Why B2B eCommerce Requires Flexibility with Vance Ryan from Shopware - EP013 - eCommerce Masters

Episode Transcript
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(01:00:02):
(Upbeat Music) What's up everybody and welcome to
E-commerce Masters. I'm your host, Ethan
Giffen, CEO of Groove Commerce. And I'm
excited, very, very excited to be here
today with an awesome guest, Vance Ryan,
who's a senior solutions architect at
Shopware. We're gonna be talking about
all things B2B today. Remember, this is a

(01:00:25):
video first podcast. So if you wanna see
what we're talking about on screen, head
on over to our YouTube channel at, at
Groove Commerce and give us a subscribe,
give us a like, give us a comment, do
whatever you can. We love it, we love it,
we love it. And if you think you'd be a
great guest on the podcast, don't
hesitate to reach out to me on socials
and let me know who you are. So welcome

(01:00:46):
to the podcast Vance, how are you? Hey
Ethan, doing well, doing well, how about
yourself? I am good, I am so good. I'm
excited for you to be here today. I love
talking B2B, you know, we, I always love
talking to you. You've got such a great
depth of experience across the whole
industry, a kind of front house, back

(01:01:07):
house, like a little bit of everything,
or front office, back office, you've got,
you know, all the things. So I really
look forward to today's conversation
talking about Shopware and B2B.
Well, thanks Ethan, it's great to be
here, especially with esteemed guests, or
esteemed hosts such as yourself. Really
appreciate the invite.
(Laughing)
Thank you. Have you ever had a Ginger
podcast host before? Have you ever, you

(01:01:29):
know, or is this your first?
You know, I think my first, this would be
the first time, first time for me.
All right, it's a first time for
everything. So, you know, welcome,
welcome. So just to let the audience
know, why don't you tell us a little bit,
how did you get into commerce? What's
your background? What was the journey
like to getting to where
you are today at Shopware?

(01:01:50):
For sure, yeah, I actually kind of fell
into commerce as it just so happens. It
was a second semester senior year.
I didn't have a job yet. I was like, huh,
I should probably figure out and get me
one of those. So I have something to do
next year. And there was some on-campus
recruiting events for a company called
Digital River. And I started, you know,

(01:02:11):
went there, had the interview. They asked
me some of the most unique questions.
Really, really liked it. I thought I was
gonna do finance, but ended
up in e-comm as a business.
(Laughing)
Was that a mistake? What do you think,
like, if looking back, well, should you
have gone finance? Like,
where do you, you know?
Turns out I was not smart enough to do
any of the finance stuff. Like I had no
aptitude for macro or micro-econ. So

(01:02:33):
just, it all worked
out really for the best.
You know, I think about all the people
that went into commerce, went into SEO,
and all the things, like I'm probably in
the second generation of folks that got
into that. And we're all kind of like a
bunch of hobos. And it's like, hindsight,
after watching Billions and all these
other shows and Succession, I probably
should have gotten into private equity or

(01:02:54):
something, but here we are, doing a
podcast talking about
commerce, all things commerce.
Well, see, I actually thought it was
pretty good because when I started, you
know, I was one of my best friends, went
and worked for JP Morgan right out of
college in New York, and I did that, I
remember doing the cost breakdown of like
per hour wage, and I was actually making
more than him. So I put

(01:03:14):
that in the victory pile.
(Laughing)
Yeah, you know, when you're living in New
York as that entry level associate, you
get to eat half your ramen, you know, for
dinner and the other half the ramen pack
for lunch the next day is kind of where
you're at with all that, so that's funny,
it's funny. I mean, you've got a lot of

(01:03:35):
different experience, right? I mean, you
worked on the ERP side, now you work on
the platform side, you worked on digital
riverside, like I'm curious,
you know, did you guys listen to like
Justin Timberlake, Cry Me A River, or was
that like your theme song
when you all worked there?
It was more a Tina Turner rolling on the
river, actually, I think.
(Laughing)
That's great, that's great.

(01:03:56):
Somewhere out there there's a video of me
doing a lip sync battle to that song at a
digital river event, I'm sure.
But yeah, so I went to Digital River, got
my, you know, decided to go back after a
certain amount of time, I moved from
business analyst right over to Solution
Architect Track after about nine months
of being there, and I got to work on some
of the best, you know, most amazing

(01:04:18):
customers that you can imagine, Adobe
Autodesk VMware, I mean, I was the main
architect on the digital riverside for
Adobe's CCT, Creative Cloud for Teams
product, and so for their integration
with their e-count platform anyway. So it
was a really incredible experience,
incredible time, and then I just
completed my master's and went back and
got my master's from U of M, Minnesota,

(01:04:40):
for those of you who think there's
another U of M out there, which, lots.
And I was like, well, I should probably
do something else, I was looking around,
found a gig at NetSuite managing a team
of devs, so I went over there and worked
on the professional services side of the
house, managing like 26 devs, and then I
missed the call of e-commerce,

(01:05:02):
you know, people think I'm crazy, but
e-commerce is sexy, I think e-commerce is
sexy, and at least it was when you
compare it to ERP for sure.
Every time, you know, you think you're
out, it pulls you back in, right?
Pulls you back in, exactly.
You know, it definitely does, when I got
into commerce, for me, I was into heavy
conversion rate marketing, I was into

(01:05:22):
SEO, I was into analytics, this was all
kind of back in the late 90s, early
2000s, and there was nothing better, you
could track, you know, you could take
something from a nickel click on
Overture, right, and for a pay-per-click
back then, it used to be a penny, by the
way, then it went to a nickel, and then
you could watch that click come into an
e-commerce site, you could track that

(01:05:43):
with analytics, and you can see within
one or two visits somebody making a
purchase, and you could count that
checkout conversion, and
be off to the races, it was,
you know, there was just a, like the full
circle was there, and really just allowed
you to kind of feed your ego, so to
speak, with that, of like, it was like,
oh, how do I do better, how do I do more,

(01:06:05):
like how do I increase that, and so, it
was a very, very fast
turn from visit to customer.
Well, I mean, that's still the most
important thing, at the end of the day,
if people aren't checking out, you're not
making money, so I mean, those analytics
are still probably one of the most
important things on any e-commerce site.
Yeah, yeah, so we had, you know, previous

(01:06:25):
guest with Jason Nye is the GM of
Shopwear America, we had a fantastic
conversation talking about shopwear, just
more generally, as an option for
mid-market merchants and brands and
manufacturers, but today I wanna talk a
little bit more specifically about B2B,
right, it's, you know, a space that isn't
getting enough attention, there's still a

(01:06:46):
lot of manufacturers around the country
that haven't done anything in terms of
creating a buyer portal, or any of that,
right, so how does, you know, like, tell
me a little bit about shopwear and kind
of position it from a B2B standpoint.
Yeah, absolutely, so, I mean, I guess the
background is that it was started in

(01:07:07):
Germany, right, so we were founded by two
brothers in Germany back in the 2000s,
actually, so we're
celebrating our 25th year in January,
but one of the things specifically about
that is that we've kind of grown up and
we've become kind of the default e-com

(01:07:27):
platform for Germany, so about 25% of all
revenue, online revenue in Germany goes
through shopwear, and so with that, as
you can imagine, you know, in Germany
there haven't been these massive players
like shopwear was, and is, and so we were the default choice for the company, and
we were the default and so we were the
default choice, so we grew up with both
B2C and B2B in our DNA, and so we've kept

(01:07:48):
that trend going, and that's really an
area that we focus on majorly, we're
doing some major investments in the
future into our B2B offerings, B2B
things, features that we offer to folks,
specifically because we see it's such an
underserved market and such an important
market, and one of the things I love
about shopwear too, you know, we have

(01:08:09):
50,000 merchants globally, I'd say about
60% are B2B, 40% B2C,
but in 2019, there's a kind of an
inflection point in shopwear's history
where we were doing that analysis of the
code base and kind of the feature
development and what it was taking, and
it was taking more time than we were
comfortable with it taking for us to do

(01:08:30):
just code maintenance on all of our, when
we were doing the updates, releasing the
features, that sort of thing, on our old
version, Shopwear 5, and so we made the
decision, I think about 2017, and finally
released it in December 2019, so that'll
be five years, I guess, now,
to really shopwear 6, and so Shopwear 6,
API first, and that's been a beautiful

(01:08:50):
thing as far as our code development
ethos, everything has to be done with an
API and the admin has to be an API,
brought in their SBA API support,
everything has to be API first, and we've
been living that methodology, and it
makes it just so much easier to use, so
much easier to build on top of and
extend, right, because we know that we're

(01:09:12):
gonna give you a good structural base for
every B2B thing that we can possibly do,
and there's always gonna be something
that you might need to tweak just a
little bit, and we make it
as easy as possible for that.
Yeah, I love the API first mentality, I
mean, even thinking about Magento 2, I
mean, I would have to think about my days
as a Magento partner,
you know, that's where all my gray hair
came from, by the way, gingers aren't

(01:09:34):
supposed to get gray hair, but, you know,
I'm thinking like Magento 2 was started
way back in maybe 2012, 2014, something
like that, and it took them a significant
amount of time to finally deliver that,
and it was full of bugs, but Shopware
came out of the gate, much more stable,

(01:09:55):
you know, a fantastic piece of software
to build on top of, you can create
innovation by integrating with APIs, and
both on the front end and back end,
right, like both on the front end website
that the customer see as well as within
the admin interface as well, correct?
Yeah, absolutely, I think it was a, I'd
be lying if I said we didn't have a
little bit of a benefit of a second mover

(01:10:15):
in that regard, we watched what Magento
did with their migration from Magento 1
to Magento 2, and we decided to go the
other path, and I think that definitely
has paid the dividends,
but yeah, to your point,
one of the beautiful things about
Shopware being so open and being API
first is that it does enable a lot more
configurability, a lot more customization
possibility, because there's always an

(01:10:37):
API backing something, one of the things
I love too is just, even if you need
something custom and you build a custom
entity, will API first is so ingrained in
our ethos, will automatically create APIs
for you to use when you create a custom
entity, like that's how extensively you
get with it, which is I think great and
super, super helpful.
Very cool, so who, you

(01:10:58):
know, if you're a manufacturer
and you're thinking about creating a B2B
buying portal, if you're looking at
starting even direct-to-consumer commerce
maybe to sell your products, like where
is Shopware a fit? Who is it a fit for
and who isn't it a fit for within the
e-commerce ecosystem?
Absolutely, so I think one of the things

(01:11:20):
that you mentioned Jason already, one of
my favorite quotes of his is, Shopware
has a major in, we majored in
configurability and flexibility. And so
anyone who really has kind of unique
capabilities that they want to have or,
you know, anything that they have that's
customer makes them
unique, makes them special,

(01:11:41):
you're probably not gonna get that,
that's probably not gonna be built in. If
it makes you unique, it's probably not
gonna be built into a SaaS platform just
because the SaaS platforms are designed
to serve the masses, right? They're
designed to serve a bunch of other folks,
they're not gonna necessarily be able to
do exactly what makes you unique. And so
really, anyone that has any sort of
complexity, they need some customization,

(01:12:02):
some configurability, that's really where
Shopware shines. If you're a pretty basic
direct sale, salary, you have a limited
number of SKUs, limited number of Geos,
those sorts of things, there are great
platforms out there that would serve you
really, really well. And also if you
don't have, you know, I guess a quick

(01:12:23):
little anecdote here, I think is an
analogy here. Growing up, my dad had a
lot of other stuff that he was doing so
whenever we'd go on a big trip, he'd
always use a travel planner, right? He
always, like, had our travel planner,
they'd plan everything for us, they'd
have, you know, it was great. We'd show
up, we'd go show up at the airport, our
tickets would all be done, we'd get
there, we'd have these predefined,

(01:12:43):
predefined tours we were going on, all
this sorts of things. But there were, it
was a really, really good experience, but
everything was made for us. Now, I met my
wife and her mother, or my mother-in-law,
her mother is an amazing, amazing woman
is so passionate about trips. So whenever
we'd do a big trip with, whenever I
traveled with their family, no travel

(01:13:04):
agents were involved. She knew our
family, what everyone wanted to do, there
was always personally tailored to us, you
know, the travel agents, not disparaging
them at all, they do a great job,
but they never got to, you know, they
can't possibly know us as well as my
mother-in-law could. And so she'd build
out these amazing trips, like the most
amazing trips. We had, you know, we had
this, we cooked a dinner in Croatia,

(01:13:25):
overlooked this stunning valley in this
like little hut, right, but nobody else
was there, it's just us. And the point of
the story is, is that you're not gonna
get that with a travel agent. The travel
agent is gonna have something that
they've built and they've made opinions
and they've made decisions for you that
are gonna appeal to their, you know, the
broad masses. And that's the SaaS
platform. But if you want those kind of

(01:13:46):
unique, special experiences, you gotta
kind of do it yourself and figure out
what's gonna work for you, and that's not
gonna be necessarily a SaaS platform.
Yeah, yeah, so-- Sorry, we'll sign up for
this. No, no, no, no, no, and just to
kind of further clarify that for our
listeners, so while you do have a cloud
edition and you can host Shopware in the
cloud wherever you want, it is software

(01:14:07):
that you can bring your own host,
basically. If you wanna host it
internally, you can. If you wanna host it
in the cloud, you can. Or if you wanna
host it through a specialized provider
that specializes in Shopware hosting, you
can host it there. But it's different
from Shopify and BigCommerce and other
cloud products where it's more

(01:14:28):
on-premise, so to speak, talking in kind
of old school phrases.
Yeah, absolutely, and there's a lot of
flexibility there, too. I mean, we have
some merchants that are just allergic to
AWS because they view Amazon as a
competitor and they don't like paying
their competitor for something. So they
can host in GCP, or you don't like GCP
for whatever reason, maybe because

(01:14:49):
Google, whatever, hosts in AWS, or Azure,
you can pick your super scaler or
hyperscaler and host it there if you
want. Or as you mentioned, we also have
our own cloud offering or a whole host,
pun intended, of
service providers as well.
You also have a pretty open framework and
a ton of apps or add-ons, right, that you

(01:15:09):
could install into your system. Can you
talk a little bit more
about how that works?
Yeah, absolutely. So just like every
account platform out there these days, we
have an app ecosystem that people can
contribute to. So there are folks that
can list, you can list your app, your
plugin if you want to, and list it for
sale in the shop or marketplace.

(01:15:31):
So there's a ton of extensions there. I'd
say a lot of technology partners are
listing their own apps there,
things like Avalara, Vertex, all these
sorts of things. They're all listing
their own versions of these inside our
store, our extension marketplace, if you
will. Not all of them cost money, of
course. There are quite a few free ones.
So yeah, there's lots of flexibility

(01:15:53):
there. And that does also give another
layer of choice of picking, I think, you
know, just as an example, we have seven
or eight different bundle plugins, right?
So you can pick, if you want to pick one
over another, it gives you some
flexibility of choice there as well.
And then what kind of size merchant is
generally a good fit? And what size
manufacturer is a good
fit for something like this?

(01:16:15):
Yeah, so, you know, there's a, Shocker
itself, the software can handle pretty
much customers of any size. I think
there's a little bit of a differentiation
between what we can host and what we can
handle. And then the, there are ideal
kind of customer profile that we're
targeting. I'd say, generally speaking,
we're focused, we're hyper-focused on the
mid-market, right? So we're hyper-focused
on marketing to those folks that are,

(01:16:38):
have been largely ignored or abandoned by
kind of all these platforms that are
going up market or down market. And so
our focus is that mid-market,
within that there's some, the classical
definition of what mid-market is, which
was usually kind of a GMV band.
I think the most classical one or most

(01:16:58):
common one was somewhere
like 25 to 500 million in GMV.
I think, we like to look at it a little
bit differently, not so much as revenue,
but more on complexity, right? And kind
of the needs of the merchant that
identifies them as more of a mid-market
merchant as opposed to just, because some
of these folks are doing billions, but
only a fraction of that's done online,
right? So I think the important thing to

(01:17:20):
distinguish there as well, we're not
gonna classify you as an enterprise if
you're only doing 5 million online, even
if you're doing 2 billion in revenue
anyway, right? Right, right, right.
And I guess, one of the questions I have
is like, does it integrate with like
tools like product information management
systems or PIMS? I know that's something
that especially bigger manufacturers or

(01:17:43):
bigger global groups of companies have
PIMS that kind of support
all of their product catalog.
Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the key
phrases, I like to steal a lot of phrases
from people as I go along the way. So one
of the ones from our former head of
developer experience that I really like
is, ShopR was designed for merchants to

(01:18:03):
be able to use this for as much as you
need and as little as you want. And I
think that's really, really powerful. So
things like PIMS and CMSs and dams,
right? All of these three letter alphabet
soup systems that we've
created in the e-comm space,
because we're API first, we're ready to
integrate or pre-integrated with all of

(01:18:24):
them. So, I'd say PIM is a super common
one. ERPs is another huge one, especially
in the B2B space. A lot of times folks
will have complex pricing that exists in
an ERP, contract pricing, that's specific
for, you know, Ethan, you get this
particular product for $9.99 and me as a
general just, yes, I have to pay $13.99

(01:18:46):
for it. I mean, things like that, all
that contract pricing, stuff like that,
that all typically lives in a third
system, third-party system. And so by
ShopR being API first and API native,
we're ready and we have integrations with
those sorts of systems.
Well, I think that's a good like lead in
kind of the next question or thought is,
you mentioned ERP, you come from an
interesting background. You worked at

(01:19:06):
NetSuite, right? Like you've got in-depth
information of what the ERP world is. And
I would say that most of the B2B
companies we work with, maybe have
NetSuite or Accumatica or Epicore, some
have AS400s that we integrate with, like

(01:19:27):
all types of data is coming from all
types of places. Why don't you talk a
little bit about connecting an ERP up
into Shopware and kind of the
complexities of that?
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, speaking
from my experience at NetSuite on the
professional services side,

(01:19:48):
granted it could be adverse selection
because I only saw people that were
making changes, but on that professional
services side, I got to see a lot of the
configurations and different ways that
people use NetSuite. And it's pretty
astounding when you look at it in depth
and see more and more of the ways that
folks use these SaaS products as not

(01:20:10):
truly SaaS, but they really
customize the crap out of them
and make them not really so much the
out-of-the-box feature set that they
have. So I'd say that anyone that tells
you that they have a direct connector to
NetSuite that's gonna automatically work
out of the box is not really telling the
truth, or it's at least half truth.

(01:20:31):
Every ERP integration is gonna have
something. It's gonna have something
that's gonna be different. It might need
to be tweaked, it might need to be
configuration, but there's something
different about every single, the way
that every customer is using every ERP,
more or less, I will say, in my
experience anyway. So things like being
able to have the flexibility to say,

(01:20:51):
"Hey, like Shopware does, we have, "Hey,
this webhook event framework." Whatever
event happens, we are not gonna make the
assumption that you need, that we have
this pre-packaged defined event structure
that that's what you need. We're gonna
give you every event. You can pick which
ones you need, and you can pick what you
need to update your system on. And so I
think that's one of the things that's
kind of crucial and key about Shopware is

(01:21:12):
that making that so flexible and giving
the data to the system and letting the
system make the determination, or the
customer make the determination on which
data is important, is really, really key.
Because like I said, everyone uses their
own, every ERP integration
is its own special snowflake.
Well, yeah, I mean, like, if we've done

(01:21:33):
10, or if we've done 12 Epicore
implementations, they're all different,
right? Like the only thing that's similar
is the name, right? Exactly. It's, you
know, or Microsoft Vision, or any, all of
the above. They're all just a little bit
different based upon what the business
rules are and how they need to be
integrated, what the data

(01:21:54):
looks like, the timing of the data.
You know, are you refreshing your pricing
multiple times a day? Are you doing that
once a month or once a year, right? Like
there are all of those kind of things
come into consideration when
you're doing an ERP integration.
Well, in Epicore itself, even just the
Epicore has, you know,
the 20 some different ERP products that

(01:22:14):
they offer depending
upon your industry too.
So even just having
an Epicore integration,
it's not really specific enough really to
tell you what system you're working with.
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, if a
manufacturer's thinking about this,
right? It's their first time through,
like creating a buyer portal or a B2B

(01:22:34):
ordering system, and they want to
integrate with their back office, with
their ERP. What are some things they
should be thinking about or considering?
Like what questions should they be asking
when they're going through this process?
Yeah, for sure. I think the main thing
would be ask your finance team, for sure,
with what they do. Oh, really? Yeah.

(01:22:55):
Everyone ignores the finance
team until it's way too late.
So make sure the finance team is happy
because they cut the checks at the end of
the day. So one of the top things I would
say is make sure that you're checking
with the finance team to make sure that
they know or you know which pieces of
data are crucial for them.
What do they need to see?
So that way you can make sure that that's
part of the integration. So that's point

(01:23:15):
number one, I would say, as far as ERP
integrations and kind of e-comm
integrations go. But then look for what's
gonna be able to meet your needs. What's
gonna be able to keep you operating the
way you wanna operate?
Kind of like what makes you special? What
makes you unique? What's the value
proposition you can offer? Why is someone

(01:23:36):
gonna come to an online portal and pay
for something from your site? Are they
going to really do that? Or are you
mostly handling your
transactions through sales reps today?
And if you are, how are you gonna make
sure that anybody that comes to that site
isn't just gonna bypass the sales rep and

(01:23:56):
the sales rep's not gonna get
commissioned because then all of a sudden
they have no interest in pointing people
to the site. So your site
becomes kind of irrelevant.
So those are just a few things that I
think are super, super key to think
about, especially if you've never done
this before. It's kind of
like how do you make your money?
What's gonna incentivize somebody to come
to an e-comm portal and then make sure
the finance team's happy?

(01:24:17):
Well yeah, and how do you accept
payments? Do you need tokenization of
your payments so that you can authorize
on the front end and capture in the ERP?
Does none of that even matter because
you're just doing POs or purchase orders?
Or are you granting credit to your
customers? And what if they exceed the

(01:24:37):
amount of credit? How does that work? Are
they allowed to exceed the amount of
credit? Are they
allowed to exceed it by 10%?
Like what's the, all of those things, all
of those questions come into play. And
we've definitely been in situations where
maybe the CFO had been, maybe there was
a, they had departed and they hadn't

(01:24:58):
brought a new CFO in yet. Like we've been
in various situations on these projects
and finance is a key, key part. And they
need to be brought in from the beginning
to be able to give a thumbs up or thumbs
down on what they're doing. Do you wanna
be able to accept payment online for
offline orders? Like all of the things

(01:25:19):
are things like we wanna think about when
we're looking at a
project of this size and scale.
Well, and to your point, I mean,
different payment methods might even have
different, you know, financial
reconciliation rules around them, right?
So you make sure that those are all
aligned and maybe your finance team
doesn't wanna offer terms or credit to
certain people because of risk profiles

(01:25:40):
or whatever the case may be too. So yeah,
couldn't agree more. Get
them involved early and often.
I'm a big fan of automation, like, you
know, and again, some of this comes from
my HubSpot background of, you know, their
workflow tools and the ability to
automate things. I'm, you know, I'm a big
fan of Zapier, Zapier, however you're

(01:26:00):
supposed to say it. I can say it with my
Baltimore accent, Zapier, you know, but
it's, you know, like, and you guys have,
you guys have a workflow engine as well
for automation as well, correct?
Yeah, absolutely. So we actually have, we
have two tools, two features that we
released that really put the power kind

(01:26:21):
of for that control back in the hands of
the merchant. So the first one being rule
builder, and that's kind of the, I call
that kind of the configurable business
logic, right? So that's where you can
build out conditions inside the platform,
no coding needed, you know, for this
customer and if it's this day of the week
and it's, you know, they're buying
products from category A,

(01:26:42):
all those different things. Those are all
different rules that you can set up. And
once you have those rules set up, then
you can take it over to the second half
flow builder, which is kind of the
configurable, no code, low code business
process. And so that's what you're
talking about kind of the workflow
where at any point in the life cycle of
the customer visit. So from the customer
logging in, the order going to a certain

(01:27:04):
state, the customer changing their
payment method, all these sorts of
things, they can trigger, these are all
events that trigger and you can say,
okay, if when this event triggers, if
this rule is true, then I want to do this
as an S. If it's not true, I want to do
this as an S or if this rule is true and
we have another rule, that's also true,
right? So it's the really truly if this
and that decision tree that you can build

(01:27:25):
out inside the platform without needing
any sort of coding or customization.
It's really a pretty powerful tool for
doing those automation tasks, right?
Assigning people to customer groups,
adding metadata to the order if necessary
for maybe VIP handling or doing some
automated notifications internally,

(01:27:46):
notifying sales rep, hey, this customer
just placed an order, you might want to
check in on it because they're your
account sort of deal.
So things like that, I think are really,
really cool. And we show these features
to merchants and they get really excited
because they see all these things that
they've had to, in the past, they would
have had to submit a ticket to a dev
system or a product request, have it sit

(01:28:08):
around for a couple weeks to a year, to
multiple years, and then they finally see
it come out and it's way too late no
matter what it is, it's always way too
late. So being able to do that in the
platform is really huge.
That's great. Are you able to trigger a
web hook or even receive a web hook from
a third party system using these flows or

(01:28:31):
does that require more kind of technical
expertise to put together?
Yeah, there is a good call out. There is
a web hook actually involved in that as
well. So one of the actions you can
select is create a web hook. And you're
talking about HubSpot, actually when I
first started at a shop where, I think it
was week three or so, they told me we
were going to these trade shows and so
everyone has a booth and they all have a

(01:28:52):
little swag, socks, whatever, cups, mugs,
all these things that they give out. And
we decided that we were going to give out
nice vests and stuff like that. We wanted
people to actually go through the
checkout process on a site because we
were like, hey, we're an econ platform.
We'll make folks go through a checkout
process. And so we built that, they're
like, okay, cool. Vance, I'm glad you
like the idea. You go build that site.

(01:29:13):
And I was like, sweet. I've been here for
three weeks. Yeah, we'll figure that out.
And part of that is after the show was
over, they wanted me to go in and make
sure, I was became a
logistics warehouse manager.
(Laughing)
Of course.
Of course.
Make sure everyone got the thing they
ordered and make sure that all that
information made into our HubSpot as

(01:29:34):
well. I was like, you know what? I bet I
could use Flow Builder and I can automate
some of this. And sure enough, I went
through and within about an hour, I just
looked at the HubSpot API, created a
webhook call directly to HubSpot, created
everyone as a contact when they checked
out. I got to use the rules to make sure
that I could, I could make sure that they
were legit. I did have to block one of
our partner managers, Justin. Yeah, he

(01:29:55):
loved trying to abuse the system to get
free swag. So I put in a rule
specifically to stop
him. Shout out to Justin.
But yeah, it was great. It was super
easy, super straightforward. And like I
said, I did it after being at ShopR for
about three weeks and in about an hour.
That's cool. And you know, no sales
person is gonna go type in the
information and put it in the CRM, right?

(01:30:16):
They're like, you know, like Chase ain't
doing any of that nonsense, right?
He's not gonna do it. So you got to
figure out how to automate that.
For sure, absolutely.
We can sit and talk. I mean, you work
with salespeople all day. So we could sit
and we could talk about salespeople for
the whole podcast if we really wanted to.

(01:30:37):
But we'll save that for another time. No,
I'm sorry. Yeah, no, but that's super
cool. I mean, right? Like that's the name
of the game is like, how do you like
create these low code, no code situations
where you can integrate
systems together and tools
and be able to leverage that within your
e-commerce ecosystem, right? Like you've

(01:30:58):
got to have these systems talking
together and working together to really
reach that optimum efficiency
for what you're doing. One of the cool
things that I like really dig that you've
done and I think it kind of came out of
the COVID time is these digital sales
rooms that allow almost like, and again,
I'm gonna not use the right words, but
it's almost like an assisted shopping,

(01:31:20):
right? For salespeople, for your B2B
sales reps to assist with your customers
to buy and have certain focus in the
catalog. Did I do that justice?
Yeah, yeah, totally fair. Yeah, no, it's
to your point, it came out of, it did
come out of COVID. We have a customer of
ours, the Wartman Group, they're the
largest shoe distributor in Europe and

(01:31:42):
they have these B2B sales reps, right?
And they go kind of store to store with,
I don't know anything about fashion, so
I'm gonna be totally off on the timing
here, but we'll just say they're going
around the spring 2025 collection,
although probably way farther beyond that
now, but they go around with the
collection of shoes just in their trunk,
right? They'd unload it, set up their
little display, B2B buyer would come out

(01:32:03):
and say, "Okay, yeah, I want this, this
and this." Then they pack everything up,
take that on the road to the next store.
Great ability to see the person interact,
that's so key, the relationship between
the sales rep and the buyer, and that's
something that I think
we can't really discount.
And all of a sudden COVID hits, right?
And the country, Germany in this case is

(01:32:25):
totally locked down, people can't travel
anywhere. And so they're looking for a
solution, and so they come to us and they
say, "Hey, shopper, can you really help
us out here?" And so we put together,
yeah, digital sales rooms. It's a, there
are multiple modes of it, it can be a
guided sales rep experience, one to one,
one to many, where a sales rep can help
take somebody through. But the important

(01:32:46):
thing to note is that it's not really
just a catalog, right? It doesn't have to
be the catalog of everything. I was
joking, use that, do you guys get the
Uline out in Baltimore?
Oh God, I get like four, I
get like three and four of them.
But I have this as a prop on my desk now.

(01:33:06):
This is 896 pages of just Uline stuff,
right? It's all the stuff they sell.
And so even if I was a buyer, I've never
purchased anything from them. So Lord
knows why they still pay however much it
is to send me this catalog every month,
but every quarter, but I've never bought
from them. But if I did, even if I did,
and I wanted something specific from
them, and that's what I bought, I still

(01:33:28):
get 896 pages and I have to leaf through
to find what I want, and then I have to
buy it from them, right? That's
ridiculous and not practical. Like no,
no, to your point, sales reps are kind of
lazy. They're not gonna leaf through
things and define the products they need.
And so what I love about digital sales
rooms specifically is it allows the sales
rep to curate an experience for a
customer. So instead of sending the whole

(01:33:48):
Uline catalog, maybe I only ever buy
cardboard boxes from them, right?
Then we can just show just a subset.
Actually, thank you, this is pulled up.
This is a perfect example. This is a
video from the actual Wartman group. So
this is a real life example. And so what
you're gonna see is in the top left, you
have kind of the customer view, and in

(01:34:09):
the bottom right,
there's a sales agent view.
And so this is to your point kind of a
guided session where they're able to
browse independently, scroll
independently, but the agent is always
able to guide them through. So the agent
brought them to this page, page 15 of 22.
You're also gonna see here that the agent
is able to kind of summon the user. So
they click a button, the user scrolls
down to wherever the agent's talking

(01:34:29):
about, pops it out for them, highlights
them. And you're gonna start to see too,
that the agent has all this kind of God
level view of all the information. So the
customer liked the product, the agent can
see that. The customer was looking at
that product, that red shoe, the agent
could see that the customer was looking
at it. So then the customer, the sales,
you know, hey, you know, I saw you were
looking at the shoe, let's dive in, let's
talk about that a little bit more in
depth, right? And so they click in, they

(01:34:50):
bring the agent, or bring the user to the
product detail page. Now on the right
side of the screen here, you're gonna see
that the agent has all this information,
right, so they have things
like margin, stock levels,
you name it, kind of all this
information, even maybe just metadata on
the product, talk tracks that other
agents have used, right? All shoved into

(01:35:10):
this product. And so the agent can see
all that information and talk to the
customer, and they don't necessarily have
that same advantage, right? The customer
adds something to the cart, the agent can
see that in real time. The agent, right
now, this is one of my favorite features
about this, is the agent's creating
what's called an instant listing page.
So, you know, we saw that the catalog is
22 pages, massive catalog, right? In this

(01:35:32):
case, the agent's maybe based on the
conversation, maybe the past purchase
history, don't know, but the agent is
actually just selecting a focused set of
products that the customer might want.
And now these products don't have to be
from this particular page, they can be
from any page in the catalog, it could be
from outside the catalog, doesn't matter.
But the agent is pulling in just a small

(01:35:52):
set that they think the customer's gonna
like. And you can see here too, the
agent's actually able to act on behalf of
the customer. So the agent is liking,
adding a few products to the
like list for the customer,
again, or they can also add stuff to the
cart on behalf of the customer.
But now what the agent's gonna do, what I
think is really cool, is they're gonna
take them to the like list. So think
about kind of an e-com funnel, a sales

(01:36:12):
funnel. We started with this massive, 22
pages of data, 22 pages of products. We
narrowed it down based on the sales reps
insights on just the products that they
think the customer will like. And now
we're narrowing it down even farther just
the products that the customer's actually
expressed and interested in. And I said
before, this can be a one to one, one to
many sort of deal. Every customer that's
visiting this has the ability to have

(01:36:34):
their own like list, their own cart, all
that stuff. This can be either anonymous,
it can be authenticated. In this case,
it's authenticated. So when the sales
agent takes the customer to
cart right now, there we go.
All that information is already to be
populated. So the customer might have net
terms already signed, they might have a
billing address, shipping address, all
that stuff's done. Boom, easy checkout.

(01:36:54):
And this has all the main core features
of shopper. So dynamic pricing,
restrict catalog restrictions. You can
buy buyer A can buy these particular size
shoes, buyer B can't. All of that is
already built into the platform. We just
released a few more things like on the
fly sales rep discounting, the ability to
share screens. So I mean, we've, we're

(01:37:17):
pushing this pretty hard. I think it's a
really, really unique use case that
really unique offering that really nobody
else has. So we're
pretty excited about it.
Yeah, it's super unique. I find a lot of
value, especially if you have, you know,
if you have 30, 40, 50, 60 reps and you
could teach them how to do this, you can
identify two or three of your highest
performing reps that are maybe a little
technically minded and teach them how to

(01:37:38):
do this. You could like go gangbusters on
it. And so in terms of if you're a
manufacturer, maybe you have highly
technical products with, you know, a list
of complex specifications and other
information. Shopware can handle that,
correct? Like those product fields.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And that's
where, I mean, that's truly where we
shine with, you know, we have, we have

(01:38:00):
the ability to have spatial. So if you
have your CAD models, you can actually
even upload this into Shopware and you
can have the specs and the actual 3D
model rendered right there in line.
One thing I want to just really quickly
circle back to, cause I think it's an
important thing to note too. We've seen
the most adoption and the best results
with DSR when folks
haven't made it a mandate.

(01:38:22):
So when you're talking about kind of
technically minded sales reps versus not,
one of the things that we think is super
crucial and what we've seen as a pattern
is that folks that put out this as a, we
put it out as a mandate, we'll see much
slower adoption than those who say, hey,
here's a tool that can be used to
actually help directly impact your sales,
right? This is something that you can use
as a tool that will increase your sales,

(01:38:42):
because we all know that the sales reps
are going to make, make their number on
say, you know, 20% of their accounts.
Those other 80%, they're probably
underserving. And so this tool enables
them to scale the sales agent to scale
much more and spend more personalized
time with those, with those, with that
80%, that long tail. And so what we've

(01:39:03):
seen is that when you haven't made it a
mandate and you say, hey, this is a tool
that can help you, there are going to be
people that are going to adopt it. And
those people are going to just shoot up
the leaderboard, right? We all know sales
orders have a leaderboard of some sort.
And so those people that choose to use it
are going to steadily climb that
leaderboard. And then if you're, you
know, other sales reps are going to start

(01:39:24):
asking, hey, what are you doing? You
know, what's working for you? And that's
how you get the adoption. If you mandate
it, just like, I mean, every sales rep in
existence probably has been mandated a
CRM change at one point in their life.
And they always hate it. They always
resist it. They
always bite tooth and nail.
And so, you know, in order for this to
not turn into shelfware, we generally

(01:39:45):
recommend that folks use it as an option
for their sales reps
as opposed to a mandate.
How about the ability for a salesperson,
like if you, you know, in a controlled,
you know, customer environment where your
customers only have access to the system,
it's not for the public,
are customers able to build a cart for,
to get a quote on that? Maybe the items

(01:40:06):
are customized and, or, you know, require
like some more interaction. And so does,
does shopware have the ability
to build a quote cart as well?
Yeah, absolutely. So we have a few things
for that. We actually have within our
admin right now, we have the ability to
create a quote, ability to create an
order. Both of those are pretty easy,
straightforward in the admin. And one of

(01:40:27):
the things I think is cool, like you just
talked about, is that not everything is
going to be a predefined SKU in your
catalog, right? There might be some
custom items. You might be a built to
spec sort of deal. And shopware has the
ability to, inside the quote, create a
custom item. And that can be positively
priced, negatively priced. You know, you
kind of determine what you want the price
to be in that use case. And so all of

(01:40:47):
that information can be, can be created
inside shopware. And one of the things we
have too, that I think is really, really
cool, kind of sticking on the sales agent
and making their jobs easier. We actually
have a feature often called sales agents.
And it's a kind of a skinny down UI,
that's made specifically for sales
agents, customer service reps, those
sorts of folks, so that they don't have
to log into the platform necessarily.

(01:41:09):
They have a UI that's tailor built for
their use cases of whatever that is. So
if it's creating orders, creating quotes,
approving orders, whatever the use case
may be, it's a skinny down UI that's just
for them to be able to use for their use
cases. And the nice thing about that is
you can actually, because it's all API
driven, you can actually embed that into

(01:41:29):
another viewport if you want. So if you
have a CRM, you can embed that so they
don't have to seem to log
into multiple places, right?
Yeah.
Hook it all up with SSO and you have a
unified experience that makes the sales
rough slightly easier without
necessarily even knowing it.
And the other part of that is like, say
you're a manufacturer with some type of
heavy CPU module for
configuring and quoting products.

(01:41:52):
Products don't need to live necessarily
in the shop where database to be able to
be added to the cart, right? So you don't
need, some products might have a million
different combinations between all the
different fields and variant options,
right? And so you don't want to have to
create skews and variants for all that.
And so being able to add an item
programmatically, like configure an item
and then push that into a cart is very

(01:42:15):
powerful, can be very powerful as well
when you're thinking about
it from a B2B standpoint.
Yeah, absolutely. I think it says
definitely a superpower that we have.
Just thinking about the fact that the
price, neither the price nor the product
necessarily needs to live inside Shopware
for somebody to transact and build a cart
around it is super powerful.
Yeah. So I know the product roadmap is

(01:42:38):
public. Like what's coming down the pipe
for 2025 from a B2B for some things that
you think will help B2B
sellers using Shopware?
Yeah, absolutely. I'm really excited. So
we're coming out with a slated for Q1
right now as a more complex company
hierarchy structure inside Shopware. So
the ability to have kind of multiple
divisions and within those divisions have

(01:43:00):
multiple employees and kind of the roles
and permissions that exist at that.
That's slightly coming Q1.
For Q2 and beyond, we're looking at doing
things around more customer specific
catalog price books, customer specific
catalogs, some more general kind of
catalog restrictions and more complex
pricing structures that I'm really
excited about that

(01:43:21):
should be coming in 2025.
That's awesome. That's awesome. You know,
Vance, I really appreciate you taking the
time today to kind of break all this
down. It's definitely, we have a lot of
conversations with manufacturers around
the country and they're great at
manufacturing their own products and
selling them to their customers. What
they're not as knowledgeable about often
is these types of online selling systems.

(01:43:42):
So coming on today to be able to talk
about it, some of the great things that
you're doing and where you're going was
very, very helpful. So really, really
appreciate your time today in doing that.
One of the things that I like to ask all
our guests on the show is if you had one
tip for a manufacturer to help their

(01:44:04):
growth digitally in 2025,
what would you recommend to them?
Yeah, I'd say that there's been this talk
track around consumerization and making
sure you have a portal and all that
stuff. And I think that's kind of table
stakes at this point. But the main piece
of advice I'd have is, what tools can you
offer your sales reps,

(01:44:26):
the real money drivers behind your
business, what tools can you offer them
to make their lives easier and make them
more productive? With the advent of AI
and all the things
we've seen in that space,
how can we make them more effective and
how can we upskill your sales reps so
that they're able to be more productive
and help make more for you?
That's awesome, that's awesome. It's
great advice, it's great advice. Well,

(01:44:48):
folks, thank you for listening in.
Wherever you're listening to this, please
give us a subscribe, leave us some star
ratings, leave us a comment. We love your
feedback. Vance, I really, really
appreciate you taking time out of your
day to join the podcast and share all
your insights and knowledge about all
things e-commerce today.

(01:45:09):
Yeah, thank you so much for having me
Ethan. It was a great time with you.
Thank you. All right, everybody, we'll
see you on the next episode.
(Upbeat Music)

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Why B2B eCommerce Requires Flexibility with Vance Ryan from Shopware - EP013

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Why B2B eCommerce Requires Flexibility with Vance Ryan from Shopware - EP013