Join Human Element’s Kevin Gardner and Znode’s Tom Flierl for a discussion on why multi-store functionality is so important in a B2B eCommerce platform.
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Kevin Gardner:
Hello and thanks for listening to the Human Element Podcast. Beyond the Cart, eCommerce Insights from Human Element. I’m Kevin Gardner, development manager here at Human Element. I’m joined by Tom Flierl, Chief Commercial Officer at Amla Commerce.
Today we’re talking about Znode B2B Commerce platform and specifically about its multi-store functionality. Tom, I want to thank you for joining me.
Tom Flierl:
Kevin, great to be here. Thank you for hosting me.
Kevin Gardner:
Absolutely. So what are the signs a business has outgrown a single storefront?
Tom Flierl:
I don’t know if a company outgrows a storefront. I think it’s their business model, right? I mean certainly one way they outgrow it is through MA activity. A manufacturer distributor is rolling up multiple brands. They need to have a storefront per brand. That would be the most obvious. But a lot of times think about think about companies that stand up company specific stores or customer specific stores. Very common in uniform, very common in safety, very common in promotional products where each store is branded to that customer and has its own specific procured set of products. Maybe even things like logos if it’s in the uniform category that get applied, customer specific logo libraries. That is really where you start to see multi-store come into play. And then I guess the third way is you know we talked about MA but it might be multi-regional. They may want to stand up a North American store, a European store, different regional stores, and manage all that centrally, certainly.
Kevin Gardner:
Mm-hmm.
Nice, yeah. It’s and I mean it’s just digging right into it. Like when it comes to Znode, what makes Znode special when it comes to like being able to launch like fifty stores at once? If you just wanted to just go in and launch fifty stores with different brands and regions and channels.
Tom Flierl:
Well, the architecture was built from day one for multi-store. And what’s unique about the architecture, and this is getting a little bit technical, Kevin, but I think you’ll appreciate this. If you think about a traditional retail platform, they typically have single catalog single store architecture. And so even traditional retail platforms that are now started getting into B2B and trying to show a multi-store, they still have to export a catalog to a store. And so it still is single catalog, single store. In complex B2B scenarios, that doesn’t work very well. And the magic behind all of this is catalog management. So at the core of Znode, there’s a PIM. Product information management tool, and that is where all catalogs are managed. And out of the admin console, unlimited numbers of storefronts can be created and catalogs can be applied one to many, many to one. So think of the architecture having PIM, unlimited catalogs, and you’re never duplicating data. The catalogs are a virtual replication of the product information of the PIM, and then being able to assign those catalogs one to many, many to one across multiple stores. That is the big differentiator versus having to export a catalog, potentially duplicate the data there, and then attach it to a store, which you have to do in a traditional retail architecture. Nice. Yeah, that’s one of the things we notice here in a human element when it comes to different platforms that were not natively B2B to begin with. and were that they just kind of, you know, winging it and trying to
Kevin Gardner:
Nice. Yeah, that’s one of the things we’ve noticed here at Human Element when it comes to different platforms that were not natively B2B to begin with. And they’re just kind of, you know, winging it and trying to get to that point and and modify and augment their existing infrastructure and their architecture to to work for that is that it tends to be very heavy on the database, it tends to be very heavy on access and it tends to slow the site down on some occasions. We’ll name any names. I know you and I both know the names of some of the platforms that have that difficulty. But one of the things that I wanted to highlight personally and working with Znode is that Znode seems to be more of a platform. As you said, it’s more B2B first. It was built to be B to B so that means it’s performant around being B2B. That’s just kind of where it lives.
Tom Flierl:
Absolutely and in B2B, catalog management is everything. So if you think about what are the core features that matter in B2B. Everybody’s selling B2B talks about well you have to have an account structure versus a user structure, right?
Because individual users typically ladder up to accounts and those accounts all have contract rules. That’s wonderful. So you have an account structure, maybe a more entry-level B2B platform, it actually allows for account-specific price lists. Or maybe they’re making tax and calls to an ERP to make that happen. But the magic is in the catalogs because if you have customer specific contracts, those contracts often have a procured approved set of products.
Very common. I talked about the uniform industry, et cetera. Obviously, if you work for Company A and you’re an employee, when you log in, you don’t want to get company B’s uniform program, right? You get Company A’s program. So that would be one example, but it’s everywhere in B2B. I mean, there’s segment specific catalogs, you may be a very large distributor of plumbing products, industrial products, electrical products, and there may be some cross-cell.
Kevin Gardner:
Right, right, exactly. Right.
Tom Flierl:
But if I’m a plumber logging in, I don’t want to see the electrical catalog. I want to see the catalog that’s specific to my segment. So catalog management is at the core of true B2B. It’s also at the core of anything from an ease of operations and an ease of scale, catalog management is core to any company running multi-store e-commerce.
Kevin Gardner:
One of the things you and I spoke about before this and when when we were prepping for the episode was talking about obviously you can set up storefronts to where those particular storefronts could be, you know, set up with like a voucher system where you could potentially go in and you could purchase let’s say you’re a construction company and you have your new people onboarding and they could come in and they could get a voucher to purchase their boots and their shirts or or whatever they need. They could go there. Can you also kind of hit on that a little bit and talk a little bit as well about one of your other products, Artify, that you could actually use to customize as well too?
Tom Flierl:
Sure, absolutely. And there’s a little bit of overlap in those categories. But again, vouchers are pretty common in B2B. It’s very common in safety. An employee needs to log in and get a new set of glasses, gloves, high viz vests, go down the list, right? Very common in a uniform, very common in work boots and any sort of wearable item that is used in the safety industry. Employee logs in rather than having to pay with their own credit card and expense it, they have a voucher or a spend limit of up to X amount of dollars. They simply find what they need, put into the shopping cart, type in their voucher number, and they move on and it arrives wherever it is at the job site, at their door the next day. You’ve brought up Artify.
That is our product. So Amla Commerce is our parent company. Znode is our B2B eCommerce platform. Again, very strong and multi-store. Artify is our product customization platform. It is a multi-tenant SaaS platform, heavily used in the promotional products industry, the uniform category, the safety category, these categories that also use multi-store. And that allows for, you know, Kevin, if you are an employee working in some sort of industry where you have to get your uniform and you want that uniform to customize so it says Kevin Gardner on it in embroidery and you can choose from a pre-approved set of logos, you can actually customize your own uniform directly in the PDP page, see a virtual proof of it, approve that proof, put it into the shopping cart, enter your voucher, and buy that item.
Kevin Gardner:
Mm-hmm.
Tom Flierl (07:39)
The nice thing about Artify operationally then, it actually sends an output file to the production team to build that uniform then using those specs, everything down to thread count and embroidery, thread color, all of the X, Y coordinates for where the logo goes on the uniform. and then the production team can produce it, obviously ship it out to that employee when it’s ready to go.
So those two platforms work very closely together and serve those companies where multi-store matters, but multi-store matters because they’re running programs. They don’t even talk about e-commerce. They talk about we run uniform programs for the Fortune five hundred. We run branded apparel and branded merchandise programs for the Fortune five hundred. They don’t talk about e-commerce. E-commerce is how those programs are fulfilled.
Kevin Gardner:
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Right. So let’s back up a little bit. I know we’re throwing out a lot for everyone listening or viewing this. We’re throwing out a lot of things that you can do with Znode, but just taking a baseline approach here, you know, and just looking at what does like a centralized control and localized experience mean? Like what does it really look like in respect to Xenode?
Tom Flierl
So let’s back up a little bit.
Well I I the way I’m gonna talk about it is just everything is configurable.
So rather than start with a PIM, rather than having your data in a master catalog, having to export it and say you have 10 stores, and anytime you want to update product information, you have to go to every 10 stores and update that catalog that’s been exported. Instead, you update it centrally in the PIM. It’s pushed to all 10 stores automatically, or to all 10 catalogs. If you look at it that way, it’s a better way to look at it. That’d be one. And then it’s very common that each store has its own unique set of entities.
Kevin Gardner
Mm-hmm.
Tom Flierl:
Some stores may have vouchers, some may not. Some stores based upon the account that logs in may have different payment types. One account may have a credit card, the other one may have a voucher, the other one may have ACH, and the other one may have a combination of all three. So to have everything centrally managed and configurable, where if you think about the entities that combine this, it’s what is the account, what are the account rules?
And then when that account logs into that specific store, what has to be shown for those contract rules? And again, that’s a data model where everything is configured based upon product information pricing, which is separate from product, which is different than retail, because in B2B, a price is specific to a product and an account. Right? And then you’ve got payment terms, which are also specific to a store and to an account.
Kevin Gardner:
Mm-hmm.
Tom Flierl:
So centrally managing everything just means that you can configure all of those different B2B contract rules in a single store based upon account or in multiple stores based upon multiple accounts. It kind of gets back to that one-to-many, many to one rule set across multiple storefronts. And I would also forget if you mentioned what you know, so far as use cases go, you know, you you had I think, you know.
Kevin Gardner:
And I also forget if you mentioned, but you know, so far as use cases go, you know, you you adm I I think, you know, sixty eight percent of B2B companies run more than one storefront at this point. So this is absolutely crucial to be considering as B2B for sure.
Tom Flierl:
Sure. absolutely. With AI you can find the data from different sources, but the data is pretty consistently showing somewhere between fifty and seventy percent of manufacturers and distributors run more than one storefront. So it is a very, very common use case in B2B.
Kevin Gardner:
Nice.
So just asking just straight off the cuff, I mean you’ve mentioned PIMs a couple of times in our conversation so far. So why should I use a PIM or not? Why should I even consider using a PIM?
Tom Flierl:
Well, if you think about a traditional PIM, traditional PIMs obviously were initially built for building catalogs. If you go back twenty, thirty years, that was the original use case they were used for print.
Kevin Gardner:
Mm-hmm.
Tom Flierl
That still is a feature in a traditional PIM, but traditional PIM is really more about workflow. If you’re a manufacturer, you have the engineering department, the product management department, the creative department, the marketing department, the merchandising department go down the list. They all need to have a source of truth for everything. Xenode’s PIM is not meant to replace that. That is a core feature of a true operational PIM that every manufacturer should consider if they need that and if they’re going to use that functionality.
Kevin Gardner:
Mm-hmm.
Tom Flierl:
We get a lot of feedback that manufacturers and distributors buy PIMS, but they don’t actually use the workflow, which is the magic in a PIM. The second feature of a PIM is syndication. The ability to have all the data feeds for Granger, Home Depot go down the list in the correct format to syndicate data out to those sites. Makes perfect sense.
Kevin Gardner:
Mm-hmm. Right.
Tom Flierl:
But when it comes to managing catalogs in the e-commerce experience, because you have account specific catalogs, segment-specific catalogs, maybe you’re running multiple storefronts across regions, and you have regional catalogs, you can build an architecture where a third-party PIM does that. And you have to have some sort of custom middleware and logic to push that into a traditional B2C retail platform model. And you can do that. Any company can do that. But again, it’s
Kevin Gardner:
Mm.
Tom Flierl:
Additional tech debt, two logins, right? Doesn’t add to scale if you add have to add another store, another customer with a unique catalog. Like suddenly you’re starting to build this monster architecture. The reason it’s in Znode is ease. You have a one-way or two-way sync from a traditional PIM. So if you think about it, the ERP feeds the PIM, the PIM connects to Znode. Znode’s PIM has unlimited attribution. And then the magic happens within the Znode platform, which allows the merchants, the eCommerce managers, the IT staff to actually build customer specific catalogs or it could be store specific catalogs go down the list and push those out into the experience. It just makes it much easier and it reduces tech stat tech stack debt as well. And the just the fact that Zenode has the PIM built into it, one of the things, just kind of touching on technical implementation for, you know, other PIM installs like that
Kevin Gardner:
And the just the fact that Znode has the PIM built into it, one of the things, just kind of touching on technical implementation for, you know, other PIM installs like that we’ve worked with here at Human Element, like working with Shopify, working with other platforms like BigCommerce, Shopify. You generally when you know, they have their own approach for the B2B modules and the B2B again, kind of touching back on the fact that it’s an add-on feature for them. It’s not necessarily the core of it.
There’s really nothing wrong with that. You know those offerings started as B2C offerings. They bolted this on right. So one of the things that we’ve noticed is that when you’re working with a PIM, in that respect, it’s almost always a secondhand thing. It wasn’t built to be the core of that and that’s one of the things I’ve noticed with looking at Znode and working with Znode is that it you know the the PIM is well thought out instead of being like it’s there to it was there to accommodate the original architecture instead of accommodating existing architecture.
Tom Flierl:
It’s it’s be it’s like I said, it just seems to be a better thought out solution overall. Just in comparison to other other platforms that started their journey in B2C and then decided B2B was something they wanted to get into as well. That includes you know, Adobe Commerce, for example, any of the add on extension offerings that you can get for Magento open source. It’s all an afterthought. And and again, we’re kinda hammering on this a little bit.
But you know that’s probably the best point that I have noticed about working with Znode is that when it comes to B2B, it’s built from the ground up for B2B.
Tom Flierl:
Absolutely. Yeah, so one hundred percent of our customers are either running B2B or B2B to X business models. And the platforms you mentioned are fine platforms, but they really were built first for B2C and retail applications. Nothing wrong with them, but again, to your point, Znode was built from day one for B2B. And in B2B, data matters a lot because B2B is complex, right? I mean, you have account-specific catalogs, segment-specific catalogs, all that data management has to happen in a B2B platform. It doesn’t have to happen that way, because with software you can build anything, right? But if you’re trying to reduce your total cost of ownership, reduce your tech stack, get to market fast.
The platform is made to do that.
Kevin Gardner:
Right. One of the things that we’ve noticed in just working with clients over time is a lot of times you’ll have a client that’ll come to us and they’ll have multiple websites. They’ll have multiple brands, like one will be on BiCommerce, one will be on Magento open source, and usually one of the first things we want them to do is to reduce technical debt, reduce their overhead, reduce their budget, because then they could bring them together and have obviously multiple storefronts, multiple views within one storefront and likely save a lot of money.
Can you talk a little bit more about from your perspective about bringing different websites and brands together to save budget?
Tom Flierl:
Well, sure, absolutely. I mean, the biggest benefit when I listen to you speak that is clearly they have multiple different licenses they’re managing. Multiple different admins they have to log into. And in Zenode, you can have different roles and permissions to allow for taking care of that scenario if you centrally manage it.
Kevin Gardner:
Mm-hmm.
Tom Flierl:
But the biggest thing is multiple ERP integrations. So if a company, if you know, if a very large company has a division that’s on the West Coast that hits the same ERP as the division on the East Coast and they run separate platforms, that means that there is a technology team managing the integration to the same ERP twice. Now, multiply that by three more platforms, right?
Kevin Gardner:
Right.
Tom Flierl:
Now you’re talking about a lot of tech debt and a lot of overhead that really doesn’t add value to the business. The ability of centrally managing all of that with one connection to an ERP, or where it even gets more complex, is sometimes you have to route orders to multiple ERPs. So take that original six unique platform websites with now integrations not to just one central ERP, but six different ERPs. You’re really building a spider web of code in tech debt that doesn’t need to be there.
With Znode, they can manage all those sites centrally. Znode does allow to route orders to one or multiple ERPs. So we can’t get rid of multiple ERPs, but we can make it easier to manage the integrations across those and how the orders flow to those. So it really gets to the middleware between the ERP and these platforms is where a lot of savings can happen and a lot of simplification of the tech stack. And then clearly you’ve got, you know, managing six different licenses. And again, think about you also have to have a developer who understands say Shopify versus Magento versus go down the list. You’re also expanding the number of people that you need with unique skill sets to even manage all of those.
Kevin Gardner:
Right. So from what I’m hearing, and this is just from my experience and just what I’m hearing you say, Tom, Znode is obviously very capable of handling a lot of websites at once.
So let walk me through, let’s just be crazy. Let’s walk me through launching 50 stores at once at one time. What would that look like from the Znode perspective?
Tom Flierl:
I think the biggest thing that we found in implementing Znode, and as a partner, Kevin, you’ll understand this is getting the requirements done correctly up front. So the smartest way to think about it, and with Zenode, not only when you can you manage catalogs across multiple storefronts, you can create a theme, you can replicate a theme. And a theme is a you know a collection of templates. So the smartest way to do that, one, is to get the requirements of all the different attributes that have to be in any given theme and put them all into one central theme. So for example, in the promotional products industry, some promotional products distributors work with alcohol companies.
Kevin Gardner:
Mm-hmm.
Tom Flierl:
Think of a whiskey company. And in order to buy any merch from that whiskey company, whether it be glasses or a t-shirt, you have to be over the age of 21. So an attribute that has to be turned onto that store is are you 21 or over? And they have to authenticate age. Go down the list that goes into payment types, every different contract rule. So the big thing is to create all those attributes in the main theme and then turn them on and off as you launch a new store.
Kevin Gardner:
Mm-hmm.
Tom Flierl:
And you can simply replicate that theme and apply it to a store when you’re building the next store. So that’s where efficiency comes in because everything is turned on and off and toggled. And then it’s as simple as saying, okay, I’m going to stand up a store. Here’s the catalog, here’s the theme. I’m going to import this account or these set of accounts into this store and publish. We have companies that literally have taken three months to launch a store prior to Znode. And I’m talking pretty complex business models. These are $500 million billion dollar companies with big IT staffs that are now launching stores in a day instead of three months because of how easy it is to configure these stores. I was at B2B Online two months ago on stage with a company called Monroe Safety. They were recently acquired by a much larger uniform company. They have two people managing their stores. They run 42 stores.
Kevin Gardner:
Mm-hmm.
Tom Flierl:
And these people are not technical at all. They’re basically merchandisers. They’re merchandisers. They’re digital managers. They can stand up a store with a uniform program and publish it in about 24 hours. When they are in a sales cycle, their sales reps will say, Can you stand up a store for me so I can go actually show this as part of the pitch to win new business? So it doesn’t, it’s not just only about operational efficiency and great technology behind it, it can become a sales tool.
Kevin Gardner:
They’re merchandisers, right? Mm-hmm.
Tom Flierl:
When your sales reps can walk in on an RFP and say, let me show you how easy it is to work with our company. Here’s your own unique branded storefront. We’ve already populated the items that you’re interested in purchasing from us. And we turned on voucher. Mr. or Mrs. CEO, try it. Here’s your voucher. Why don’t you build a uniform for yourself right now and buy it as part of this RFP process? Like that’s a big win. That’s huge.
Kevin Gardner:
That’s huge. Yeah. That’s one thing that we’ve noticed, you know, in the in just in the agency front here, being able to spin up you know, some sort of proof of concept or or something that I mean, that absolutely seals the deal a lot of times with the sales process. That’s a huge deal. And it’s really awesome to know that Zenode is one platform that we know that can do that very, very quickly. We’ve actually used that in the past as well, with doing presentations and whatnot there too. So any given requirements gathering, you know, like you mentioned earlier, requirements gathering, you want to get everything out during the requirements gathering phase and get as as much as you can attribute-wise ready to go. how easy is it with Znode if I happen to I mean, let’s be real, every requirements gathering session, it’s you do your best to get everything that you need. You’re gonna miss some things.
How easy is it in Znode to go back now that you have six fifty or sixty websites to go back and add an attribute or a feature that was missing from all the websites to all the websites?
Tom Flierl:
Well, you create a global attribute and you apply it to all those websites and you just have to make sure on the front end that when an attribute’s created, it could be any type it could be it could be any type of data model or data is exposed and API is automatically exposed ’cause Zenode is a headless platform.
Tom Flierl:
It does come with a preset templates and themes that come with it, but they’re all calling APIs. you just basically have to expose that and make sure that the front end is accepting that API and it’s that easy.
Kevin Gardner”
Nice. Yeah, that’s a that’s a phenomenal feature. And that’s probably one of the best things that we’ve noticed about headless architecture in general is that, you know, it tends to eliminate the the issues well not not completely eliminate, but it it primarily eliminates the issues of caching, right? Things of that sort that you run into where I knew I like you go to the back end and you’ve changed it, you’re like, I know I just updated this. Right. I don’t know why it’s not showing on the front end.
Tom Flierl:
Well did you flush these fourteen different caches? I’m not gonna name any names, but there are some platforms that are like that. Right. Make sure you do that.
Kevin Gardner:
We don’t notice that that happens with Znode. Znode’s very with it being you know headless the front end tends to be: you change it is there it’s done.
Tom Flierl:
Absolutely. Yeah. Everything is API first. The data model is very dynamic. So you can add attributes, user defined fields, custom tables directly in the platform. It won’t impact the upgrade path. And anytime you add data, an API is exposed. And to your point, it just speed to market, efficiency, lower tech debt, checks all those boxes.
Kevin Gardner:
Nice. One final question I wanted to ask you that we really haven’t touched on yet. We’ve been talking a lot about B2B and we’ve mentioned a little bit about platforms that start B2C and they’ve gone to B2B. How well does like one installation of Znode handle when you have B2B customers, but you also want to have exposure to B2C customers?
Tom Flierl:
Yeah, it’s a very common use case. Soto us B2C is simple single catalog, single priceless, single store.
So in that case, if you have an ungated experience and you’re hitting the website, Kevin, shopping for something, you see the MSRP price list, right? and if you do have an account there when you log in, then it gives you Kevin’s price list. It’s that simple. Or you log in and it says, Hey, would you like special pricing? Become a customer, and you go through a workflow to basically onboard as a customer and get pre approved with credit, and now you get 15% off.
Whatever’s in the shopping cart. Whatever the case is, those are simple rules of moving from a B2C experience to a B2B experience. But at the end of the day, if you think about priceless and catalog, a B2C experience is one master catalog of all items and one price list. That’s about as easy as it gets in Znode, because in Znode you can have unlimited catalogs and you can have unlimited priceless. And the pricing, by the way, the pricing’s cached in Znode. You can also do real-time calls to an ERP if you have dynamic pricing situations. But for the most part, if the ERP goes down or you have latency issues, you want those price lists stored or cached in your e-commerce platform. So Znode handles all of that. So it’s a very fast performance. But again, it allows for those rules to be managed in the eCommerce platform and make it easy to take that B2C shopper into a B2B journey as well.
Or leave it as a B2C shopper and the B2C journey and just manage it centrally on Znode.
Kevin Gardner:
Nice. All right. Well, just kind of wrapping up here, is there anything else that you’d like to add, Tom, today, about Znode? Anything that anyone listening or viewing would like to know about Znode?
Tom Flierl:
A lot of companies are looking for a new platform, and there’s platforms that started in B2C and they have very large brands and they always make the RFP list. I would say work with a partner like Human Element, get deep into the requirements. Make sure that you’re not buying just a brand, you’re also buying a product that is made for the specific use cases that your business needs to run successfully with as much native features and as much flexibility as possible. Check those boxes.
You know, I would also encourage people to take a demo of Znode if they are in market. Our sales staff is very consultative and we’re more educational than we are pushy. But I see a lot of companies that buy the wrong platform and they either justify lots of technical debt or they go through replatform two years later. And that’s very disruptive. So making the right decision is really important on the front end. Right.
Kevin Gardner:
Right.
and that’s one thing. Thank you very much for mentioning Human Element there. That’s one thing that we can obviously help you with if you are on your eCommerce journey, if you have already felt like you’ve made that mistake that Tom mentioned and you’re several years into it and you feel like this isn’t working for you, it’s something that Human Element that we can help you with. We do this every day. This is our bread and butter. So if you can, reach out to us at human dash element dot com.
And I want to take, I really want to just take a few moments here and thank Tom again. I know he and I have done one of these podcasts before. Hopefully we’ll continue to do them and we thank you for joining us today, Tom. And we will talk to you really soon.
Tom Flierl:
Sounds good. Thanks, Kevin. Appreciate you.
Kevin Gardner:
All right. Thanks everyone. Bye.