an Entrepreneur for over sixteen years in the U.S. and currently serves as a speaker and mentor within the business community and research industry. Life Quote: “Don’t live in the world of maybe, let your yes be yes and your no be no”

Building a Customer Centric Culture

Store owners want to get from out of their e-commerce business. Real conversations happen when building a customer-centric culture is a prime focus. Whether you are a merchant or warehouse distributor, or a manufacturer looking for digital commerce. You should look at your tech partner, either agency or the solution integrator, and make sure they understand the business aspects and the workflow of your industry.

Vatsal Shah offers transformation and growth to organizations and individuals by creating an inner drive. He helps them elevate their brand image, increase revenue and profitability. He founded Pragmatic Consultancy in 2008 to unlock their potential. As a business coach, he championed transformations of 69 IT, Digital Agencies, E-Commerce, and Retail organizations, trained more than 12K people and 184 CEOs. His clients spread across India, China, UK, Africa, Ireland, and the USA

Vatsal and I also discuss Vatsal’s involvement in Meet Magento Events


Transcript:

All right. Welcome to this episode. Today I have Vatsal Shaw. He is a coach, a CEO coach. E-commerce evangelists speaker. I’ve seen him speak in person. He’s a pragmatic at pragmatic consultancy. Sorry. Let’s all. Please introduce yourself. Do it much better than I just did. And maybe tell us one of your passions in life.

Yep. Thank you for having me here at the same time. Yeah. So in a nutshell, if I tell about myself, what I do is I help it companies, digital marketing companies and agencies grow from small to big, say from few million dollars to multi-million dollars or multinational companies. What I work closely with them in terms of strategy, planning, execution, creating organization structures, they’re liberal politicians pricing and.

And as a result, a lot of adult Shopify, big commerce agencies have grown. I also work with various mobile and app development companies available in development companies. So almost all types of ID, sector companies. And I’m fully focused on that. And my passion is when people grow and then they touch more lives and all prosperity at that time, I feel good.

So I’m a teacher at heart and businessmen as. I have a weird combination about education. I studied it masters, then marketing majors, then psychology and communication. So I try to keep on accumulating new knowledge and keep on sharing on different platforms. And yeah, my mission is wherever I am, I should be able to transform lives, whether it is individuals or.

And my individual passion and singing and drawing, bending, and singing as well. So are you going to sing a song for us today? No, because I may be singing in Hindi, but you’re a leg Indian language. Your target audience may not understand that. So we’ll do a follow-up episode with you singing. Oh, we’ll do the intro.

I will sing a song for you and meet with India, because then the audience is. Alright. Perfect. So today I’d like to split up the topics between the store owner and maybe the agency and see maybe there’s I know there’s different perspectives from both all was there’s different perspective there, the third perspective from the developer as well, but maybe you could go into what customer.

The store owners want to get from out of their e-commerce business. Yeah. So it has been my favorite topics since long. We have been reading on internet or maybe listening the dogs from specimens. And I started with the purpose. We might have read a book called Scott McCain, which is what customer really want.

And then a lot of popular conversation happens where customer centric culture is a prime focus. So what I always look at is when any e-commerce. Oh, no. Or you can say merchant or warehouse, distributor, or a manufacturer looking for digital commerce. The space, what they look at is their tech partner, either agency or the essay they understand the business aspects and the workflow of that industry.

They bring subject matter expertise on the table. They help them digitize their workflow instead of. Fixing them around a platform or a tool or technology, which is preferred by them. It is an interesting no six, seven points. I can recall from the court Mac in that customers are looking for a compelling experience and where the it companies or agencies.

Giving the customer service or development service or e-commerce maintenance service. And so on customer look at personalization and personal focus that how I can help their business, how can increase their revenue. How can I increase their order ROS and so on. But most of the agencies focus on tech part, or they are focusing on digital part or UX part all together.

Is there a very rare combination. Most of the essays don’t focus end-to-end servicing of the customers customers want reciprocal loyalty means they want me as a solution architect or business practitioner to suggest what not to do. Instead, I have seen a business analyst or e-commerce solution specialist keep on prospecting.

What next can be sold to the customer. And a customer wants differentiation. If. Same Gordon’s book purple cow. What they want is there as to what has to be remarkable or different. If you look at all different chains of retail store on store, we’ll have component. Similar, but the orchestration of the retail sales is different.

And the same thing happens when you talk about digital commerce. So I understand that functionalities can be same platform can be the same, but the way it has been delivered has to be different. Whereas I have seen that agencies are busy making excellent at their packages and selling the same thing again and again.

So these are some of the gaps which I keep one finding in the market and I’ve seen the biggest. Exactly do opposite side. And then the Grove as billion dollar company and the rest skip one, struggling and finding new customers, licensed valley, switching the platforms and so on. And and as a result, Merchants struggle in finding the right partner.

So it is not the problem in Asia. It is a problem. I have found everyday because I talked to agency partners in us, UK Australia, Singapore, and India. So I have seen this trouble going on everywhere. And I would say merchants are right now pretty savvy, but still they get confused.

What is right for them. Yeah I I agree with that. So what do you think agencies could do to interpret what the client wants? In my previous stock which I recently delivered at magenta association connect we recently delivered that Magento association connect actual problem statement.

Somebody is trying to solve. And then based on that research is done, right things. So it’s interesting thing I used to teach when there was a curriculum going on in India that help us start digital commerce. And I was affected in there. So I used to teach to the merchants and the business owners as well considered that you are going to the new city.

And if you don’t have enough money on you’re trying on, so you won’t buy a house or an apartment, what you will do as you go on. So that can be Shopify. If you grew up at big and if you are established, then you want a bigger system because you have bigger house like bigger family and you want to scale it bigger.

So then you can look at hosted SAS cloud platform, or you can switch to window. And if further you grow, then you can have only general solution, which is enterprise grid, which can be Adobe commerce or any other no. Solutions, which we see in the Gardner store. So with the need of the client size and scale, if it’s just them, things, it works in a different fashion and it will reduce the cost of ownership. What I’m seeing is merchants struggling in their profit and margin for each thing. And that’s where the number of site opens you find equal ratio. Number of sites gets school. Yeah, I think that’s been an ongoing thing for a long time.

 Is the is the sites that go back and forth between either agencies or platforms that’s happened quite a bit. So in the beginning you mentioned some breakdowns that agencies should pay attention about. Maybe we could go over those again. You mentioned UX UI, what are some of those high level things?

If we were to take buckets, the merchant or the agency is offering and they are, and I think the other thing you said is they don’t offer. They don’t often offer all of the different things. They’re just offering one small segment of those broader orphaning offerings. What what are the things that that you mentioned earlier?

Okay. Interestingly, most of the agencies, they do requirement gathering. Then they do solution specification, but they don’t do like the product development companies do. So when you look at the product development companies or digital product development companies, what they run is a design sprint, or discovery sprint.

They go on MVP model. I have not seen e-commerce stores getting developed in. It just design, like you tell us what you want. We will package it, deliver. And then at the end we will support. I believe that business evolved over a period of time. What worked in 2018 may not work in 2020 and will not work in 22.

So it can be in a weaving model. Then we can keep on increasing the scope. Digital commerce where the technology and marketing can work. And then I’m doing Moscow analysis is very interesting stuff. And when I deal with merchants, I knew that mustache would have, could have, and won’t have eaters and I would rather recommend them what not to do then.

So yeah, it is not pro business when it talk about closing the deal. But what I have found is by doing this, I end up winning more. Sure. Yeah. So where then the agency comes in, if the client is asking for something that isn’t measurable or is measurable. So what I mean by that is a lot I think what you’ve said earlier was agencies will just do exactly what the client said.

And then they don’t often go back and measure the success of whatever they’ve been they’ve delivered. Maybe you could talk about some things that would be measurable that an AI would help an agent. Sure. In previous question also, I missed telling it so one is consolidation part second, I’ve seen that agency don’t focus on marketing automation, and it goes in the way of the customer.

So recently I have seen that some of the agency have picked up a conversation where they say client, that we work on value pricing or the amount of orders. Or the increase of the revenue have we will have a share out of it. It is called performance marketing. So that is lighting. New thing. Agencies should look at UI.

UX is already people have been doing, but I would say interaction design can be the next thing where they can look at ideal customer profile, which is ICP of merchants clients. And then based on that, they can create custom customer flows and personalization. These are the costly things. So all merchants can not afford.

I understand that, but the people were in terms of the enterprise who can go for it, they should look at it. And it didn’t say you should start looking at it for similar concept, but it does smaller scale. They can give to all the plans. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you would agree that a agency should offer it and let the client say no, rather than never say anything about.

Certainly. Yes. So w when you offer something, at least you are leaving a customer empower and they have rights to choose. So when customer feel empowered they love it. And instead of dictating, this is not right, this is possible. This is not possible. If we give choices to the customer where you made a differentiation between types of agencies.

So maybe you could explain or tell us the difference between an e-commerce agency and an it company. I think a lot of times those two things get blurred. Yeah. I have seen this overlapping conversations out there. I have seen the. Agencies have different type burners. Their primary focuses on UX design and they outsource the development.

Second IRC in a digital marketing and branding agency, but they have small development arm and then outsource development. Third is tech focused company, which is working on as a platform essay or implementation partner. And they don’t have to do marketing house. So this all three of them claim themselves.

And it was just very confusing to the market. And there are pure-play ID players in this. Menu also, you will find e-commerce development is one of the option. So I can see this four distinct types and then all claim that they can build an e-commerce store. So what they mean, maybe The right components.

They may degrade the jacket and put it live. But th that is where not the business begins. It is, I would say 20% of the nearest 80 is missing. Which is around the business and the workflows and marketing and so on. It’s a different way of looking at it. I have seen ID companies, how they build up in a different way.

What they look at is we will make one thing and sell multiple things. So there is a product approach. There are agencies which work like a B2C B2B approach. What I mean by that is there so end clients or they sell dedicated resources. And I think companies are more focused on selling resources, staff, augmentation, teams, selling, they are offering manpower to the other it companies, agencies, or to the end customers.

And so that is one of the VR selling. Services and gaining money, which is most commonly found in it. Companies or product development companies, unlike agencies. And then what agencies look at is how we can create a masterpiece, how we can win a project or a brand or a kitchen where we do value pricing.

And we may do less number of projects, but we will have be more. So these are the two different tracks that I’ve seen. People get confused between to try and both the things together and switching between two and so on. So don’t you think though, that in that to be in it, to be an e-commerce agency, you have to be an it company and not necessarily I asked an e-commerce or digital commerce agency.

Not an ID company, but they know how to do orchestration of all these components available. They do have programmers and developers, but Derek, their center is not technology or product. Their center is commerce. So now you look at the big four consulting firms. They do amazingly big implementations, but their core focus is commerce or retail tech, or digital transformation of retail chains, not a particular platform or technology.

They use technology to deliver. Oh, that would be the with, okay. So are you making the differentiating around platform rather than technology or rather than the skill set of the particular developer? Because it sounds like an e-commerce agency. If they’re only on Adobe commerce then they’re focusing on that and they can’t offer something.

 I’m not saying they can not offer something else. I, you can see that most of the Adobe partners have started offering multiple platforms now, except couple of still they’re still low Adobe only, but rest of the people that have. No suggesting different platforms. What I’m seeing is their core concentration, even while department gathering and suggesting to the customer is revolving around the product platform or the technology.

It’s not that our own commerce. When you put commerce into the center where you start reading. What is the customer’s product? What is their differentiation? How we can create a story around pans products, and then you start building no canvasing their customer’s journey, and then fit commerce technology in that.

So it can be then in store catalog can be variable. It gets, so it brings the only channel solution. So what. So it’s what is the first priority technology first or commerce first? Yeah. Okay. I get it. So I think that a lot of the, a lot of the agencies that have been Magento only are focusing on making sure the client fits into Magento.

And what you’re saying is figure out what the customer needs first and then find the best solution for them. Okay. And then wherever the right components are fitting. Components and technology in the clients need. So it can be Magento. It can shop if it can be front end with Hiva or it can be used to a friend or it can be anything else.

It backend can be anything. It can be, anything can be anything. So it’s not necessarily that it only one product can be fitted. Yeah. You can have one product as a base and then you can revolve components around it, but the focus should be commerce, not the product we are. Got it. Oh as we move through this, then how can agencies become more agile when they’re making these decisions for on the behalf of clients?

Oh, it is a interesting phase. We are passing through. Now since last couple of years, we can see that there are different layers of solutions on the label. So the VA said different platforms available that our platform, which is economical, that our platform, which is for the mid range.

And there are platforms, which is expensive. Now, when you. I consider that if I’m an agency owner, what I have to do is I have to be agile in strategic decision making to sustain and grow. What I need to look at is my imbalance, what analysis I’m supposed to do. But at the same time, nowadays is a question on installed capacity.

 So we build a one listing, can Google G nine metrics. It says capacity building of the company. Now all the agencies are supposed to be. Check a skill they have, they’re supposed to build new capacities. Earlier they were doing one of the tech work. Now they’re talking about composable commerce.

They need to learn or unlearn rather different ways of doing and calling and practicing e-commerce development. People who are front end developers, maybe. Be in need or maybe a different kind of rented would be in a need. So a lot of new things are coming up. So if I will be an agency on I would have forecast there’s interns on 1819, that what would be the next instead of being like, I would have been a late adopter of different front end platform.

 Maybe she’ll get in Contentful, goes to a friend, a lot of many other things. And then we’ll look at how different vacuums forms can help me deliver what client. Second. What I have seen is agencies who have been settled records all or two and a half decades old, 15 decade, Allie, 1.5, which has been a seasoned player who have been gold platinum partners, adapting new change and embracing Jane needs.

Lot of evaluation with them, which leads a redesign of the process, recharging in no motivating people inside to learn new things and learn what they’re already good at or the best. And reshape the organizing structure. Earlier you had only one type of people. Now you have multiple type of people, a leader who used to be a king, maybe now he’s one of the manager.

So a lot of structure restructure happens. And then so this leads to a jail management. And if you go to any businesses, They teach different ways of managing business, but they I would say new terminology should be taught nowadays. It’s just got a general management because businesses are specifically it businesses becoming now a giant, it started project management.

Now it is business management. It also getting a day because everything new coming in new conversations are, I know their social commerce is going to play a big role because three platforms will be more now different ways of payment methods are. A lot of things have changed. So I would say the people who used to be great may not be a fit into the market sooner.

 It would be survival of the test. I would say that, yeah. That’s a really good way to put it this, since things are moving, they’re moving exponentially quicker. It seems like you have to be agile when you, when it comes to your management process, just like you have to be agile when it comes to your delivery process of your technology.

 You mentioned a composable commerce. I know that composable commerce and content and commerce are a big thing right now. Maybe you could explain what your thought is around composable commerce and how it fits into today’s. I think you are the better person than me do. Explain where this composable of commerce here with masters.

 And I claim to remaster in commerce space, but I would say composable gives a lot of freedom of expression to the developer, or maybe an agency also to the customer where I have Liberty to choose what all I want and I can. No set up things together, which works in the favor of my business.

So earlier I would say it was made to order. Now it is assembled to order. So if I say in a simpler word, what is composable? Commerce is assembled to order depending on the client need, we assemble right components and deliver to this plant. And it, it breaks the boundary of one particular platform’s dominance.

 It becomes open to everyone. We shared the pie and the pie is bigger than this word, compostable commerce is heading towards. And how do you feel content in commerce fits in with that? Last year in the UK happened to talk about content driven commerce. I always believe that we don’t buy products.

 There was a popular tweet because of my session with Guidewire. I said that people don’t buy a product, people buy stories. So you don’t buy apple phone or for 100 back, you buy a story which is around math. Similarly, you don’t buy anything like the, I think you are using. Right now.

Yeah. Yeah. So you’re it because somebody might have you on a great story about it, and then you happen to buy that. So people don’t buy products, people buy stories around it. Look at the community into inclusive Magento community. It is a spirit and the story which holds us together. So it’s always that it’s, they want a product.

 And then when you talk about expiration of. Nowadays generation Zed is coming in. The next set of buyers are doing this enzyme. They are patient, they are digital, they’re tech savvy. They read about brands and then the juice products, which connects to their values, which is a girlfriend which builds loyalty and trust.

There are some of the key points we can find in McKinsey article, how their behavior prints, and then looking at that continuum and commerce will be the key. When you talk about DTC brands that are more towards advanced story and content, their philosophy, why they read it and so on. So it is going to be a interesting part.

I know that you mentioned earlier around growing your e-commerce business, what do you think it takes to sustain and continually grow an agency in this e-commerce world? Recently. Oh CNS not only e-commerce development, but marketing of store using marketing technologies arrow, maybe automation.

And then there can be a huge gap when. Need of skilled manpower of which we need as a merchant automat, no manufacturer to run my e-commerce store. If agencies start focusing on giving that service, which is called e-commerce process, outsourcing EPO which is called manage e-commerce stores.

So some of the people I have seen some companies have started this. Since one and a half year are doing there, get catching wildfire. What it does is this allow merchants or manufacture to focus on the core business and rest of the grunt work, which they need to manage the store also done by the agency.

 Maybe a subcontracted partner agencies have, but that can be new addition to grow it and see business second, I would say no, client is small, maybe a new birding literacy brands can be a unicorn and coming two, three years. So it is a scale look at how they can start small and then grow along with the.

And working on performance marketing alone or the client or e-commerce tool can be an amazing thing. And the way I recommended we should look at Jeannine metrics, which is called installed capacity. So what kind of team competition? I have skilled metrics I have inside the company, how to keep on checking and updating it to stay into the market.

Yeah, I think you you mentioned something interesting there about about no client is too small and oftentimes you do get a big client that has a small idea that wants to grow it. So that’s a great way to look at it. Hey they, this is a really big client, but they want to do something that’s as a test.

 And there’s all kinds of tools out there too, to test their ideas. And you as an agency or as an agency has to be willing to take up that test and move forward with that with that client. And it could be a small client and the agency believes is them or could be a big client that has a small idea that the agency believes in.

I think both are very valid. You mentioned Meet Magento a few times and I’d like to go into Meet Magento’s now. You attended all the Meet Magento India. I had been doing most Saul. Yeah, I turned it all and I have taken a role play in four, not one, not in one because I worked my top was not selected by you.

I would say that this kidding, but yeah, in the in the first episode of Magento, I here I was. Then in the third one, I was a anchor and speaker and hopefully contributing this year as well. And then not only in making much of the India, I have been contributing to split, went into Singapore, Indonesia, UK, wherever I get an opportunity.

Recently I contributed to Magento association connect. Yeah, I know Magento community because I started my gender with Magento when the first meter release was there. I still didn’t call it Dave and I was, I used to do a job and my CEO gave me a big printout of what into architecture and then the data structure and.

What the hell how this can be possible. I’m talking to them eight, nine. And since then I have been, then I left my ID job. And then at that time I used to be e-commerce product manager. And then later on, I started my consulting career and help a lot of e-commerce agency grown using Magento. So the idea has been fantastic journey.

And personally, I love orange. And now I’m forced to love many more colors, like green, blue, and so on. So let’s just say, we’ve been talking a lot about agencies as an agency. Why would an agency want to attend any Meet Magento? Yeah. There are a lot of things. One. People don’t generally spend time on reading or entrepreneurs are busy managing things, which is coming up in their daily routine.

So consider that if I want to have a quick review of what’s new into the mix. Good a bit Magento, you will find world’s finest speakers talking about the new trends. What is coming next? And then know you can quickly learn and whatever you feel interesting. You can go back and explore. Second you meet like-minded people.

And have a drink with them. Third it’s fun to be with the community. It’s a different you have talk to like-minded people. You talk about your case studies and you learn from each other’s experience and exposure. That’s the reason you should read and go into Meet Magentos. Personally, I have been to imagine as well, four times.

So it’s altogether different vibes when you meet in person nowadays it’s drier because. We are on zoom and then delivering session on hoopin. But yeah, but all who below, but when it goes back normal, I think it’s. Interesting conversation happens when we meet. Yeah. And I think some of those conversations happen in person and different conversations happen in person.

And you feel more enabled or more empowered, I think on both sides to have more conversations and things come up that wouldn’t normally come up. It would never come up if you didn’t attend. And I think it’s harder on zoom too, to have those open conversations. What about why would a developer Juan and with tandem Meet Magento event?

Okay. So I would say they have numbers. Life is pretty boring sorry, developers. I love you, but yeah, that’s how it is. You love computer and poor more than the people around many may not agree to it, but yeah, I have seen that you’re focused on. What is to be delivered as a tech park. So if you want to revive your human feeling go and meet your friends at windows.

And then actually in the way you’ve learned from each other, feel jealous that somebody knows more than me. And then you go back and put up more hustle and learn what it does also have certification coupons going on. So you’ll go and attempt your exam. They get a day off, maybe paid from your boss and then go and attend video.

 I’ve seen that developers can learn a lot of things. They’re focused towards that, but there, they can also attend business tracks, or you can say margin tracks to see how commerce at the play. I always seen that funny part, that developers and then the lead in tech technical. I don’t know why that I’m not interested in business tracks.

Actually what they are making is actually empowering the business. So they should look at that also as a perspective consider that if they want to become a freelancer agency owner, they should attend business track to understand how this business. Yeah. I you bring up a great point about developers on how the developers should have a bigger, a broader view of the solution that they’re doing when they’re doing their coding.

A lot of developers fall into that trap of, Hey, I’ve been given this task, I’m going to do this task without asking any questions, attending those business tracks, lets you have a chance to learn the bigger picture of what you’re trying to accomplish. I want to key on one point you said, why would a boss let their employee attend?

And so my question is why should a boss give their employee time to attend a Meet Magento event? If I would be a boss, I would let my all employees go and sponsor tickets and then I will see them go and see the world, how it goes. Why? Because when they go there, they see the tracks, they look at different parts of where people coming from.

Different part of world, some from America, some from Germany, Europe, maybe Singapore, Austria. In the place where you are, and then they learn how to, how they communicate, how they behave body language, they learn soft skills. They also explore presentation skills. I will not, some of the team members, I would push them to talk as well.

I would push my developers to deliver a talk as well. There is a different exposure to develop a person’s personality. And then yeah. It is always good that there is a trend as well, that other, we know many business agency owners come there for shopping, you know what I’m talking about so that they take away into those developers that is part of life and part of business.

But at the same time if I’m having a great culture, if I’m paying well, I should not worry about my developers going here and there. But then I would put them as a brand ambassadors as a. And from what my brand have a snowball effect, bring many more people like you into our company and let’s throw together that can also be a talk I can deliver as a boss too much.

Yeah. I think you brought up a great point about that, that it is a two way street that your people are out there to recruit other people. And it is a, it is an open forum and giving them the opportunity to learn more about what’s out there in real life and talking to other other people in their same industry.

You learn a lot from that. And I know in the past I’ve learned a lot just from attending, talking to other agency owners you learn their experiences. Certainly there’s going to be some filtering around that, but you do learn about how they’re experiencing their customers now. And we did, we earlier, we talked about how maybe clients jump between platforms.

 Clients definitely jumped between agencies. As you start to be great, big talk to bigger agencies, you’ll learn this big clients been with this agency and this agency, and they they seem to change their mind every two years or every year sometimes. I wanna, I want to key on one more point that you made too about about speaking at events like this and how these smaller events and actually Meet Magento is not a small event.

It’s been quite large. But it’s not as it’s not as, I don’t know how to come. It wouldn’t be compared to say Adobe summit there. There’s not the same budget. Let’s just say that the why would, what is the PR what would, let me try to phrase this question correctly? Why would a person want to speak at an event like that?

Okay. So it’s an interesting question. Many people ask me you are not going there to sell your service or promote your CEO coaching course. You are not an agency. You are not a developer. You are not part of Magento. You’re not running a Magento farm, or you are not running WordPress from why you keep on talking there.

So I say there are a lot of tech, people are there and a lot of agency owners have. If I have some idea and if I can get a platform to share, it’s amazing to get. And then I would say a lot of. URI or I would say followers, or you can say fans, I have earned in my life of who appreciate what I talk is thanks to Meet Magento.

A lot of people in those, I have spoken even in word games and also in university forums, but meet Melinda has given me helped me a lot of respect in the country where I’m living. And it has actually made me a better personally. And that’s the reason I should go and talk there. It actually, when I’m supposed to prepare for a talk, I’m supposed to do background work, study research.

It also helped me improve my intellect as well. So it’s amazing to. Yeah. Yeah. So I would just key in on to couple of those points, that number one, it gives you an opportunity to learn how it is in front of other people. And it helps you to collect your thoughts and put them into a format that helps you to communicate to others.

And you will get direct feedback from others and how your presentation went good or bad. I know that we’ve been talking about giving some coaching. If there’s younger people that would like to present we could help them give them some coaching on how and I’m sure that you would also be good at giving some coaching to younger people or maybe people that are not so experienced in public speaking.

I would also say that since this is virtual, it is a lot easier to do a presentation to people because you don’t, maybe you don’t see them out there in person. And there’s not that extra pressure. There’s some pressure still, but you don’t see them there in person. So there’s a lot of opportunities and I think the biggest one is just that.

In preparing you end up learning so much about what you’re presenting that in that presentation all that time, it takes to put it together. You end up learning 10 times more than you could possibly have known before you started that presentation. I would add one point there considered that what all knowledge I hear.

If I can summarize that knowledge in 20 minutes. Think about how well I will be making my pitches to the customer. So it helps me create framework that how I can compress my conversations still, it can be crisp and effective, so it helps in business development as well. So where’s the train. All right. I promise I have one last question about meat Magento.

 Why would the merchant want to attend a Meet Magento? Oh, it’s interesting. At one particular place, merchant can see what all kinds of technology he or she needs is available. All the boots are there at the same time. He or she can validate different vendors standing there. Third, they can validate whether that vendor is good or bad, because you will always find people who can give feedback about them for they can learn new things fifth, they can also meet a product company, employees, like they meet one another.

You will always find people from Adobe. You’ll always find people from.digital. So we’re actually a platform or a product. So you can go and talk. You can get. It started on the live meeting. People were from payment gateway or processor like PayPal. People is always there. So you’ll find there’s a merchant.

I can find quick solutions so I can have quite answers to my questions, which I have been thinking in my office. I can just go for a few hours and get those answers. All right. So you brought up one more question. I apologize for not, I’m going to have another question. One. The last question about me, Magento prompts.

 Why would one of these eight, what would one of these tech companies sponsor? I Meet Magento event. So there are multiple reasons. One, you get promoted locally, so you be attractive to the new employees. That is one of the biggest advantage tech or is get when they promoted me Magento.

Second, if the merchant’s footfalls are there, you catch that merchant as well, and a third, any type of brand promotion happening, you should have an opportunity to do it. Why? Because unless you are visible on earth, how people will notice you and how you get Get more leads or the mileage. So I would say attending events and sponsoring events is one of the channels of generating leads or getting visibility.

So people should spend money there. Yeah. Excellent. All right, so let’s just switch to the Magento association for a little bit, as we close things out. That’s not, yeah, we won’t get into anything contentious, but I know that. Suddenly because of because of some people they’ve made some noise in our community and it started with the hoof a theme, and now it’s culminated in this may major open source community Alliance that has put some of us would look at it.

Some people would look at it as some division and others would look at it as it’s coming together. So I feel as though that it’s helped us to come together better because really this open letter that. Has prompted Adobe to wake up the Magento association to wake up and suddenly we’re all talking. What is your view on that?

So when people are sleeping here to make noise, to wake them up, there’s the first answer sake. Sorry. You can say that openly, but yeah, that’s there. And second, I am also part of modern day association committee ISO a committee called diversity and. And you might have a red a blog coming out from from the chosen ones who is going to take a head Magento open source.

So DNI committee actually played a good role in choosing who can be the next stars betters. I would say it was intended, it was spending, but this noise helped them do it faster. So sometimes I believe people perform better and faster in pressure and that actually have happened and I go the same then does help us merge together instead of splitting into two.

So I think now it can be a better roadmap we can see, and I hopefully See that open source survive grew and try because a, I would say whatever market share Magento has, the majority of it is open source. The Adobe commerce. So if it thinks then there will be a vacuum in the middle layer of open source e-commerce systems.

Yeah. And I think all these things are coming together now to show the importance of where the community fits in. And Adobe’s also acknowledging that the open source product has a great hold on. What the commercial product does and that they can’t simply ignore it and continue on with plans without talking to anybody.

I wouldn’t say Adobe cannot do it. The reason is open source clients. Are there potential prospects to convert into the pain? Licensed claims anybody who’s on opensource would likely to if they grow likely to buy at a promise. Actually for them, it was a lead generation platform. Instead of putting it on back burner, they should look at how they can tell.

Yeah, no, I agree that this has been the, this has been the question since 2010, since the enterprise platform came out, is how do you, is it a competitor or is it a lead generation or a One league below, like in, in cricket you have a premier league, right? You have a a great big league and then you have the leagues that are at, and everybody promotes the top.

So clients, the clients should, their aspiration of a client should be driving to the top and having this premier platform that you’re going to be on a Gobi needs to look at that open source as the, as. Driving place that helps people to move to the top. And I think in the past there’s been hundreds of thousands of users on the open source platform and they need to make sure that they’re.

Attending to those users because of bad experience and open source, and essentially means that they’re not going to go to that commerce platform because why would they even had a good experience. So from the Magento association point of view, then w I think there’s only 2000 members and I think there’s a hundreds and hundreds of thousands of developers that are in the Magento community.

How can we get more people to join Magento associates? They have created a committee which is commit a community building, or you can say it, it adds more registration to the Muslim association, but I believe that it’s not marketed, but if it is communicated it will work. Just for example, if you go on LinkedIn and you search Magento.

And you just select Southeast Asia countries like India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Singapore. LinkedIn search ends at 50 to get results. And then it’s dot.dot. You will find more than 50 to give people if you just stand that those many. Now you think about all different continents, Africa, USA.

 Russia, Australia, New Zealand and so on. So this can be, this has to be, I would say 20 X or 30 X community and registered on Magento association platforms. I think it. It needs marketing. It needs a declared hash. And then we’ll look here looking at people registering here. And I think it’s not promoted by.

Yeah. And I am on the I am on the membership committee. We don’t have any control over marketing. I think it has been suggested a few times that we do marketing as well. But what I believe is when solutions are not working, then the fork works, so sometimes you need to make new. No.

Then it starts working ultimately the benefit of Melinda community association unless you get more membership, how we can monetize or how we can grow big or how we can pass on more benefits. So it’s needed it as it has to be marketed, but then you always find great influencers in particular country.

They are not even leveraging those influencers to gain more membership. Yeah. And I think one thing that I just thought of that it seems like a no brainer is when we do a Meet Magento event, we should ask if those people would also like to join the Magento association, there has to be some way of opting people into the Magento association.

If they sign up for Meet Magento event, I think those two pieces are disconnected at the time. Yep. So if those data was pulled into the Magento association membership, it will create a magic. So I would say by default opt-in can be a choice that if you registered to Meet Magento, you are attempting for free the part of Magento’s position as well.

Excellent. We’ve solved everything. Thank you so much. We have used up our time and I, we had talked about going for 30 minutes and we’re coming up to an hour. So I think I I think we have to we have to wrap things up now, but I appreciate your time. I know that earlier I asked you if you could give me a shameless plug, so why don’t you go ahead and give me a shameless plug about anything.

 Perfect. Lots of Shaw. The CEO is this right. CEO of pragmatic consultant. So when they get all right, yo coach. Perfect. Okay. It was great speaking to you today. I appreciate your time. A lot of first time we dogged in this land. The log of first time we talked about this lent the log of first time we talked, taught this length, the law of first time we talked with this lent.

Thank you very much.

What the F*** is an UnConference?

David and Brent talk about Unconferences and how they differ from traditional conferences. We talk specifically about the https://unconf.us in Orlando Florida on January 21st, 2022.

Transcript:

All right. Welcome to this bonus episode of talk commerce. It is the unconference version of talk commerce, and I’ve invited my friend DaVita for the conversation today, unscripted. So an unconference is an unscripted event where the speakers come up with the top. So I came up with the topic, but Davi, go ahead and introduce yourself.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do. Hi, this is the and I am a team lead for for the development department of my company. We are working in WordPress PHP. Laravel obviously CSS and HTML and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All right. Full disclosure, David was here in Hawaii with me for a week or a little bit more than days, and I can see that it’s dark in his background and it’s one o’clock for me.

So it’s nice for me. And it also we’re chili today. It was chilly this morning. It was 75 degrees. Yeah. A little chilly when I anyway, so let’s get to topics. So I know you’ve gone to word camp and some other kinds. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about that and your experience at that type of conscience.

I went to two type of conferences, like a world camp work camp that is for WordPress. And then I went to the Las Vegas to the reinvent that is AWS, right? AWS is a huge conference. It’s all about AWS. And the world camp is a smaller conference, all about WordPress right then. And a little bit of e-commerce, but.

For WordPress oriented. I was one of the organizers here in the world camp, meaning Minneapolis. I was in charge of with another person with a sponsorship. So we did it in 2020, I think. Was it not. 2019, no, 2020, because we had to go remote. We have to go online at the time. But I would say that I really enjoy those conferences.

I learned a lot. My first introduction to WordPress, eh, was in a work camp that I really enjoy it. I thought that the price, the amount of information that we got as a attendees for those conference is this is such a good value. You get so much information and not just the speakers that they were great.

I, what I found more useful is the network. It doesn’t matter if you are in WordPress, if you are Drupal, if you are Magento, if you are big comers you are going to network with people and we are all facing the same challenges. So that was I got great contacts just by just going to both the.

Warp WordPress, eh, conference and the AWS conference. I really would recommend anybody to go to those. So that’s my experience with those two brands. So great. Thanks for that. An on-conference is a little different in the sense that there is no predetermined schedule and there’s no predetermined speakers.

 You go to the event with an idea of what you would like to see and you would go as a potential speaker. The idea is that the topics are driven by the audience. And I know in Minneapolis the local mini star chapter puts on an event. Mini bar. And that one w is the, are chosen a little bit in advance, but they were also on there’s no like specific path.

There is a you put in your talk and most of the done, and this one, this is we actually on the ground or during the first part of the event. Vote on topics. So think about a big, huge board and a lot of does a paper getting bandied around and topic choices, and then the board, and then everybody votes on them.

And I went, I had the pleasure of going to an unconference in 2019 in person. Okay. If the format was that the the topics were were presented and then everybody got a little sticker on the topics they would like. So it seemed, as I can remember, there was 16 different topics that would happen over two days.

Okay. And we would get each get a number of stickers in the. The topics with the most stickers were the ones that got presented. There was a number of people that showed up with a topic already pre-canned that they would like to do. So they would put they would put out their topic. They would like to present on.

Then present on that topic. Okay. The other thing would be, people would put out a idea for a topic and then somebody would have to present on it. So there were things that did not get presented on simply because either no one was interested or there was a nobody yeah. Presentation. However, I think the majority of everything was presented There was some off topic topics as well.

So as I can remember I may have put in a topic on running, which, Hey, that did not get it, didn’t get voted on, but there was a topic on ballroom dancing. It did get voted on. So anything goes this particular kind of dot U S is a e-commerce conference. And it is all around anything e-commerce so we are making it specific.

It is not a Magento only event. It is any e-commerce platform. And the idea is that you would show up and have some, I have a topic that you would either like to present on, or you’d like to hear. Okay. So Brent, where, when, on, where is this conference? So the conference is in Orlando, Florida, which I have been told.

There are some theme parks around there as well. It’s a myth I’ve been in Florida and there are no parks.

No really it’s true.

The conferences on a Friday. And then we were planning on having a Saturday and said you can come earlier, come late. I go, you can come early and stay late or whatever you were. But yeah, the idea is that there’s something to do around the conference and it’s going to be a one day event. If we have enough, we could bleed into the next morning.

So Saturday morning, but more likely we would just have the one day event. It would happen from eight to five, we’d have food and drinks. And then and then everybody’s free to either go to the parks or we’d have an after party or something like that. So I got to say that and last time I was in Florida in Orlando.

I, it was super fun going to all or there are so many Epcot. I love Epcot. That is my, this is not about the, this is not about that. This is about having fun. It’s not about you either. So try, stop trying to make this whole topic about you, Florida. It is possible to have good January 21st.

Yeah, 20, 22 Orlando. Now being an unconference to whom is your targeting audience, who are you? Obviously you don’t know could be, if the majority people are developers then but there could be, majority of people are merchants, a blend. What do you experience before in this kind of.

 Yeah, that’s a great question. It, traditionally I think a lot of unconferences are specifically for developers, but I feel as though there’s a lot more that can be learned from just having developers on board. And if we do include staff SAS platforms like big commerce, then there would be other roles that should be played in that front end developer, but also configuration and app developers.

Since we’d like to market things and there’s so many aspects around e-commerce that can be that can be represented that we want to make sure that it’s a voice in what we’re trying to do. Good. Good. Yeah. Because no matter where you are in which e-commerce platform you use, you have to deal with shipping, with payments, with cards, with all that kind of stuff that It’s really known platform, a specific probably right.

Yeah. It’s not like in some countries like Spain that might just have they have coins or something they exchange when they go down to their local fruit market to me ah, okay. I see. So I defended all the Spaniards. I apologize in advance. I would remember that when you want to have me again for another interview and this.

He goes. All right. Just for you guys to know, Brenda and I have known each other for many years, so that’s why I’m that’s why we pick on each other. So yeah. So what is the cost of these unconference breath? So right now we have early bird tickets open. I believe the tickets are around $140.

The and it is limited to 140. The idea is this can’t be a giant conference. This is going to be a somewhat intimate event that will allow people to eat. Okay. Are opportunities to have conversations outside of the presentations. There are opportunities to review what has been talked about it is not at all.

 What you would traditionally see as a formal event, but it is a, everybody should participate. And it is extremely fun. And having that participation and having your voice heard important part of how we can learn more about whatever topic we’d like to learn about. Okay. I can’t remember if you mentioned it, but what is the venue?

 Is it a hotel? Is it a. I can’t remember what it is at the four points by Sheraton in Orlando, wonderfully beautiful venue that has some great photography of the venue could put on the website uncomplicated. Oh, here we go. I was going to say, why don’t you tell us the website, but you just did and contact us.

The tickets are on Eventbrite and this is a big, huge commercial. This is our. Is there unconfident info, commercial that’s unscripted. I know you should say something like by now, before if you buy now you get, if you do follow me on on LinkedIn or Twitter, I have been posting videos that I’ve created while surfing.

Oh, it makes it even more fun because I feel as though you, as a participant should then go and do some surfing or get into the ocean and do whatever you’d like to do. That’s fun. You don’t have to go to a theme park. You’d go to the ocean. Good. So why don’t you really quick? Like I N in my, the introduction, I cannot like.

All right. Audience. What I got out of the conference that I will, I went, so why don’t you just give us a really what would you say that you got from the last unconference that you were went to, that you were like, Hey, these made worthwhile, they take the price of admission because you got a tip. You got some.

Yeah. I think in the last conference I had, which was again in 2019, it was in-person we were able to come up with some topics that were super interesting bout let me just say that the shop where people okay. You presented some topics on shop where, and it was a Magento unconference it goes to sh it just shows that there is not a specific.

 I learned about some specific programming things, but we also learned about workflow and how maybe a buyer would go through your cart. And what sort of things you could do within your shopping cart to help buyers better better understand the products, but more, more importantly, as a merchant to help buyers.

Oh with that. There’s other things for sale and people had a really in that. It is good to see. I know that we already have ticks some tickets sold and there’s some people from Europe coming here. So we’ll get a variety of people from different parts of the world showing up to and with that variety, you do get a greater.

The audience grows and you get a different aspect and a different view on things. So I think all those put together lead to a really on event. That’s informative. Okay. Good. Good. I’m sorry. You may hear some background noise. I think my dog is making noise, so hopefully it’s not too disturbing

that I tried to block the noise. Tara. So they’re making all kinds of it’s true. My windows. Yeah, so I think this is just meant to be a short little bro to what an unconference is. If you have questions I would incur unconfident you S and you can you can contact myself brent@whatgentle.com.

Quitter and we have more and more content coming out every day. So next. So if you are interested in sponsoring unconfident us, we do have a sponsor deck that you could contact myself or Madeline. It would gentle, and we’d be happy to share that. All right. Brian, thank you for inviting me to, to these short episodes.

I I wish I could. I was, I wish I could go, but we are in the middle of launching a website. We are moving our websites from, in premise to a fully hosted environment. So it’s super busy right now. So I’m going to, I’m going to have to go to Florida next year. Maybe.

 W a little shout out he has done some content for podcasting as well for performance. And I think your first episode is on anchor.fm, right? Yeah. Yeah. But it’s this is my first episode, maybe I’m a little bit shy about it if somebody wants to find me and listen to it, go for it.

 Is just try to inform people and just to have fun Brent and I are doing right here give us an a, yeah. This might be episode number 60 something for me. Better on your first one, you have a lot going for you there. Maybe you had a good mentor, right? Both Caskey mentor.

 Davide is we are planning on some Spanish episodes. If anybody. Either your accent is from Mexico. I can’t, I forget all the time where you’re at. It’s from the far east for us Spain. He has a funny little, what is it called? The feta or no,

So we’re hoping to have some Spanish content as well. Soon in the first part of the year, we’ll be leading those episodes for tuck commerce is spaniel. I can wait for it to start pushing your Duolingo skills. Did I just plug something? Without wanting to, you can beep it for me, beep it out later.

And we should have the we should have the swearing podcasts. Oh, there’s seven seconds delay. We should have a seven second delay that you can press the button. First. The button you’ll have a great evening. It’s been good talking to you. And again, on-call dot U S U N C O N F dot.

And I would look me up on LinkedIn or Twitter at Brent w Peterson. And you can see some of the fun, little commercials have been making or promos. Good. Good. Bye. Everybody. Enjoy the rest of your day. Bye.

Bart Mroz

A Marketplace in the Cloud

The marketplace model is getting more popular and platforms to choose from are growing every day. Bart Mroz of SUMO Heavy talks about his experience as an agency and how he has helped medium and large merchants create their own marketplaces. We discuss the differences between Magento and Shopify.

Shannon Lohr

Where was your shirt made?

Are your clothes made where you live? Where does the cloth come from? Shannon Lohr and I dive into some of the sustainability questions that you should ask when starting a clothing business. As the founder and CEO of Factory45, Shannon has worked with Idea-stage entrepreneurs to launch clothing companies that are ethically and sustainably made across the globe.

Shannon got her start in 2010 when she co-founded {r}evolution apparel, a sustainable clothing company for female travelers and minimalists that was featured in The New York Times, Forbes.com, and Yahoo! News.

To date, Shannon has worked with over 150 entrepreneurs in the sustainable fashion space, many of whom have launched some of the most transparent supply chains in the fashion industry. https://factory45.co/ Shannon has worked as a consultant for crowdfunding projects that have surpassed their goal amounts by as much as 300% and has worked closely with startup apparel companies from all over the world to create ethically-made products with a focus on environmentally-friendly materials and transparent supply chains. Shannon is a strong advocate for increasing supply chain transparency through sourcing, localization, and storytelling. She’s been named a thought leader for the future of fashion by Ecouterre and Triple Pundit, and she frequently writes about conscious consumerism and the intersection of fashion and environmentalism.

Flipping the script on e-commerce fulfillment

How Ecommerce Brands Can Use the Ohi Platform To Deliver Powerful, Fast, Brand-Focused, And Memorable Post-Purchase Experiences

We’ve all experienced the feeling of a magical post-purchase experience and the lasting impact it can have on our relationships with brands. Consumers want more from their brands, and brands need more in order to deliver.

We interview Russell Griffin, the CRO with Ohi. He has flipped the script for e-commerce fulfillment, transforming it from what is traditionally seen as a cost center into a growth engine. Brands join the Ohi platform to deliver powerfully fast, brand-focused, and memorable post-purchase experiences that enable them to grow.

Why Ecommerce Brands Should Care About The Ohi Platform

Brands are clamoring for more from their post-purchase experiences. Even as they’ve transformed fulfillment into a growth engine, however, most e-commerce brands continue to service customers based on their ability to meet delivery windows. This approach doesn’t address the problems that lead customers to bounce from retailer to retailer. It also doesn’t allow retailers to gain a better understanding of the customer.

Post-purchase experiences can be difficult, and the world is evolving at breakneck speed. When customers have another option, they’ll go to it.

What Are Typical Post-Purchase Experiences Consumers Experience?

Perhaps the most common post-purchase experience is that of frustrated shoppers.

Being stuck with slow shipping or delayed products is just the tip of the iceberg. Poorly designed websites are on the list, as are poorly documented checkout pages.

Products that fail to meet buyer expectations, a lack of product reviews, and poor after-sales experience don’t help.

How Has Ohi Revolutionized the Post-Purchase Experience?

A business can get most of their shipping and post-purchase experience wrong in just one click or screen.

Ohi’s service allows small, growth-stage companies to expand their network of fulfillment centers across the United States in a unique way that saves money and energy.

Micro-warehousing means that brands can avoid the much higher environmental costs of maintaining traditional warehouses or offering next-day or two-day shipping on a plane. This also eliminates the much higher costs of long-term leases and fees associated with air travel.

Ohi’s Post-Purchase Experience Solution offers a top-to-bottom way for merchants to deliver powerful, fast, and memorable post-purchase experiences to their customers.

How Ecommerce Brands Can Use The Ohi Platform To Deliver Powerful, Fast, Brand-Focused, And Memorable Post-Purchase Experiences

Ohi integrates directly into your website, always keeping your brand first. Your brand + Ohi instant commerce = the kind of growth every e-commerce and marketing leader dreams of.

By providing enjoyable post-purchase experiences, Ohi delights your customers and keeps them coming back, increasing their order frequency, average order value (AOV), and ultimately, your profitability. The math is simple; adding Ohi unlocks growth for your brand.

Since ecommerce is a high-touch experience, we had to reimagine how to support our customers and build more intuitive experiences on the backend.

Conclusion

The process of understanding customer needs and anticipating the e-commerce buyer journey requires us to consider what the shopper experience will be like. How is the customer purchasing journey organized? How do they find a product, determine which one to purchase, research the competitor options, and so on?

The answers to these questions all depend on having strong brand standards for these attributes and having a clear view of the entire purchase journey.

Ohi is looking to the future of fulfillment and the future of warehousing.

Alec Berkley

A Better B2B experience on BigCommerce with Alec Berkley

For years the SaaS Market has not had a great solution for B2B… until Now. Bundle B2B is a SaaS application that offers enterprise-level B2B functionality to businesses of all types and sizes. It enables store owners to facilitate their B2B operations online and provide their B2B customers with seamless transactions and convenient self-service account capabilities. Alec Berkley, the co-found and director of business development with BundleB2B explain how he got started and how his solution will benefit B2B users.

With core capabilities that allow users to easily manage front-end and back-end B2B processes, Bundle B2B can be utilized to fit the needs of any growing B2B Commerce business and improve the B2B self-service experience for both store owners and their customers.

Transcript

Brent: Welcome to this special B2B addition of Talk Commerce today. I have Alec Berkeley with me. He’s the co-founder and business development manager, business development superstar for bundle B2B. It’s a B2B ex B2B app for BigCommerce. Alec, go ahead and tell me a lot better than what I just said.

Alec: yeah. So we’ve been working with BigCommerce for quite some time. We started out as just a ranking technology partner and just offered our B2B extension for company account hierarchy. And then we just expanded out from there. And now we’re like a full mini B2B platform with invoice payment management, quote management.

Alec: And we are being resold by BigCommerce as their B2B edition. So that just happened in March of this year. We saw launched that and. We’re growing pretty fast and we’re working with a lot of BigCommerce merchants. 

Brent: Great. And what type of merchant do you think best fits the bundle B2B and you call it an app or extension.

Brent: What do you call this? 

Alec: We are a mini B2B platform. So we’re like a companion product for BigCommerce. It’s like a B2B extension for BigCommerce, I’d say. 

Brent: Great. And what type of client do you think is the best fit for. 

Alec: Yeah. So we find anywhere from pure play B2B to hybrid merchants that do both a combination of B2C and B2B all the way from SMB.

Alec: So first time online with some offline revenue and B2B accounts all the way up to enterprise. So we tend to play the best in the higher end of the SMB and the mid-market. Up until enterprise. And then when you get to the enterprise stage, you could still work with us, but you might require some more customizations and work done by a digital agency partner.

Brent: And are, I’m assuming most of the features are there or are there particular features that most clients are asking for that, that that are included and what are some of those feature? . 

Alec: Yeah. So all the way from like the approval process of a B2B account, like I’m looking to do business with you, how can I get payment terms and better pricing?

Alec: Or if I submit that in the form of a quote, say, Hey, I want to quote for these 12 products, a sales rep can then go and follow up with me and. give me a deal for that one time, or then I’m converted into a B2B customer. And then as soon as you cross over that threshold and become a B2B customer, that’s when all of our features come into play for reordering and for invoice management and sales reps that are transitioning those accounts into self-service.

Alec: I’d say the objective for a lot of our clients is to be more efficient and transition more of their B2B accounts into that self-service model so that they can reduce manual efforts and increase efficiency across their organization. 

Brent: You I maybe describe some of the motivations that you had around building this module and when did it start and what was the impetus to get going?

Alec: Sure. Yeah. My background originally in this industry was working with Magento open source, which in 2015 was one of the only options for this particular segment of new two online B to B that was able to get this type of functionality. So funny enough we really haven’t progressed. A crazy amount in terms of the features and functions that people are asking for.

Alec: We’ve just been able to decrease the total cost of ownership by 80 to 90% from there. The vision has never changed. It was to provide a, self-service easy to use B2B commerce portal. I think the platform changed to BigCommerce. And then as BigCommerce progressed with some of the things that they were offering from an API perspective, We were able to take it into overdrive and really progress pretty quickly.

Alec: I’d say within the last couple of years, we’ve started to see the majority of our traction with, again, those same merchants that we were helping back in 2015 on Magento open source with B2B extensions. 

Brent: Yeah. And so you started with magenta one and did you make a conscious decision to move, to be to BigCommerce and not move into magenta?

Brent: Two? 

Alec: Yeah. So we started with Magento 1.9 and we saw that, Magento two was coming out and we were able to gather that Magento was working on their own B2B functionality and the enterprise offering of that. And. Had a couple of options in terms of as a business, how we wanted to proceed and really putting the customer first, rather than our bank accounts and implementation fees.

Alec: So we were looking at BigCommerce and Shopify at the time, and it seemed that Shopify was more focused on the direct to consumer while BigCommerce was more focused on creating an API first platform and looking more at the ecosystem to provide. Direction for them. And so we got in there really early and said, look, this is what we’re looking to do.

Alec: This is the types of customers that we’ve been working with over here. This, this is what we’re looking to do with you guys. How can we get there and started out with custom projects and then eventually work its way into the brand that we have now is bundle B2B and in the technology.

Alec: Partner world. And again now as a part of their enterprise offering. 

Brent: So are you seeing that let’s call ’em legacy clients are slowly moving into the B2B online world, and this is a good entry point. Are you seeing seasoned B2B companies who. Either are already on BigCommerce or they’re converting their store from some other platform onto BigCommerce.

Brent: What is the sort of trend that you’re seeing? 

Alec: Yeah, that’s a really good question. We definitely see a lot of legacy. A lot of legacy customers that are on a specific E R P or specific eCommerce shopping cart that. has some integration capabilities. I don’t wanna call out specific ones. Shopping cars that are well integrated with different ERPs, but don’t have the extensibility or front end management and marketing capabilities that a SAS platform like BigCommerce or Shopify would have today.

Alec: So we see a lot of that. We also just see a lot. companies that never really had the budget or the vision to create an eCommerce site for B2B. And they’ve just been doing it over email and over the phone and directly keying orders into E R P systems or CRM systems. And they might have a customer portal that can show invoice data or something like that, but that’s about it.

Alec: And it’s just like a mirror into their E R P. It doesn’t really have. nice looking user interface to it. So that’s a lot of it. We do get the platform migrations. Those are usually tougher for us because they’re gonna come with, customizations likely on the previous platform and depending on where they’re at in that progression, the more mature B2B businesses.

Alec: sometimes are trickier for us. We work really well with the open-minded businesses that are tired of the legacy platforms and open to change and simplifying process or changing process a little bit to. save a whole lot of money. . 

Brent: Are you seeing some platforms? Or some, I’m sorry, some clients who are rigid in their ways and you’re going to ha you’re gonna have to do some modifications to it or are there are, they are a lot of people open to the way you’re set up and how the, how your workflow is going?

Alec: Yeah, I think it depends on who you’re speaking with and how large the organization. I think in the larger organizations, the challenge that we find is in customer service and sales not wanting to retrain. They’re team members w with yet another system to process orders and service the customers.

Alec: That, that is usually the toughest part is the adoption of the sales team and B2B, the clients are typically owned by sales. It’s, it’s not like organic Google ranking that brings them, it’s the hard work of sales people and. Sometimes even sales folks see the e-commerce site as a, as competition once their client goes into self-serve, why am I still how am I going to be, needed at that point?

Alec: We do see pushback in that regard and with the smaller businesses, it’s usually just, getting all of their data in order. And they know that, I think since the pandemic and when physical kind of. Interaction was limited. I think that kind of, for a lot of the laggards that kind of shifted their mind to realizing, whoa we really ought to have some online presence, but in terms of how we get there usually the complexity is more in the data and a lot of times that goes back to the it guy that’s been with them for 15 years and, has to take it on his own or her own.

Alec: To do the project. So with the smaller businesses, it’s usually the loan ranger. It, that gets bogged down, the marketers are usually pushing for it. The CEO is usually pushing for it and it’s more of a data challenge. And I’d say with a larger organization, it’s more of a people challenge and a training challenge.

Brent: From a technology and integration challenge. What are the biggest hurdles that that clients would look to get over when they start installing or setting up the B2B portion of their business on top of BigCommerce 

Alec: source of truth, right? It’s always gonna be source of truth. So if my source of truth is.

Alec: Not BigCommerce and it’s another system then, what’s the minimum amount of data that needs to go back and forth to keep my source of truth the source of truth, right? And not have two different systems to manage one for, my online customers and one for my offline customers or, phone call customers that are never gonna.

Alec: until there’s another generation of purchasing, never going to log to a website to order. Cuz I haven’t been doing that for the last 25 years. Why would I start now? Yeah, out that the source of truth and then the other part is just the cost, right? Nobody wants to spend extra money. So when the alternative is changing process to spending maybe, 20, $30,000.

Alec: to integrate, all of this data changing the process starts to sound a lot better than the integration bill. But they do need some minimum integration. I think that’s where our service partners really come in and help navigate that discussion. Architect, those sort of solutions and options for them.

Brent: Are you seeing customers struggle with the idea that they used to key in their orders into the E R P and now they could, they should key ’em into BigCommerce rather than E R P like, just any. Any other end user would come to your website order that those products go through that same workflow, get to get it into the system.

Brent: To have that, I think you had mentioned source of truth. So most of the B2B customers have an E R P system that’s running that should be their source of truth, at least from a skeleton standpoint for, maybe their skew, the description, the quantity, and maybe the price. And then.

Brent: The web front end is the way to show it to people publicly and and get the, and maybe beautify the product a little bit. Do you find that a struggle at this time? 

Alec: Yes and no. So it’s not a struggle showing how much nicer the interface is going to be for them because nine times outta 10, BigCommerce is gonna offer a better user interface for inputting orders than an E R P system.

Alec: But the complexity, again, it just goes back to like things like customer specific pricing. So EOPS are gonna be a lot more sophisticated in terms of managing different price overrides. And if then, I might need to do, in some cases, do a dynamic call for a price to, to get the actual Value that’s needed for that particular order, depending on the volume or something else.

Alec: So if BigCommerce isn’t aware of that and the E R P is then they’re gonna be yeah, this looks really good, but I have no idea. I’m still gonna have to go and look up the price over here anyway, and then override that. So it goes back to the data challenge, I think from a presentation point of view.

Alec: Usually we don’t see a lot of pushback. We see good feedback with that. Whether it’s doing it through our quote functionality and converting the quote into an order, doing it from the front end, within a masquerade, or even doing it directly within the BigCommerce order entry. It’s just, all right.

Alec: So based off of this customer, do we already have the price list in BigCommerce or is it going to be a challenge, for me to figure out okay. For this particular order. , this is the pricing that they got last time. So I need to honor that, last invoice price or something to that nature, that’s where it starts to break down.

Alec: I think, is the price calculation in terms of finding the products and creating the order nine times out of 10, they’re gonna say, yeah this looks better than my current system, but is, I sound like a broken record. Is the data accurate? So 

Brent: right. Yeah. You had mentioned some features earlier.

Brent: What do you see. Popular things that people maybe you don’t even think about, but would like to have. And I can just say some other platforms would have quick order requisition lists things like that are hierarchy of accounts. Are most of those features built in.

Brent: And is there certain differentiators that sets you aside from other extensions or even other. Platforms out there. 

Alec: Yeah. So we’ve got all the, the quote to order the shopping list or what someone also called requisition list buy again, which you’ll see is a common one in, in, Amazon to go reorder your last ordered products.

Alec: We roll everything up to the company level. So whether, it’s you or me, that’s placing the order. It’s going to be rolled up at an account level so we can see the various. Skews if I’m placing the order this week and you’re placing it next week the masquerading functionality is the more unique one.

Alec: So we have that out of the box. We call that a super admin. So that could be a sales rep that can act as an admin in a set of accounts. Or it could be, if I manage, say like multiple different retail locations or franchises, I could log in on behalf of these different franchise locations and it creates.

Alec: that sort of ultimate view of a set of accounts. So a customer that can belong to multiple customer groups that’s a trickier one that doesn’t exist out of a box in a lot of platforms you can try with segmenting or tagging and different platforms. But yeah that masquerading functionality, if used correctly, it can be very valuable because you can quickly, even if you’re on the phone with a customer, you can quickly.

Alec: Basically everything in their account and it works for outside sales reps as well. I can just say, Hey Alec, you managed the west coast accounts. Here’s these 25 different customers on your dashboard, but this, you can place orders for ’em. You could view orders. You can view invoices, but only for them.

Alec: So you’re not giving them any sort of proprietary information in the backend or, orders from customers that I shouldn’t be seeing or competitors, things like that. So I’d say that’s probably if used, which again, Getting the sales team on there is its own battle. But if use, it can be a very valuable feature for both outside, as well as inside reps or people on the buyer side that manage multiple different accounts and oversee, different locations for job sites for that 

Brent: matter.

Brent: And the features that you have are they, I’m assuming they’re customer driven. So you started you started the bundle B2B platform as custom integration with BigCommerce. And you found that, Hey, there’s more than one person that wants this. Have you continually added on features as you, as people ask for it and then it eventually goes into the mainstream?

Alec: Yeah that’s pretty much how we’ve done it. If any customers are listening to this now I’m sure that they recall conversations with me over the years, expressing their pains and challenges. And then, however many months later, realized, oh, you guys did that one so yeah, we’ve pretty much done it based off of customer feedback.

Alec: BigCommerce of course, is their product team and their sales engineers have given strategic business development team. They’ve given us a lot of. Insights and feedback as well in terms of what they’re hearing from their conversations. We try to send out surveys now because it’s more difficult with the volume that we have to hear from everybody in a one-on-one setting.

Alec: But that was for sure how it started was just very detailed conversations with customers that had very real challenges and very real business, revenue in BigCommerce that, Needed to be addressed basically. And they didn’t wanna migrate away, but they didn’t have the features that they needed at the time.

Alec: So it was really, it was like, am I gonna migrate to Magento or another platform? Or can I is BigCommerce gonna be able to offer all of these things? And I think we played a large role in elevating the features that a lot of these B2B businesses were asking for to keep ’em there. And then now.

Alec: even taking them from the platforms that they were looking at, going to way, way back then. 

Brent: You mentioned API BigCommerce being API first. Do you have public APIs that people could attach to as well? If needed. And then do you recommend clients build out microservices when they want to customize.

Alec: Yeah, so we’ve totally adopted the BigCommerce, open API mindset in that, with every single one of our features, you’re gonna see the ability to access via APIs as well as being able to create custom fields. So on a company object, you can add additional fields to manage things like tax exemption, credit limit minimum order threshold.

Alec: On an invoice object, you can add custom invoice lines, cost lines to map with your invoice objects that you might have in other systems for quotes. Same thing, depending on, if I have to add a line for custom packaging or custom engrave or expedited shipping we offer flexibility there and server to server APIs, and the newer APIs that we’re offering are actually to support headless.

Alec: So it’s recreating the bundle account features outside of stencil theme and. Using our store for an APIs. That’s a huge push for BigCommerce as I’m sure you’re aware is, The whole concept of headless and, decoupled systems, whether that’s for performance purposes or for, content management purposes and marketing personalization purposes.

Alec: B2B is a little bit behind, I’d say in terms of their demands for personalized content. I think they’re just happy to have all of their data there. And again, I sound like a broken record with the data thing, but yeah, that, that’s our mindset is. You likely are not using our system as your source of truth.

Alec: You’re using it to present customers, the information that they need to see in order to get through the ordering process more efficiently and hopefully without having to call you. So we have to be pretty flexible when we’re being used in that way. like nine times that. Yeah. 

Brent: you’re I’m assuming you’re targeting right now.

Brent: Just us and Canada. Or what is your target market for this extension? 

Alec: Yeah, so we’ve actually made a pretty big push since the B2B addition into Mia and APAC. So we are offering multi-language we’re available in six different languages. We’re actually seeing some traction with the Spanish now, and I know you guys have good presence there.

Alec: The whole LATAM, I think, is a newer area for BigCommerce, but we’re starting to see traction. AMIA we are seeing a lot of traction. There. There’s some funky stuff that we’re working through. Like I just found out about a law in France where you’re not able to change an invoice after it’s been sent.

Alec: So you have to add credit notes and. One of my customers has been talking to us about that. So we have now Q1 roadmap or credit notes on invoices cuz you can’t change it. did not know that was a law. Things come up as you start going into those different countries and then your roadmap changes.

Alec: But yeah, we do want to offer our service globally and to the extent that BigCommerce is global, we already have, multicurrency, we’ve had multicurrency for a while. Yeah, the multilanguage we’re trying to prioritize there’s someone new languages. So we have to just look at the demand and prioritize the language packs from there.

Alec: And if we are doing the translation or if someone else is doing it and, putting it into the files and our system. 

Brent: So you I’m just coming back to EMEA then do you run into problems with data or is all your data stored in BigCommerce? 

Alec: So a lot of the sensitive data is we just push it over to BigCommerce.

Alec: We do have some information like the company name, but we’re GDPR compliant. So we’ve got, the user agreement to be compliant with the EU there. We’ve we have done what is needed to play over there. But yeah, we have had to get, red lines and stuff like that with some of the larger businesses over there with just making sure that, there’s no issues with how the data is managed.

Alec: But for us, it’s really just company name, email, and then a bill to, and a ship to address. We’re not dealing with any of the at least payment related stuff. We’re pushing all that through the BigCommerce system. 

Brent: And are you seeing more requests for cross-border things that would happen shipped from one country to the next country as a feature request?

Brent: Or is there 

Alec: something built in that helps out. In AMEA. Yes. It’s very rare that once you’re in Europe it’s very rare that you’re only selling one country in Europe. We had experience in cross border from some of the, China connections that we had. Back in the day. So a lot of merchants that are selling manufacturers, distributors in various regions in China that wanna sell into the us or other countries.

Alec: So we had that experience, but the within AMEA cross border is its own. Like I said, you learn about new laws. I think European laws are some of the trickier ones. APAC, everyone knows that it’s very difficult to sell into China, but outside of that it’s not. Too tricky. You’ve got the VA which comes up, but it’s VA is a hell of a lot more simple than sales tax in the us.

Alec: That’s one of the most complicated things you could ever try to tackle. It’s just why everyone just uses third party services for that. 

Brent: Yeah. And I’m assuming that for a lot of those things you rely on the third party service to provide that information like tax or shipping and things like that.

Alec: Yeah. So we’ve in our quote functionality, the, one of the recent releases we did was you just integrated that with the with Avela, for the tax and then with shipper HQ for the shipping rates. So yeah, those can be populated from third party systems in the quote. And then outside of that, we just rely on BigCommerce, existing integrations with their shopping cart checkout that they have with Avela and ship or HQ or.

Alec: Tax star Verex as well as other shipping rate providers, I will say ship HQ is a pretty, pretty big stronghold on BigCommerce because they have their basic plan and Avela also has their basic plan baked into their enterprise. Both of those companies have a pretty good stronghold, I guess you could say the same with us, we’re baked into an enterprise offering.

Alec: So it’s like the three of us you’re gonna get when you purchase it. And then if you want to go with someone. In theory you could. 

Brent: I don’t know if but Magento is unbundling everything out of their system and it would present you with an opportunity to attach your features to Magento open source.

Brent: Have you thought about anything like that? 

Alec: We’ve had some requests, we get magenta requests, we get Shopify requests at this time. And for all the BigCommerce people that may be listening, we’re not entertaining any of those requests. While it’s technically feasible, we haven’t made any commitments to those platforms as of yet.

Brent: And just from a technical side, are you using GraphQL for your your API. 

Alec: Not at the moment. It’s but we are planning to migrate to GraphQL for our APIs. That’s on the roadmap. 

Brent: So coming back to, so some of the requests that you get out of OEM, maybe some of the more urgent requests from a customer standpoint, how quickly can you turn around?

Brent: Some, if there’s some urgent thing that, Hey, we either have to shut down our store or we can keep going. Have you, do you experience much of that? And then if you do how, what’s your turnaround time on something like that? 

Alec: Yeah. So luckily we’re brought in at the beginning there’s usually three to four month project timeline that we have to work within.

Alec: So if we hear requirements that worry. That’s also hoping that, the project was before making the decision that there was some scoping done where if there was, there were things that were gonna be showstoppers, it could have been brought to us earlier, but our release cycles about three to four week sprints.

Alec: If I hear something today, it’s rare I can get it into the first one, but I can usually get it into the next one. So we can usually work within from when we hear about the issue within a couple of months, we could get. We could roll an update in and apply that update to the PO to the platform. 

Brent: Do you have some kind of a a community board that, that you entertained features?

Brent: I know things like HubSpot has a community section and they’ve, everybody can vote on some features that they want to get into it. And do you have, do you let clients drive some of. . 

Alec: Yeah. I think that’s the direction that we are headed. I think there’s a couple of things that, are, we’ve grown too fast type of problems.

Alec: One is a knowledge base, right? So all of the things that have been done with custom fields or like the various use cases that will come up where man, I really wish I had a solution for that. So it’s the knowledge base. And then I think the next thing that, that comes along with that is you provide the knowledge base to the community and then hopefully the community starts.

Alec: Feeding off of that and sharing information. For us, we went at the beginning of this year, I think we had around 65 customers, maybe a little less than that. And, we, not the year’s not over yet. And we are already pretty much at 200 customers, so we’ve more than doubled in less than a year.

Alec: So a lot of these things of, oh wow. We actually have scale shifting the mindset to, yeah. I can’t have a conversation with, I don’t know my customer’s dog’s name or their wife’s. So that’s a little bit foreign to us. Having been more of like a boutique offering for so long and now having volume largely attributed to the B2B edition trying to of shift that, that mindset to more mass communication and feedback.

Alec: I think there’s still some growing pains for us there, but we’re getting to it. 

Brent: and just for your information, my dog’s names are Finn and SAS. Okay, that’s great. And Finn is a seven month old Jack Russell, Terri. A complete terror. That’s awesome. The so the features are I’ll just talk about scale and growth, so you’ve more than doubled.

Brent: Are you keeping up with it? Are you experiencing some labor shortages? Tell us a little bit about the, this growth and and how you’re keeping up with things. 

Alec: Yeah, for us the big part of it, I think is. Training the technical people whether they’re internal or external.

Alec: So external being a digital agency, internal be I’m a developer for, company, ABC and I need to customize X, Y, and Z. For us, if everyone used the product out of the box, I don’t think that there would be. An issue, but in, in B2B and in eCommerce overall, out of the box is a loaded term.

Alec: I think everybody has some uniqueness, even if they’re selling t-shirts right. The enablement and the community building and all of that has been the biggest challenge. I think. So the customers all really what we’re offering, it’s just when they want to start changing it. Wondering how they can do that.

Alec: And then, alright if I change this, can I still upgrade or is this gonna mess things up? If I, I think in Magento could be attributed to, am I changing the core files or am I, everyone has, nightmares about Magento upgrades and. As a software as a service platform, you have your own, database and internal architecture that you don’t want to Jack up.

Alec: But in some cases, if a customer begs enough you’ll make an exception. I think we’ve had to start saying no a lot more as we’ve grown to say you know what you’re asking for can be done. technically, but, do you want to have access to our next six upgrades? Or do you want your upgrade, path to be more challenging?

Alec: It’s not that we’re not gonna be able to upgrade you, but now once you fork off of this there, there might be challenges associated with that. And sometimes they say, you know what? What you guys are doing is so cool. And I love you guys. I don’t care if I’m on my own version of your code, I’ll maintain it.

Alec: I’ll pay you more. Let’s just go and do it. It’s still costing me 20% of if I were to do the whole thing custom. So we’ll sometimes say yes to that, but it is a tricky. Yes. And, coming from the background of being so customer centric and wanting to. Help customers saying no to weird stuff is probably the hardest part of this stage of the business.

Alec: I would say that. And then training the ecosystem to customize just in general, on top of the platform. . 

Brent: Yeah, I think that’s super interesting, especially the idea of forking what your original core code is, and then allowing a customer to cus have that custom. I’m assuming you maintain that still.

Brent: If you were to fork it and have this custom code, that’s running off on a fork and you, and then you help them to upgrade that, but you’re completely responsible for it. So it’s like a SAS pass. Version at that point. Yeah. 

Alec: It’s like turning BigCommerce into a, in like a hybrid, cuz we’re extending it so far that, you know, Hey, I need these three new fields exposed on an API.

Alec: That’s not gonna require us to fork anything, but if the most recent one that came up is like a distributor management system. So like I could have five sales reps associated with one distributor. When a company applies based off of their zip code or country, I’m gonna assign ’em to a particular distributor.

Alec: So in order to accomplish that, bit of logic. You could either create another app for that and integrate it with our APIs. Or you could just build an additional tab in our app architecture that has it. So again we try not to do anything too crazy, especially nowadays with the volume, but that is, it’s a challenge to ride that line, knowing that you can essentially extend things further.

Alec: Just is this, is this gonna make sense to maintain I don’t know. 

Brent: yeah, that, I think it’s interesting right now that API first approach and how people ha. It seems like it could be less complicated, but I think the only people that is less complicated for is the person who has written the core code, because they’re just providing the API endpoints.

Brent: Everybody else has to write some custom code or custom application that just like you’ve done with bundled B2B that runs alongside of it and continues to run with it. And. at some point, I think the challenge is if you are running all these microservices yourself , you have a whole bunch of stuff to maintain.

Brent: That’s theoretically in small little bespoke little pieces that are out there running on their own. So it’s like running, I don’t know, you could be running 20 different micro sites that all have to tie together and talk, 

Alec: right? Yeah. That’s, that’s the. That’s the price you gotta pay to, hang with the big dogs, BigCommerce is a much larger organization.

Alec: They got customers with unique needs. Why do we exist is we can solve for maybe 70, 80% of it. But then what do you do with that 20%? And how does that get addressed? We push as much as we can to, to digital agencies and we solution with them. But at a certain point, yeah, you really have to evaluate, where things are hosted and, level of complexity, trade off of value scalability, cost of maintenance, all the things that you would evaluate and building something custom because you’re customizing a, SaaS platform that allows you to.

Alec: Do yeah it’s definitely interesting. 

Brent: Is it a challenge to get to get BigCommerce? So you mentioned that you keep some of your data in BigCommerce. Is it a challenge to add a new feature that you need to custom place to put data? Or is that fairly straightforward from the BigCommerce?

Alec: Yeah, it just depends. I think right now our plan with data centralization is to just do a feed. Actually, we’ve already done this for a couple of customers. This is doing a feed into the Google big query. So BigCommerce has just launched their, big data initiative where you can, instead of just working within their own analytics, you can just export tons of information into Google, big query and it’s free.

Alec: And then, you can have another tab review with all of the bundle B2B data. But then in terms of how you’re. Referencing that and using it for, your marketing or personalization purposes, it’s gonna require, someone that knows what they’re doing with database schema. But rather than trying to create all the redundancy directly in BigCommerce, we’re just taking a page from their book and say, Hey, we’re just gonna dump all of our stuff over here.

Alec: You dump all of it over there. And then you just create the relationship models that you need. If I want to get something. Top purchase products based off of user, based off of company within a date range, we have the company information and the user but then they’ve got like the product information and.

Alec: You know the date that it was ordered and a week after some of that too, but it’s like why try to write it all onto their system where I can’t even control what data fields they have? When we could just all put it somewhere else. 

Brent: sure. There’s a buzzword that’s going around right now called composable commerce.

Brent: Do you feel like you’re just going along with that whole new idea or old idea, or however you wanna look at it, but you’ve really, you’re now composing this part of it. Somebody else could come in and offer the content version of it, and then BigCommerce could be there with their cart version and suddenly composed a new solution.

Brent: That’s part of a bunch of smaller pieces. 

Alec: Yeah. We’ve definitely toyed with the idea of creating our own little like mini customer portal, like directly into an E R P and then say, Hey, you want the shopping cart, you go tag on to your shopping cart. You want the CMS, you go tag onto that.

Alec: And again, that’s I think, where the industry is headed because so many different SaaS companies out there creating very specific solutions to solve for specific needs. And then you say at a certain point, we all have our APIs. And then you get Brent to come in and figure it all out. , I’d say, yeah, we’re definitely in that.

Alec: I hadn’t actually really heard that term, but I guess it does make sense in the context of what we’re doing and where we could go as a company, if we’re to start decoupling ourselves further from the shopping cart component and just focus on the customer data and the. Sales reps and the invoices and cuz we’re operating in between like a CRM and an eCommerce system right now and an accounting system.

Alec: Those three things are operating somewhere in between. All of them just leveraging a lot of things with BigCommerce that we don’t want to reinvent or deal with, like PCI compliance and product, data management and stuff like that. 

Brent: Are I’m assuming that from a, like a payment standpoint, you’re allowing customers to do the specific terms that a B2B customer would need.

Brent: Is there any extra challenges around that? 

Alec: There’s a lot of challenges around payment, but there’s also a lot of opportunity around payment. I think, to maybe skip ahead to what the opportunity is in 2022. I think, once, once these businesses have gotten past their data challenges and they’re able to present all the invoice data and information to their customers, what’s the next thing that they’re gonna start offering, which is, more PA more efficient efficiency around B2B payments online.

Alec: You’ve got a lot of tools out there that, you’ll use maybe pay your medical bill or your, you. It can just go and connect to your bank and, plaid. And I think some of these other platforms out there are offering that easy bank connectivity type stuff. Right now we’re just playing within the BigCommerce checkout.

Alec: So I think they’ve got Adin and blue snap as the two where you can do the bank payments within their checkout framework. And then. Everything else is just the usual players Braintree, Stripe, authorized.net, PayPal, Amazon, apple pay. So all that stuff is gonna be available within a BigCommerce checkout.

Alec: And whether that checkout is a B2B order or an invoice payment, that’s what we are keeping track of. So what kind of transaction is it and how do you reconcile it? But in terms of where we could go, sky, I think sky is a limit. Once you hold all that data. If you can just say, all right today it’s going through BigCommerce checkout next week.

Alec: It could be going, direct to a gateway, six months from now, I could change it back. There’s just a lot more flexibility. Once you have all your invoice information in sync and your customers being able to have the flexibility. To pay up to pay off those invoices. Whether it’s through the website or it’s outside of the website, usually businesses, they want to not pay for transaction fees.

Alec: So instead of credit card, they’ll usher them toward a better option that doesn’t charge two plus percent. So sometimes maybe that’s just mailing a check. Fine. People are still gonna mail checks, it’s free, or I guess, close to free. You got your postage there. As long as you use it.

Alec: Us PS is still around. That’s much longer, but Yeah. 

Brent: You, we, you did mention what’s coming out in the future. Do you think that you’re gonna adopt more of the E R P things that are maybe some of the backend things that are coming forward into the front end and, or you think there’s just a mix of that’s gonna happen in the future?

Alec: Yeah, I definitely think we’re gonna continue to offer right now, the only E R P year we’ve really. gotten our hands dirty is Acumatica. We’ve created a base framework that communicates between, the Acumatica supported versions for commerce and our APIs. And so that’s the first one that we’ve created, like a reference design, I would say, and gone through the VAR ecosystem and started Going through the ringer.

Alec: There it’s been a challenge, but I think that’s ultimately the source of where we should continue investing is, with the E R PS, like dynamics, NetSuite, continue with Acumatica maybe even CRMs because that’s currently where a lot of these B2B guys are. Doing their, the majority of their business, right?

Alec: 80% of their business is usually done outside of any online system, if they have one. So if we can go there, make it easier for them to get the information. Least that their customers need initially, which is just, know, what’s my statement of account. How much money do I owe you? Even if I’m just gonna mail you a check anyway just showing the customer.

Alec: So I don’t have to call or, check my emails to see how much I owe Brent this month for my disposable masks or, slip resistant, mats or whatever. There’s all sorts of funny stuff that our customers sell. It’s all very supply chain, industrial. Type stuff, majority of which is that.

Brent: So as we, can wrap up here what is the easiest way for somebody to get started? yeah. What are the steps like you, you have to have BigCommerce and then what, tell us, and is there certain versions of BigCommerce that it’s gonna work on? Maybe tell us some of those steps that, that makes sense.

Brent: Yeah. 

Alec: So the enterprise version of BigCommerce is gonna give you the price lists, which makes customer specific pricing a lot easier. So if a business already knows that they need to have priceless a for company, a priceless B for company B, et cetera. likely they’re gonna have to go with the enterprise plan, unless there’s some sort of real time price integration that’s done on top of a pro plan, which isn’t recommended, but it’s possible.

Alec: If you have more simple pricing where. You don’t have a whole lot of different options for different customers. Then you could sign up with a pro plan installer app from the app store and, get going. You can still use our invoicing system with a BigCommerce pro plan. So you don’t need BigCommerce enterprise to access our invoice portal and start receiving payments and doing the statement of account for different companies.

Alec: So you can start small with just a basic customer portal of invoice information and. As you start to see more traction, roll up the online transactions, which I think after 400 K a year, BigCommerce is gonna upgrade you to enterprise anyway. Yeah that’s pretty much how you would get started.

Alec: You could start a trial, a BigCommerce installer app from the app store. And start setting up companies and viewing, viewing the B2B functionality there. So I could get it done within probably 30 minutes and create a test company within five. So that’s how long it would take you to see what’s there.

Alec: We have projects that are sometimes almost, a year long, depending on the complexity, so yeah it’s crazy really with SAS it’s it could be a couple of weeks. It could be a couple of years. You never really know. 

Brent: And is it I am hesitant to ask, but is it too late to get your store up and running before black Friday?

Brent: And I suppose if it’s B2B, it doesn’t really matter, right? Nobody’s gonna be doing black Friday B2B, or are you seeing people doing black Friday? B2B cyber Monday? We haven’t 

Alec: B2B. Yeah. That’s a really good question. We haven’t seen it yet. I have a feeling that it’ll start at some point when more of them are online and whatnot, but yeah, we don’t really see the black Friday.

Alec: Craziness in B2B. We see the, Hey, I have a budget that is gonna run out before the end of this year. So if I don’t use it, I lose it. So you better get this done and whatnot before the end of the year. Again, usually it’s not our responsibility. It’s, whoever’s doing the integration in the, in the customization of the BigCommerce site.

Alec: We sit in a spot where, Hey, how can we help? But we’re not responsible. Which has its pros and cons. 

Brent: Yeah. I think the beauty of SAS is that you can turn on something and have it up and running in a day and start using it or playing with it at least as even as a sandbox. So that’s fantastic.

Brent: Yeah. Great. Is there any sort of nugget that you can give a client looking into 2022 on what’s the hot topic on B2B right now, 

Alec: start looking at simplifying your process and understanding how you can get all of your data out of your system into. another one, because if you’re hamstrung from that perspective, then it’s gonna be very difficult to to shift.

Alec: And it could put you at a disadvantage versus your competitors who have already found a better way to manage their customer information and data so that they can provide these portals for the customers that are asking. 

Brent: All right. And as we final finish up here, I always give people a chance to do a shameless plug.

Brent: So you can plug anything you’d like today. 

Alec: Go ahead. Yeah, I guess if you listen to this podcast, I’ll give you a 20% off an annual subscription, three months, all so I’ll 

Brent: put all this in the show notes. 

Alec: Yeah. Before the end of the year, 20% off list price on our website, if you do an annual subscription and I’ll give you three months for free.

Brent: Yeah, I was gonna start a store selling masks and non-slip bath mats. So that’ll be perfect. I’ll get 20% 

Alec: off. How were those the first two things that came to my mind? I have no idea. Yeah, 

Brent: that’s great. It must be something they’re using every day or do you use the mask in the. Maybe that’s what it is.

Alec: That’s a new one. Water resistant masks. Yeah. 

Brent: Go. All right. Alec Berkeley, the co-founder of bundle B2B. Thank you for being here. 

Alec: Thanks Brent. Take care.

The four basic sales types with Paul Lima

We interview Paul Lima with Lima Consulting. We had planned on diving into Adobe Experience Manager but our conversation went to business and the four types. Listen to learn what they are and get some great wisdom and insight from Paul. We cover the four main areas of business, Selling Products in your store or on a marketplace. Selling services or even selling lead generation. Selling experiences like Disney does or selling your audience. Paul further identifies 64 sub-categories within the four business models.

About Paul Lima

Author, speaker, and visionary, Paul has spent more than 25 years leading companies and helping the world’s premier brands transform their digital futures. Prior to starting LCG in 2004, Paul served as one of the America’s first cyber-warriors in the US Army. After retiring from the Army, Paul became a product development leader at SEI, the leading global trust accounting platform. There, he led six FinTech solutions and oversaw their evolution, including an effort to web-enable Trust3000 Anywhere, the firm’s flagship product, responsible for processing $1.5 Trillion a day. Paul is the author of the digital Transformation Maturity Model. He is an Adobe Certified Expert and certified with several Google products. Paul holds a Bachelor’s of Science from the Military Academy of the United States at West Point, and a Master’s Degree in technology management, jointly awarded by the University of Pennsylvania Engineering School (SEAS) and the Wharton School. Paul speaks Portuguese, Spanish, and English.

Jay El-Kaake

How Jay El-Kaake Automated the Fight for Legitimate Reviews

In mid-2019, Jay made the difficult decision to switch Fera’s focus to something new: PRODUCT REVIEWS. With all the FAKE and fraudulent stories, he believed that merchants needed to help to show the world that they were legit. To support his new focus, he added automated review requests, 3rd party verification, and every other feature you’d expect in a reviews app – and then some. It took over a year to get there, and today Fera is the BEST REVIEW APPS for Shopify and BigCommerce, with nearly THREE THOUSAND 5-star reviews.

The Fight for Legitimate Reviews

The battle for your reviews has just begun. In 2019, Fera spent a lot of time dealing with scammers and con artists. They wouldn’t spend any time on the “good reviews” they promised, but they had plenty of the bad reviews.

In a blog post about Fera’s war on fake reviews, we discovered when fake reviews are floating around on the internet. It makes it so much harder for customers to buy a product with confidence!

Today, Fera is fighting back by:

  • Automating Review Requests and Verification
  • Automated Reviews on BigCommerce
  • Removing User Comments

What This Means to You

To have a thriving business, you need reviews and endorsements. But with all the fake reviews you’re getting from confused customers, reviews apps like Fera are a great way to boost legitimacy. You can even prevent fake reviews in all of your marketing and customer service.

Jay El-Kaake’s Struggle

In late 2016 Jay realized there was a problem in the market – and a BIG problem. He set out to build the solution in the spring of 2017 – that solution being Fera. When the plan was first evolving, he had been running Jay El-Kaake Art Productions and doing freelance marketing and art for clients. He was producing full-time work, creating more than 500 paintings per year and selling them in the gallery and his website, and performing marketing for other art and design clients.

The motivation to create Fera was driven by a recent business failure. On a previous job, Jay was contracted to do online marketing for an ecommerce store, where the owner neglected to run a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign to promote their website.

Automating the Fight for Legitimate Reviews

Also, in late 2019, Jay’s team released a new application, HYPREP, to scan for fraudulent reviews and improve the effectiveness of paid advertising. Now, when a user visits a website for the first time, the app scans the site for hundreds of new, relevant social media profiles and automatically adds these accounts to an advertiser’s campaign. It’s the first on-site solution to take advantage of thousands of new potential human sales agents for every campaign.

Today Jay and his team passionately help merchants harness the social proof and urgency psychology of customers to increase sales. Fera is already being used by over 100,000 merchants worldwide.

Conclusion

If you’re a merchant concerned about the security of your reviews, worried that the numbers of reviews were going to be inflated, or have received false reviews – stop worrying. It’s easier than ever to create, manage, and track reviews, whether it be on Facebook or a centralized site. With Fera Review (and similar products), you can prevent the most egregious violators from being able to abuse reviews and ultimately stop the fake ones from being a detriment.

Industry guidelines and best practices (such as the FTC’s) still require 100% of reviews to be legitimate. And your company should set goals of a 5-star rating – to make it easy to distinguish between good and bad reviews. But, Fera is the perfect tool to handle reviews with the least amount of effort.

Talk Commerce
Talk Commerce

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