Join Human Element’s Jason and Magee and iPaaS.com’s Robert Rand as they discuss the challenges involved in B2B eCommerce integrations.
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Jason Magee:
Hi, everybody, and thanks for listening to the Human Element Podcast Beyond the Cart, eCommerce Insights from Human Element. I’m Jason Magee, managing partner here at Human Element, and I’m joined by Robert Rand, chief partnership officer at iPaaS.com. Today we’re talking about the hidden complexities of B2B eCommerce integrations. And thanks for joining me, Robert.
Robert Rand:
Thanks for having me.
Jason Magee:
And you know, why don’t you tell us a little bit about iPaaS and why this is a relevant topic for both of us to discuss today?
Robert Rand:
Well, loaded question for me.
Jason Magee:
Okay.
Robert Rand:
iPaaS.com stands for Integration Platform as a Service. And so we are a platform that’s dedicated toward helping organizations move data between their software systems, or as we like to think about it, unifying data across their tech stack. And that includes a lot of key business software in the B2B commerce space.
Jason Magee:
Cool. So let’s just dive into it and you know, what do you think are some of the B2B requirements that are most often underestimated?
Robert Rand:
All of them. No. When I think about data flows, there’s an assumption that when you hear, okay, someone’s on a certain ERP and they want, you know, they’re ready for a certain eCommerce platform that you know what you need to know. that that’s gonna do the job. And the reality is that and I’m gonna use the the human element name maybe in a punny way, but it’s that human element is missing because they’ve been customizing that ERP for however many years and their business operations aren’t plain vanilla. So what we find are things that seem very straightforward, like okay, people are going to be shopping on a B2B eCommerce website. Do they have to be pre-approved for an account? Do they have to have a sales tax exemption certificate on file if they’re not the ultimate end users or are those users going to be approved in the eCommerce system? Are they going to be approved in the ERP or are they going to be approved in a CRM? Do they get net terms or are they going to be paying via credit or debit or such in the eCommerce checkout? And it keeps going from there. You know, you think about things like, you know, is there a hierarchy, a relationship between different shoppers within a certain company and organization?
And you know, what’s tying together, what addresses they can ship things to, and who can approve orders. And, you know, there’s so much nuance. And then what are they paying? Are they getting a specific discount based upon a group that they are in as a customer and the volume that they shop in, or do they have unique prices on individual products? And where is that being established from? And you know, and and you can get into lots of nuance with things like quote requests and CPQs, you know, where you’re dealing with those sorts of things. And so there’s just so many of these areas that, you know, when people think eCommerce, they’re thinking about, okay, well, you know, there’s a product price and there’s an order and there’s, you know, and and there’s this one to one relationship of the customer that placed the order to the order and B2B can really get off the rails fast.
Jason Magee:
Right. Especially in early conversations, you know, most people that are involved in the conversations on eCommerce and you know, or planning these projects, they don’t have much visibility into the ERP, especially. You know, and they really underestimate the amount of customizations, to your point, that they’ve made over time.
And over the course of the implementation and use of that ERP. And often it it’s not until you’re deep into these projects that you start identifying these things that have been customized and these processes that exist. Financial teams in my experience are very anti-change, right? They they it was working a certain way, they’re dealing with bank accounts, they’re dealing with financial reporting, and it’s working for them. And they don’t want to change any process. So even if, however it was set up, you know, maybe even be legacy, right? Coming over from a previous ERP and maybe it made sense 50 years ago, but it doesn’t make sense in the modern world, but they’re still not going to change it, no matter how much sense it makes.
And so there’s you’re you’re fighting a lot of those battles as you’re saying this is a better way to do it. You may not be able to do it that way.
Robert Rand:
And you know, we and what you do and your team, you know, brings the expertise on day-in and day-out, just understanding what is it gonna take to build the mousetrap the way that they’re describing, the way that their business has been doing it more manually. What is it gonna take to maintain it that way? And is the juice worth the squeeze? Or is this the time to look at modernizing certain business requirements and rules and and thinking about, you know, how to make this the most frictionless for the shoppers and for their internal teams. And, you know, what we always, you know, are looking at and have that visualization with everyone is that you may be doing things pretty manually today. You may be deciding which, you know, which facility is gonna manufacture that product based upon a variety of factors on any given day, or which warehouse is going to fulfill a certain order. Can we come up with logic to decide? You know, things like that, or you know, and it’s funny you mentioned finance, and obviously that when it comes to an ERP, they own the stack more than anyone.
Jason Magee:
Yeah.
Robert Rand:
But, you know, when we’re thinking about these kinds of operations, you’re really thinking about other teams that are involved, whether it’s like sales and account management or shipping and fulfillment and warehouse kind of operations.
Jason Magee:
Yeah. The warehouse, yeah.
Robert Rand:
And and you find if those folks, if those stakeholders don’t have a seat at the table at the beginning of the project, then typically there’s going to be some scope change, additional scope, what have you, some gotchas later on in the project, because nobody thought about, well, you know, some of our customers have us ship on their own freight accounts and, you know, don’t don’t just select in the checkout kind of, you or that you wind up with with all of these different scenarios. It’s the old measure twice cut once. It’s trying to, it costs a business money to bring all those people together in a room multiple times to hash things out. But it costs a lot. There’s a bigger opportunity cost. There’s a a you know, bigger impact of not doing that and dealing with the gotchas at the tail end and you know, the frustration, of course, then of missed launches because there’s new scope, there’s things that have to be dealt with. So, you know, for me it’s all about being proactive in the process.
Jason Magee:
Right. One of the first things that we do whenever we engage with a new client or on a new project is we ask them for a system map. They almost always don’t exist. So we help build those system maps. So when they do exist and a company has a system map that they can just share with you, that’s great. But I’m always surprised at how when we go through those processes, how many times we uncover systems that our project team wasn’t aware of. And sometimes you uncover duplicate systems that are doing the same thing for different teams. You know, and then the challenge is, like you said, you know, measure twice, cut once. Then when we are planning out our future state, right, when we’re into doing these integrations and deciding what system is going to be the pro the, you know, source of truth for every single function.
You know, you have to be really explicit with the data flow and at least get a starting point in the planning phase so that you know what you’re addressing. Because sometimes you don’t want to address everything because it is too complicated because there are too many people involved that they’re, dang, I didn’t know that that was occurring. We don’t want to touch that right now. So let’s just do inventory and pricing or something like that.
Robert Rand:
Right. It’s coming up with that MVP, that you know, minimal viable product and saying, Look, what’s gonna bring the most value? Let’s get that launch, let’s let you start getting return on that investment and not hold up a a launch on twenty other things that are nice to have or that could be added later while you’re already getting ROI and being able to think in that way to be a little bit more, more agile in how you you know.
You work on delivering in that way becomes important because, you know, you can sometimes need the kitchen sink. Sometimes you know, you’re going from one system to another and now you can’t go backwards in the capability. But in a lot of cases, there’s always a better state that you can get into, you know, incremental improvement. I mean it’s the same thing we all see today with AI, that people that are trying to, you know, eat the whole elephant all at once. And you know, it’s very hard to show strong ROI on an org versus selecting specific lanes where they can get incremental value and get those rolled out and perfected and really, you know, see that build up. And you know, for us at iPaas.com, because we’re a hub and spoke architecture, we have a lot of users.
They’ll start with the e-com and the ERP, but then they’ll start turning on more spokes to move, you know, unified data with the CRM and the product information management system and the warehouse management system and the accounts receivable and the sales tax exemption certificate management and all these other things that that ideally you know help to improve the the customer and operations experiences, so internal and external, but they don’t all necessarily need to launch on the same day.
Jason Magee:
Right. Since you’re dealing with so many multiple systems, how often do you see people trying to do everything at once? And we don’t recommend that, right? We have seen multiple times we’re gonna get a new ERP and a new e-com system, we’re gonna do it all at the same time. We’re all modernizing everything at once. And we recommend against that all the time, right? Is there a good order that you would recommend people stair stepping things?
Robert Rand:
I mean, good is subjective. It’s tough, but I’m with you. I don’t like seeing people try to flip the switch on a new ERP and a new e-com and a new CRM all at once. Change management within an organization, it’s difficult enough to get through the launch of one, but while all the others are in limbo, it’s even harder. trying
Jason Magee:)
Yes.
Robert Rand:
to find the same, let’s say, launch day for all of them is impossible from my experience. It’s a real holdup, the process. You know, so you start to think about where are you the most invested, what’s the hardest thing to leave, where are you gonna get the most value? And again, I don’t want to be a broken record with that statement, but I it’s an important one where you find that folks are often very vested in the ERP that you know, we see that in retail also with things like point of sale, that trying to retrain all the staff on it, trying to migrate off of it is difficult.
And that’s why we all walk into retail stores, and the bigger they are, the older the point of sale often is that’s on…
Jason Magee:
Yeah.
Robert Rand:)
…the counter. That it plays hand in hand, the same with, you know, large enterprises that you sometimes run into that are still running, like, you know, a AS400 or what have you, you know, the bigger it is, the more the more vested. Where something like the eCommerce experience, they can get such a huge ROI on it so much faster.
By making it easier for these shoppers to shop where otherwise shoppers don’t always tell you that they’re not gonna come back. They just go somewhere more convenient. They don’t wanna have to yeah, to find
Jason Magee:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Robert Rand:
what’s available to and and the same thing that they don’t you know you deal with with a harder time onboarding more and and growing and so for a lot of businesses, that becomes the low-hanging fruit. It’s okay, well, you know, now we’re dealing with a younger generation of buyers that have different expectations and relationships are important, but so is being able to order day and night conveniently to know what’s in stock, to know what turnaround times are, to know what costs are, to have it at their fingertips. They’re not waiting for trade shows to place orders anymore.
People are trying to keep up with where they could probably stay on the ERP longer. In many cases at least, obviously it, you know, each situation’s a little bit different. But we see the same. It’s like, okay, you know, you’re going to do that, but now you’ve got different brands you’re selling in different markets. You want to start thinking about a product information management system that’s going to allow you to manage how you’re presenting these things for different sales channels and such.
You want all of this to be really healthy in the CRM that’s the fuel of your sales team. So I think, you know, there is that question of a when do you get the software, but also B, what when do you integrate it? When is it most important? Is giving the sales team visibility into the eCommerce sales in the CRM what you need for launch, or could that follow up a month or two later?
Jason Magee:
It’s really like you said about understanding where you’re getting the most value in your current system, you know. Once you understand what you have, where does it make the most sense to invest heavily now? And then what’s next, you know. And one thing you mentioned was training, right? I think that’s really underestimated in a lot of ways. Because you know, internal teams build up processes over time and a lot of times are not necessarily that well documented so that people don’t know what’s occurring. And if you don’t take enough time to properly train and really understand what you’re rolling out, it can be a problem. So I do think that that’s really important to understand that element of it as well. And with you know, you mentioned the eCommerce maybe having the bigger bang for the buck because, you know, you’re just providing a better experience and you don’t necessarily have to train your users to use your system, right? There’s a different kind of light of day situation there when it comes to like an eCommerce experience versus like an ERP, where if you change out your ERP, right? There’s a limited number of users generally, they really need to understand that not just their systems, but the workflow of how everything bounces back before you know between each system. That’s why doing the discovery and mapping these things out first is so important in order to get to a longer term plan and mapping out your future.
Robert Rand:
Yeah, and you know, I think when we start to get into those terms, the conversation really gets uplifted, right? You’re we have customers, you know, subscribers on our platform that again, there’s the brass tacks, there’s what do they need to operate, but then there’s where are they just, you know, losing a lot internally on manual process and where can they keep, you know, trimming away at that and let their their teams work on things that are going to be more advantageous, not manual data entry, not busy work. How can they better support and service the customers? That’s where, you know, what the customer wants. And that’s, you know, generally speaking, when everybody looks at it with eyes wide open, what everybody within these manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, etc., are looking to achieve. And so we see these scenarios where for instance, accounts receivable, you know, when you’re B2B selling an e-comm, it might be that a majority of your orders aren’t paying in the eCommerce checkout. They’re what we’d call offline payment. It’s net terms or such. Well, now you’re waiting for checks in the mail. Or, you know, you’re playing phone tag with people trying to get credit cards. And so at that point it is like, okay, well, we can bring automation around that. We can automate a system like Pay Fabric from Global Payments.
That’ll add that accounts receivable motion and the shopper can log in, see the invoices paid through credit, debit, ACH, partial and full, et cetera, and keep it all in motion and cut down on that friction. Or things like we’ve we we integrate with Avalara’s sales tax exemption certificate management product, where if the sales rep doesn’t know that there’s an exemption certificate on file or the account manager, right? And doesn’t know if it’s still valid for what state or states. They don’t know if somebody accidentally uploaded their kids’ homework and not a valid certificate, right? Then they’re waiting on finance to tell them or somebody else. And it’s still building friction. It’s delaying the process. It’s well, you know, those certificates can be made available to the CRM through a system like iPaaS.com.
For us, we look at it as okay, you know, you might have that baked in the e-comm experience, but is it where the internal staff in the organization need it? Is it unified across all the right departments? And so we really do get into some very unique workflows. And even so, when we think about data like product data, you might have the inventory coming from a warehouse management system, the pricing coming from the ERP.
And other fields of data coming from a PIM, like product descriptions and attributes and you know, a categorization and what have you. And so you find that sometimes you need that one to many, or sometimes an order is going to come down from the eCommerce site and it’s got to go to the ERP for accounting, but it’s got to go somewhere else for fulfillment and somewhere else. So again, the sales team has visibility in the CRM and so on and so forth. And you start thinking about the bigger picture that you don’t intend to have your entire team, in most cases, all living in one system. you’re trying to bring together your tech stack.
Jason Magee:
So when you are working with a customer, for example, that has all of these different connections with a PIM and you know the CRM and the ERP and all of the, you know, like an asset management system, so how do you typically go about mapping that out? Like do you like what is your process if you engage with the new customer?
Robert Rand:
So, you know, as a platform ourselves, we provide a lot of great resources to our partner network. We’ve got, you know, partners like Human Element that bring in that layer of consulting and expertise. And we work with a wide variety of different types of orgs, ERP VARs and CRM experts and so on.
I’d say that the best way that we recommend in our training and and in supporting our partner network and our user base. It’s really documenting what actually happens in the journey here. What would a human being expect in a perfect scenario? What would success look like?
Jason Magee:
Looks like. Yeah.
Robert Rand:
And talking about it one data flow at a time. So thinking about, okay, this is where when we’re creating a new product, we start here in this system, and then but this data’s got to come from this system. We can’t publish that product to the eCommerce website until there’s some approval…
Jason Magee:
This happened.
Robert Rand:
…step or there’s some so now we know we’ve got a filter on that, don’t grab those products until, you know, they have whatever flag on them, so to speak, until whatever field is filled out. Don’t bring over products with zero dollar prices that aren’t filled out yet, right?
Jason Magee:
Right. Yeah.
Robert Rand:
But but you’d be surprised, you know, how you can figure out those things in arrears, right? You can build something and then test and and keep finding all of the idiosyncrasies,
Jason Magee:
Yeah, keep iterating.
Robert Rand:
Right? But you know, it’s a lot better when you know, okay, this is the process and this is how we’re going to now think about automating it to cut out all the manual copy and paste or or typing in, or, you know, and and honestly, you know, with all that manual effort, typically every org sees a certain rate of errors and exceptions that come out of that. And that’s another friction point where customers are not happy when that order didn’t ship because it didn’t get keyed in properly or went to the wrong address or whatever happened.
You know, so back to higher level customer success, it all kind of, you know, comes together when you realize when you do the math on how simple, let’s say, a one percent fail rate on something like order fulfillment can impact your org, how many customers it can lose you, how much you can spend, you know, reshipping and redoing. And it’s interesting just how reality can start to come into a different light.
Jason Magee:
Yeah, you also mentioned, you know, establishing kind of key metrics and what success looks like. I think that’s really important in any project. We always talk about that right at the beginning. How do we know whether we won or lost here? Right? Because we know that these projects are hard. And I think it’s important to go into them. Like when you’re integrating, you know, e-com in an ERP or any other system, it always sounds a lot easier than it actually is in reality. It’s the old saying, like everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the face, right? Isn’t that Mike Tyson who said that? Like so, you know, it’s really when you when you get in start implementing and start do no matter how good your plans are, no matter how well we map out these user stories and all the, you’re always going to run into things in the middle of the project. And I think it’s important for everybody involved to understand that. And it’s important to have change management, you know, built in and understood and recognize that this is going to happen, no matter how good a job we do. And also because the road’s changing, right? It’s like we’re trying to build something.
Robert Rand:
There’s an ERP upgrade that now you have to account for that must be done
Jason Magee:
Exactly.
Robert Rand:
in order to keep the ERP supported or you know, things just happen.
Jason Magee:
Yeah, you have a security patch all of a sudden, right? You have to install in the middle of your project, you know, or you can’t go live, and that could affect things one of the things we talked about earlier in a previous conversation, because Robert and I have known each other for a long time, and so we’ve had many conversations over the years.
And you know, we’ve built out a number of integrations over the years. And we’ve got a Shopify integration right now. And we’ve had an experience where we had a couple key processes break because Shopify had updated their APIs. And we didn’t know until after the fact because we didn’t have the kind of logging built in, which iPaaS does. And so you’ve already run into a lot of those problems and have hardened your software to deal with that so you’re not dealing with it when somebody in the warehouse notices a week later or it’s a client or, you know, a customer calls in and says, Where’s my order? I ordered it two weeks ago and you find out it fell, you know, that something had changed in your integrations and you didn’t know.
Robert Rand:
Layers of that. And I think that often, again, you know, our collective jobs in this tech space and in this eCommerce world, making difficult things, technical things, look easy. To make them function as, you know, consistently and fast and so on and so forth, as possible.
But not every day is a perfect day when it comes to data. Sometimes you got something from a supplier or somebody, you know, had a typo somewhere. I always say, you know, somebody puts a question mark in a number field somewhere, that data can’t get where it’s trying to go. And our system will flag that proactively, it’ll automatically retry. Maybe the ERP is down for a few minutes being upgraded, it’s unavailable.
You don’t want to lose the data, lose the orders that can’t flow in. We have a system that has a queue and it keeps it in queue, keeps retrying until it’s successful, lets you know what’s stuck and why, and gives you all all that at your fingertips to deal with those inevitabilities. But also every integration in our marketplace has version control.
Meaning that there’s a drop down. And when we’ve got a new version, so Shopify updates their APIs or BigCommerce or Adobe Commerce or Magento or you know, go down the list, right? You know, Shopware, whatever it may be, that you can hot swap to the new version without having to reconfigure everything from scratch, without having to start over. Because we know that that’s a part of technology, the evolution.
What users will often spend, it’s the hidden cost of trying to manage and maintain these things one off. I tell people, would you want to build your own eCommerce website from scratch and deal with all the payments and the shipping and the sales tax and the product catalog and the customers and the my account area? Would you really want to take on that technical debt and own managing and maintaining all of that in a completely custom application built just for you?
There was a time and we know that that heyday is past. Yeah.
Jason Magee:
Yeah, that I mean that’s how it was done. That’s how it was done for many, many years. Technical debt builds up over time and you had a lot of integrations where you’re learning, you know, there is no starting point. I mean, I think that’s one of the great things about iPaaS is that you know, and similar companies that do this, that there’s a starting point.
And you’re not building it out from scratch all the time and you’ve thought about things like queuing and you’ve thought about the version control and you’ve done all that stuff and because you can do that custom.
Robert Rand:
Yeah, but we’ve thought of the auto scaling of the platform and the SOCTU compliance and the encryption of the data and the user control and roles and what have you, so only you know the right people get access to the right settings and data and such and all of these things that that should be prerequisites into these sorts of living breathing systems.
But we’ve also, you know, the integration space started like everything starts. It was reactive. It was okay, I need to get data from A to B. And then I need to get a that same data from A to C and A to D. And by the time that you’re done, you’re in a world that’s full of connectors that you’re sitting on that you have to some of them are black box and you can’t do very much with them, that they’re not really meeting your goals.
Others, you know, you can’t make heads or tails out of what’s going on and why things aren’t working and you’re chasing your tail. And with us, it’s meant to be a low code, no code experience that there’s visibility and control, that you can turn on new spokes as your tech stack evolves, you can map new fields, you can add new business logic around, okay, we want to keep, you know, this much product in reserve or
we do B2C and B2B. We want to transform these orders a little differently on the way to fulfillment, you know, apply certain things, you know, to them along the way. So many things that you could think to do and not being boxed in by it. And from what we see, the users that would normally spend a ton of money in break fix situations and dealing with the management and maintenance of connectors in terms of hosting them and keeping them up to date. And as Shopify changes, you’ve to rewrite the whole thing on your own dime and and all the debugging of why is this not working and the client frustrations that again you didn’t know proactively that something wasn’t flowing and you know, that it was stuck or that, you know, anytime that that happens, you’ve got to manually key it in because there’s no retry mechanism.
And you’ve got so many things working against you in terms of that long-term spin that it’s a quiet bleed. But then you get, if you ever go back and do the math, you realize just how painful and what you often see in these orgs that have been living that experience is that they’re worried about taking on the next because they never really got what they wanted out of the last round.
Jason Magee:
Right.
Robert Rand: (30:10)
They’ve always blown out of the budget. They’ve always, you know, the timeline has always been a mess. And again, some of that’ll come back to the gotchas in a project if they didn’t have all the specs and they have requirements that are kind of coming up at the 11th hour. That can happen. you know, that there should always be some risk analysis into okay, these are the things that could cause some delays or some changes.
Jason Magee:
Yeah, that’s, I mean, that’s something that we we, you know, when we’re doing any project, we always always try to identify these are the risks that right up front, you know, and how are we gonna mitigate at least fifteen percent over on anything that’s really complex. Yeah. Because those integrations…
Robert Rand:
Right. Have a buffer ready. Right. You know, ’cause you have to account for the unknown.
Jason Magee:
Yes, you have to. And it’s like even no matter what we estimate this project to be, you know, if it’s complicated and we’ve never done it before, then there’s going to be some flex and you have to be prepared for and not be afraid of it because that’s just the reality of these complicated technical projects.
Robert Rand:
Right. Well, what we do really well is bring standards and normalization to the data, you know, process to that unification process. So whether it’s in how our integrations are built or how data’s mapped or tested or monitored and and so on and so forth, that really cuts down on a lot of that friction and pain.
But when you’re talking about the real world and you find out that okay, somebody, you know, thought that they were gonna move data with the, you know, let’s say product data from their ERP, but didn’t realize that their product data is living in custom tables in the ERP that aren’t even exposed to the traditional APIs.
I’d say that the other caveat here is that it’s always great if, obviously, some teams have everybody in-house and that’s fantastic. Then you’ve got the stakeholders. But in many cases, there are value-added resellers, service providers, other other orgs involved in how some of these other systems have been customized and so on. And so when you can factor in having a little bit of time from those teams that know more about where the bodies are buried.
Jason Magee:
Yeah.
Robert Rand: (32:32)
In your software than your in-house team does, or being prepared to bring them to the table, for them to be able to answer questions, for them to be able to review when something didn’t go the way that that was e expected on their side of the you know, the fence, let’s say it’s the ERP, having those resources ready and having everybody working together in unison, that will unclog the pipes so much more. That’ll keep everything in motion so much more. I used the phrase earlier table stakes that you know having a strong eCommerce presence really isn’t optional anymore. But you know, it’s all about how are you gonna get to the outcome that you want with the, you know, the fastest, lowest, you know, cost, et cetera, et cetera. experience.
And so you know I think that’s really what it comes down to is it doesn’t all fall on one vendor necessarily when you need your tech stack working in unison, but you know, if you’ve got the right people working together, you can really move mountains.
Jason Magee:
You just mentioned you know, having a strong eCommerce presence is not really an option anymore, you know, or not having it, right, is not really an option. We still see a lot of industries that have not gotten there yet. And it it always surprises me that in 2026 there are still entire industries where companies that haven’t moved. And one of the things that we’ve seen is it’s organizations, and I don’t know if you’ve had this experience as well, but it’s organizations that are very sales rep heavy that have been slower to to adopt eCommerce.
There is a generational thing that’s occurring that we’re seeing where, you know, certain industries, they have more old school sales rep situations, where a lot of those people are retiring now. And so you’re having new generations come up that are used to having an expectation of modern technology at their fingertips at their job.
You can actually make that sales rep experience. If you do your integrations right and you design an experience for the sales rep, those industries I think are more likely to feel comfortable with making a move if you address that concern right away. And we’re working with a number of the platforms that we work with to help develop some of those experiences that are sales reps focused.
Robert Rand:
I don’t recommend trying to do away with the human. I shouldn’t do it, right, the human element. But it’s always there. It always is.
Jason Magee:
It’s just there, it’s always there, you know?
Robert Rand:
But that human touch, that human experience in the sales process matters. But it should be there to support the customer when and where they want to be supported. The same way that, you know, there are a lot of shoppers that would choose to go to a self-checkout and plenty of times when you wouldn’t want to. There are a lot of people that want to buy eCommerce and then there are times when they want help. You want to marry it together. You want to find that equilibrium of, you know, if the rep can be checking in because there hasn’t been an order lately, or checking in to see based on their previous purchases, if they would also need this other product line or checking in to see how the last order was and making sure everything’s satisfactory and keeping the relationship strong, you’re freeing them up to do that.
Jason Magee:
Yes.
Robert Rand:
Instead of having them trying to be, you know, glorified order takers. You know, it’s the same way that people, by and large, there are still businesses faxing in orders, right? But that’s we know that that’s not the future. It hasn’t been for some time.
Jason Magee:
Yeah, we know that’s not gonna be forever. Right.
Robert Rand:
Right.
That you have to anticipate what comes next and make sure that even if you’re gonna continue to support some shoppers in one mode, in one experience, that you’ve got the experience that others are looking for and that over time you’ll see more of that shift toward the more modern on average. I mean partnerships for a living, I deal with people.
I believe in the power of bringing people together and the positive experiences and the ability to collect feedback and understand why someone wouldn’t be buying that item because it’s a dollar more from you when you’d have no problem with adjusting the price in order to get the volume of business from them. Or there’s so much that you can get out of that. But then again, there are customers that absolutely just, you know, they don’t want to talk to you or they want to be ordering after hours or so many different scenarios that you run into or they want to be able to log in and see the invoices and see the, you know, what’s due and what’s paid they want to have somebody in there organizing the purchase and somebody else putting the the payment in and approving it. There’s scenarios. And so I think that that’s what’s key is that they taught me many, many, many years ago in this space, not to use myself as the ultimate barometer for every shopper’s, you know, experience for what everybody likes.
It’s just kind of me. I might use certain social media like LinkedIn, but there might be other social media that I don’t use. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t a market that uses that. That you have to be able to put yourself into the shoes of others and and think about that wider audience and and think about where that audience is headed.
Because it’s a lot easier to, you know, retain and grow from from a peak than it is to see the business receding and shrinking the longer you wait at that point, I’d say the harder it is, then you’re trying to win back the market versus, you know, the faster you can catch it when you see those things happen.
Jason Magee:
Keeping it and growing it.
Robert Rand:
Yeah, you know, that’s crucial. So, you know, time becomes of the essence.
Jason Magee:
So you also mentioned the kind of fax ordering and like we gotta talk about AI for a little bit, right?
Agentic Commerce Alliance is a group that is put together you know started by Shopware.
And it’s an independent group, right? And there was a kind of show and tell in New York a few months ago. And a lot of the search providers that are integrating you know with all the major eCommerce systems added this feature where you could basically upload a PDF like a PO, you know, or a fax because faxes are coming in and being turned into PDFs somewhere, right?
A lot of these search providers were now utilizing AI to so that you could just load it into their search and it would go through and add products to the cart that it could and say, we can’t add these because we don’t have them, they’re out of stock, or this is a similar type product that you do you want us to add this. And I thought it was interesting that that’s happening because some of these legacy things are still around. And how do you get them to integrate into the modern stack?
And so that’s just one example of how AI is changing a lot of what is happening in eCommerce. We still do custom integrations, right? Because some customers want to do that, right? And there’s nothing wrong with it. It is just like all those complexities that you mentioned are still true. Like you still have to do all those things, queuing and you know, the error logging and everything. But we find that it’s help at a starting point.
AI can help, you know, by comparing the APIs of the two systems you’re in, at least give you a starting point. How are you guys utilizing AI in what you’re doing?
Robert Rand: )
AI is changing a lot of development out there in the world. You know, as a starting point, as a data hub, as a platform that’s built around unifying data, we don’t see our value going away because of AI. If anything, we see the value increasing because it’s more important than ever that you’ve got clean data in all these other systems where you need it to be because AI is very much a trash in, trash out kind of a system, regardless of where you’re using it or what system you’re subscribed to or such. We’ve added AI into our user experience. So you know, I mentioned earlier no code, low code. So there are times when you might map, you know, that name field over here to a name field over there. And then there are times when you want to do more unique things. You want to append ABC before the order ID to know that that order came from this sales channel or this brand or whatever it may have been. And we allow you to write formulas to do those things to append ABC and do it in a healthy way.
And so now we’ve added AI where there’s a prompt and rather than you needing to come up with a formula for this and think about it yourself, you tell it what you want it to do and it’s going to ask follow-up questions. What if the order ID already begins with ABC? What if the field is null? And it’s going to write in all of these scenarios so that there’s a script there that’s going to run and it’s going to do the job right. And so you know that’s a key area for us to cut down on that implementation experience of bringing in some of that custom business logic where it is much more user friendly. Internally, we’ve seen AI be extremely helpful when we’re specing out a new integration for our marketplace. To your point, just as you described, okay, you know, take a look at these APIs over here versus what our our integrations are all written with our open SDK, our software development kit, and talk to our data models, to our APIs , and so thinking about where do these things line up and and having that baseline to start from, you know, as we’re coding things out, you know, same thing that providing maybe more of that base layer. So it’s allowing us to create more integrations faster, it’s allowing our partners to create more integrations faster with that open SDK, being able to leverage these AI systems, but you know, that the data that’s flowing, let’s say your accounting data and the sales tax is paid and what have you, the data’s sacrosanct. It’s not up for debate, it’s not up for hallucinations. It’s not up for what, you know, when things are gonna work and not work. And so at that point our system is gonna keep it all flowing like clockwork and act as that interoperability, you know, hub.
That interoperability infrastructure, regardless of whether you wrote the integrations with our SDK using some AI tools, bringing the security and the reliability and the scalability and all these attributes to the table. And again, when you’ve got one integration with written with the SDK, let’s say it’s a homegrown ERP, now that can talk to everything else in our marketplace, to your CRM and PIM and e-com and so on and so on, that you’re getting more of a one-to-many experience. So for us it really comes down to, you know, what is it that still needs some, you know, some human intervention. And we’ve got lots of things in our roadmap that we’re looking to continue to tweak and improve using AI to help. If there are those data errors and exceptions, you know, right now we give a variety of information about them.
And you can see all the communications between our system and whatever third party API. So you’re not trying to recreate the error looking for a needle in a haystack. There’s there’s already a lot there, but there are some cases where AI might give you a little bit more information about, you know, why that ERP is is throwing that error for this data, that the API rrror itself coming back from the ERP isn’t self-explanatory. Things like that where if we can, you know, help down the rabbit hole situations to alleviate any further friction beyond what we already do, which is already tremendous. You know, where can we best help is important, but we believe in a marketplace of integrations that are certified that are, that have been put through quality control that are being maintained you know that that idea of having everybody write their own connectors and back to managing teen of these A to B and A to C and A to D and again all the security and all the facets of it and and on top of that you know is it really maintainable because the code often being written by AI systems today is not easy for humans to parse through to to be able to make heads or tails, that you know, the quality of that may not always be quite what you’re looking for. Obviously we expect these systems to continue to improve and evolve, but working with what’s at hand, I describe it often, you went to hiring someone on Fiverr to write connectors for you. Now you own them. Now you know if they’re having a if those connectors aren’t working right, you know, yes, you can keep asking the AI to to help support it, but were they written to any standard in the first place? That’s the danger zone.
Jason Magee:
Well that’s I think that’s the key. You have to have somebody that is knowledgeable working with the AI to make sure the output meets your organizational standards, and using it in a smart way. You know, and I do think one of the things we found some of the models really helpful with is this organizing documentation.
And with these like in the discovery process, it really can help because we can load in you know all the API documentation, and it gets us a starting point for us to edit, you know, when we’re mapping out the data flow, asking where risk factors can be. It augments what a smart person can already do and saves them some time is where we’re finding the value. You know, but one of the other things, we’re basically acting as if we’re the customer prompting AI on the customer’s behalf, kind of pre-prompting, because what you ask the AI, you know, models really matters.
And so if you ask for a how much does a Shopify site cost to build? Right? And it’s you get a much different answer than if you say, how much does it take to recreate the feature set of a 10-year-old Adobe Commerce site and migrate all that feature and get feature parity on a Shopify site? You get a completely different answer when you ask it the real question. But oftentimes in our initial conversations, we’ll come in and say, hey, you know, the this is the question you should ask.
Robert Rand:
Right.
Jason Magee:
This question and not the one you did.
Robert Rand:
Right.
It’s all about the guardrails and the parameters, right? You know, so now you know, are you specifying twenty twenty six or whatever, you know, timeline prices, or is it going off of articles from, you know, seven years ago that are on the internet and the prices on these things may not be quite the same anymore.
To your point, you know, if you’re coming off of Adobe Commerce, how many Adobe Commerce or Magento extensions are you using?
Jason Magee:
And how custom are they, right? Yeah.
Robert Rand:
And how much data do you need to migrate over in the process that, you know, users will often move a lot of their data through iPaaS.com into their new website that they’ll get the product data from the source of truth like the ERP or PIM or such and get that into the new e-com, they’ll so on and so on. You know, and so thinking about all of these different things that, you know, are different when to your point, when you’re on a 10-year-old website and there’s history and credit cards on file and recurring subscriptions? Are there loyalty points? Are there gift cards? Are there, you know, so whether we’re talking B2B, B2C? or a mix of the two and you know, all of these pieces of data that may be on the periphery that may need to flow as well. But you know, I love your example of documentation because our knowledge base has hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of articles on you know the different integrations in our marketplace and how to configure.
So you understand, okay, well, to get the API key from this ERP and activate, you know, whichever API says you’re gonna go here and do this and do that and a lot of the the details around what you need to know in a configuration situation, what you need to know about known limitations of that ERP.
I mean, let’s say, your customers and products and such into your CRM. A lot of CRMs, for example, they’ll take product data, but it’s flat. They don’t have a way of dealing with variants or you know, product-child you know, relationships. So thinking about how you’re going to structure that, is it okay to have a flattened product catalog where everything’s just some form of a simple basic product? Just a SKU and a price and inventory, whatever it may be.
And so, you know, we absolutely are leveraging AI to pump out that documentation much more efficiently as we’re getting new integrations written or we’re updating existing integrations. And it makes a difference that a lot of people are used to having no documentation around their old connectors and that you know you’re trying to track down somebody that wrote something years ago, that you know, it’s a bunch of spaghetti code that kind of weaves all over the place and nobody knows what it’s doing.
And so with us again bringing that kind of an experience, I absolutely see how AI has improved things for us. Recently, this year, we added to our website a data flow tool where you can take any two systems in our marketplace of integrations and you can see the available data flows between them and how those operate.
Jason Magee:
That’s pretty cool.
Robert Rand:
And so it gives you an idea of this round trip, you know, what data’s bi-directional, what data can sync in what ways and it we can always append more.
Jason Magee:
To start the conversations, right?
Robert Rand:
Right. But with us, that’s thousand you know, into thousands of pages on our website that trying to build out and maintain it without AI, without some tooling around it, would have been significantly more more difficult.
Jason Magee:
And also there’s the thing that nobody’d probably want to do it, right? So Yeah, exactly.
Robert Rand:
Right, right. It’s it’s just unwieldy. So, you know, as we grow, every new integration is growing that set off of these pages. And so but it’s really great for our partners to be able to use that as a baseline that hey, I want to integrate Shopware and Net Suite and what are the capabilities of that today. And so you can get that baseline, and then if you need something extra, we can look at how fast can that become available.
But those sorts of things, it’s not always the areas that people are thinking about that drive the most value to everyone. It’s sometimes these very specific, you know, very nuanced areas where just the learning, the understanding, the documenting, the speccing, the all these things that come around the core to improve.
That whole user experience and timeline and everything around it, that that’s where a lot of the magic is, in my opinion.
Jason Magee:
I think we got into a lot of topics and details about what makes, you know, B2B commerce integrations, complex. And, you know, what you can do to help yourself along the way if you’re in the middle of one of these projects and what you should be thinking about. So thanks for joining me again. I’m Jason Magee: from Human Element.
And this has been Robert Rand: from iPaaS.com. So I guess everybody have a great rest of your day.