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DCKAP eSessions | Going Live with Cathy’s Concepts

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1) Introducing Bijal Patel (00:13- 02:43)

Timothy Diep: Good morning, everybody, or good evening, depending on where you guys are at.

Welcome to the DCKAP esessions for 2021. This is our February edition. And we’ll be talking about how we went live with Cathy’s concepts. So looking forward to this event, we have an awesome lineup of just all the partners that were involved with the process of Cathy’s concept website.

So Cathy’s concept is a premier customizable gifts provider that sells items ranging from travel, home wedding, and other related product lines. Information related to new orders, product details, real-time inventory, and customer information work to be manually transferred from one application to another. This is one of their biggest pain points with the site. orders placed in big commerce had to be manually entered into distribution one, and the latest information inventory and product details from distribution one had to be updated manually into Big commerce.

Cathy’s concepts required the automation of data entry related to orders, products, inventory and other key business data from into their ERP and e-commerce software. So today, we’ll be going over the case study with some of the partners who were involved with this project. Before that, I’d like to have a big shout-out to all the sponsors for distribution, one from big commerce and from DCKAP Cloras.

These are the guys that will be speaking today. So and you know what DCKAP, we are really a big community and we love to bring the ecosystem together. So all these different companies, they have lots of skills, and they’re very good at what they do. So if there’s anything that we could do to help to even connect you guys, to the right technology partner, do let us know You can reach me at Timothy D at DCKAP.com.

Bringing on our first speaker, Bijal Patel. He’ll be talking about how distribution one increased efficiency for Cathy’s concept. So Michelle has been working as the mobile solutions manager for over eight years now working closely with mobile apps, e-commerce, VDI, and other integration products. He’s had a hand in many new distributions, one software feature, and he focuses on the intricacies of technology and its application and improving the distribution process. Bijal’s motto is to do good and be good. And the rest will fall into place. So right now I like to bring up Bijal and he’ll have a presentation for you guys. Alright,

2) Starting on the journey (02:43: 03:38)

Bijal Patel: Perfect. Thanks for that intro. I’m going to share my screen shortly. Alright guys, so I appreciate DCKAP for setting this up. I look forward to going through this journey for Cathy’s concept. Before we get into that, I just want to take a brief moment to quickly talk about distribution one, who we are what we do, just quickly set the agenda I’m going to quickly give you a brief of distribution one overall, some of the technologies that we offer, followed by some of the tools and technology that we use to make Cathy’s concept process a little bit more efficient, and how we kind of went through that whole journey. Like I said, if you have any questions you can pop by shooting them over in the chat, we will be addressing those towards the end of the meeting here shortly.

3) Innovations and moving ahead with changes (03:38:- 07:07)

So distribution one is celebrating it’s 25th year anniversary this year. So we were founded in 1996 by our current owner and CFOs just Larry Ward industry. Dean Christiansen with a simple mission statement in mind where we’re just wanting to provide a feature-rich, software to wholesale distribution, to eliminate a lot of their pain points with some of the manual intensive work, kind of automate them and make it more seamless and cost-effective for them overall.

We have offices across the US specifically in New Jersey Mount Laurel, we have a couple overseas offices so we do work with international businesses as well there. As far as the company goes, we mostly deal with wholesale distributors across multiple different verticals specifically towards fastener industry supplies and retails. Our customers are kind of smaller, ranging from very small five to 10 user systems all up to 200 to 300 user systems. So we have a wide variety of clients across the US, Canada, Mexico, UK.

So there’s a lot of different experiences that go along with that. We can kind of help you along with those. Overall at this point, I just want to talk about some of the basic functionality just introduce you kind of to some of the ERP aspects of our software itself that we sell is called GRP. It’s got a comprehensive list of technology available API, mobile apps, e-commerce to name a few. Going through those, as you can see on the list right there, we have, really, it’s a one-stop-shop for a lot of different requirements.

For a lot of our customers who have kind of migrated, they have kind of outgrown their older system and tend to stay with us to use a lot of different so we’re not modularized in any way, we have a lot of software that can you can help you kind of grow as your company grows, starting with the order entry processes. This applies to your warehouse automation to invoicing to CRM, as you can just see something to name a few right there.

So we should be able to accommodate a lot of our customers as they go through the growth cycle. And they end up having additional options. So that’s something that kind of stands out as where there’s no modularization, we help you grow with the software as well. Specifically, in addition to that, as the technology is changing, we have a lot of different supplemental products that you will need to adapt to the changing environment, such as mobile app suite, e-commerce platform, some credit integration with higher lower fees, API capabilities, and document imaging and such as to name a few.

And with that, I’m going to kind of jump over into how we use that technology to help Cathy’s concept kind of change their business. So give you a quick history of Cathy’s concept here. Strictly, they used to strictly deal with a lot of b2b customers, big box stores selling a lot of engraving products, and things like that. So they used to deal with a lot of big box stores. But as you can tell, with the technology changing with Bob, purchasing, power changing, a lot of people going direct to retail, they had to do a shift in their business model. So it all started when they’ve been with us since 2007. So you can imagine the technology at that point versus where we are today. They were doing really well across the board. They’re good customers of ours. They’ve been with us since 2007.

4) Getting Distribution one on Board (07:07-11:50)

Cathay’s Concepts used to deal with a lot of big box stores. Like I said before, a lot of high-end AI-intensive processes, boxes, just sending pallets and pallets and stuff over to a lot of big box stores. With the process of the buying power, power changing for a lot of customers who are going retail directly, their profit margins shift started going down there. So it started with simply just an email from dawn to General Manager at the time. This is the kind of relationship we have with our customers. She just reached out to me that she couldn’t make the conference. And they’re going about a journey of trying to get into the retail space trying to avoid the middleman for say, that point. So it all started with a generic “Hey, let’s talk about it”.

How can you guys help us with what options we have? At that point, we went through this whole journey, where we just did one on one sessions with them and looked at their need, what they were trying to accomplish there. So this is outside the realm of VDI just kind of trying to understand what they need, what they’re thinking. And with our expertise. me being here, which is seven years of this one, I’ve seen a lot of customers go through very similar pain points there. So we went through the full journey of how they can go to e-commerce, whether they want to start off small, do something manual versus how they have where they want to go with it.

So we looked at a lot of technology partners, a lot of different e-commerce platforms as well, a lot of different integration partners alongside that. And we found that hey, BigCommerce fit what they need. They were trying to do something to give a really good user experience, which BigCommerce kind of supplies for them. And at that point, they didn’t want to be entering anything manually, it’s just kind of, there’s no point of having an e-commerce solution where you’re entering stuff manually in the system, manually with BigCommerce pulling the orders in typing those into the system.

That’s where a lot of the technical aspects came into play, we have an API offering that’s really robust and gives you a lot of open-source open access to the database. So you can essentially push and pull a lot of the data directly from the GRP. So that ends up being your record of source. So that way, you just enter stuff as you’re adding items against the GRP system and that can easily pull to the commerce. Along with that we had a lot of different tools and technology that we had to offer at that point.

Okay, this is what we have to offer. This is what BigCommerce had to offer. Somewhere there had to be a middle handshake that needed to happen. That’s where DCKAP filled in that void for us. We reviewed quite a few different partners with them and DCKAP by far, kind of with the technology and the ease of use, they had two offers stuck out for everybody.

And we kind of went on this journey of “Hey, let’s start with just getting the orders into the system pulling the customer record”. A lot of different kinds of things that go onto the day-to-day aspect of it. Initially, it was very simple, just a very simple push of an item pushing the orders into the system, then it kind of evolved into a lot of days doing a lot of engraving products, a lot of different types of custom stuff that they do.

How do we integrate that? So it’s been a really fruitful kind of partnership as far as going through technology and the workflow. So we’ve helped them DCKAP has been a great partner along with BigCommerce in this journey us, as the requirements come up, we usually set up sessions, we go through it, and we kind of give him the options and what can or cannot be done. So at that point, we kind of went through the whole life cycle, and, at this point, the whole process is pretty much integrated. They have inventory information getting pulled from the MRP orders being synced to the MRP, without any manual intervention to this date on there.

After we implemented this, this is just kind of some of the testimonials from Cathy’s concept team. Overall, as part of using the ERP system. Since its inception, they have kind of moved away from a lot of paper-based processes that were costing them a decent amount of money, but to all the customization stuff that they do with their products that they sell. So they kind of reduce cost across the board, along with the efficiency of not having to worry about having to manually enter stuff, everything’s kind of seamless. So they can sit back and just once they have the products and let the software do the software itself on there. And overall the process, as you can see here, took a few months to kind of get going. But we’re at 2021 at this point, and we haven’t seen any major hiccups or any complaints. So everyone’s been happy. And we have pushed over a lot more leads and progress from that support concept for us.

5) The wrap up- (11:50:13:55)

Tim Diep: Thankyou, Bijal! We’ll reconnect with you again after this with the discussion panel. So thank you so much for that. So again, I would just like to thank all the sponsors for all the speakers as well. So that from distribution, one from BigCommerce and for Cloras, that was a great informative session, just by looking at the poll. Section two, it seems like a lot of you guys were looking for so for some help in integration, that was the number one aspect for maybe some of your pain points. But then also managing data, and even gathering requirements and better design. So if you guys do need any help with that do reach out. We will be having a post-event networking session after this. Let me click on that real quick. So I’ll share that you guys could join that immediately after this session. So yeah, so what we’ll have our sales team, we’ll have other people in the ecosystem join that room as well. So there’ll be a great way to network if you guys are still available.

And just upcoming. We’ll have our next session on March 9, and look forward to having the next session on March 9. If you guys don’t have any questions, we’ll see you guys then.

  Download this Transcript.

  Download this Transcript.

1) Introducing Adam Semien (00:13: 02:35)

Timothy Diep: Good morning, everybody, or good evening, depending on where you guys are at.

Welcome to the DCKAP esessions for 2021. This is our February edition. And we’ll be talking about how we went live with Cathy’s concepts. So looking forward to this event, we have an awesome lineup of just all the partners that were involved with the process of Cathy’s concept website.

So Cathy’s concept is a premier customizable gifts provider that sells items ranging from travel, home wedding, and other related product lines. Information related to new orders, product details, real-time inventory, and customer information work to be manually transferred from one application to another. This is one of their biggest pain points with the site. orders placed in big commerce had to be manually entered into distribution one, and the latest information inventory and product details from distribution one had to be updated manually into Big commerce.

Cathy’s concepts required the automation of data entry related to orders, products, inventory and other key business data from into their ERP and e-commerce software. So today, we’ll be going over the case study with some of the partners who were involved with this project. Before that, I’d like to have a big shout-out to all the sponsors for distribution, one from big commerce and from DCKAP Cloras.

These are the guys that will be speaking today. So and you know what DCKAP, we are really a big community and we love to bring the ecosystem together. So all these different companies, they have lots of skills, and they’re very good at what they do. So if there’s anything that we could do to help to even connect you guys, to the right technology partner, do let us know You can reach me at Timothy D at DCKAP.com.

I’d like to bring up Adam Semien. So, Adam Semien, he’s the partnership manager at BigCommerce, working with strategic partners like DCKAP and has many years of experience in e-commerce and SAS technologies.

Lately, Adam has worked with several partners and merchants to build out specific b2b solutions on BigCommerce and would like to share a bit on why BigCommerce is a good fit for merchants who want to sell b2b exclusively, or b2b to b2c all inside one place. So I’d like to bring up Adam Semien to the stage.

2) Adam Semien on Industry Insights- (02:35: 07:20)

Thank you. I’m just working on sharing my screen here. Great intro. Okay. Perfect, excuse me about bandwidth is a little bit slow. I’m actually in a cabin in Lake Tahoe right now. It’s beautiful. But the internet is a little bit choppy.

So bear with me if my video lags a little bit, but I’ll be here. So really quickly. b2b eCommerce is projected to hit $1.8 trillion in the US by 2023. So what we’re seeing is more and more companies are going online. This is actually from Forrester,, I think it’s a little bit outdated. With the uptick that we saw due to everything that happened with COVID, we’re finding that more b2b businesses are joining, are coming, and trying to get online even faster considering they weren’t able to sell on their traditional channels and methods previously.

So we think this industry is going to go pretty dramatic. Just to put this into context. The overall technology industry is about $32 trillion. Artificial intelligence sits around $16 trillion. So again, b2b e-commerce is going to be a force to be reckoned with, and it already is. And that’s just growing faster and faster due to everything that’s happening in the world, and how people have had to been forced to adapt. So again, just some more stats here. Really, what this represents is the forecast and e-commerce sells, we’re expecting it to grow about 16 17%, almost by 2023, which is a pretty dramatic increase for an industry that’s already so large.

And when we talk about those buying experiences that b2b buyers are having, what more companies are realizing and what we’ve certainly realized here at big commerce is that b2b buyers and sellers prefer the new digital reality. And what that really speaks to is the overall experience that they have buying. Buying b2b items, they realize that what they really would like is a more consumer-oriented buying path and customer journey. And I’ll speak to that a little bit more later in the presentation. So let’s speak specifically associating b2b and big commerce. So BigCommerce was founded in 2009. We recently went public in October. So you can find this under this stock ticker, Big C, we have about 750 employees across the world.

Our headquarters are in Austin, Texas. They’re actually originally in Sydney, Australia, but the founders decided to move the official headquarters to Austin. We still do have offices in Sydney. We are actually working across 120 countries Overall, we have 5000 different agency and technology partners, and like very much like DCKAP. And we have 25 billion in merchant cells that we see on an annual basis. So a little bit more about why big commerce is good for b2b. We’re actually getting recognized by some of the largest publications, that analysts that are critiquing and examining these different platforms, so Forrester named us a strong performer. There’s a paradigm B, the B report that was a bit commerce was one of the only partner actually to achieve gold and partner ecosystem as well as the total cost of ownership, as well as the IDC market scape.

Report named big commerce, a major player, and this is all specific to b2b. Some more on why big commerce for b2b what I would call is defensible differentiators. The first thing that I’ll highlight is we have a flexible open SAS platform. And I’ll get into all of these in the following slides. We have a modern buyer experience trusted technology like CLORAS and and distribution one that you can easily integrate into our platform. And again, it’s that low total cost of ownership when you compare this to other platforms like Magento or even Shopify.

3) Rising up to the occasion and fulfilling the need with open SaaS (07:20-11:54)

So a little bit on flexible open SaaS platform. So open SaaS is a term that many people aren’t familiar with. But it’s something we’ve kind of coined at big commerce. Effectively, what it means is we have six different open APIs that you are able to easily build any and every integration you’d like to inside of our platform. But out of the box, we have a lot of flexibility. And because we are SaaS, we are actually taking care of a lot of the difference. Because you’re a SaaS, we take care of a lot of the different hosting, and different services you traditionally would have to get into, you’d have to do yourself. So we have a best-in-class ecosystem of agents and technology partners, we seamlessly connect to internal systems, such as GPS, LMS and much more. And then we give you the ability to go headless, and speed up your time to market by leveraging the existing investments that you’ve already made your C CMS, your DSP, or your custom front end. So you really can use that technology on top of BigCommerce and use BigCommerce as that back end technology if you choose to go the headless route.

So in terms of a modern buying experience, as I said before, what the industry has realized, and it’s kind of funny, it’s taking the industry quite some time to realize it. But a buyer and a consumer, when they’re going through their customer journey as a consumer buying consumer-oriented goods, so you might buy it for your house or just yourself, when you’re buying for business purposes, really, that buying experience shouldn’t be any different. Sure, there’s going to be some nuances they’re going to make for that b2b buying experience to be a little bit different. But in terms of how you evaluate products, decide on which product is going to be the best for you, that should be a very consumer-oriented customer journey. So we have done our best to make that possible inside of big commerce. So with Kathy’s concepts, specifically, their use of lightning, usually utilizing features on their platform like price lists, customer groups, one of the things that they wanted to do is create different pricing and different customer experiences based on the type of customer that was buying on their site. So we threw features in their platform like priceless and like customer types. They’re able to create those differentiated customers. answers that allow for those unique customer journeys for each and every type of buyer. We are a trusted technology. So what we mean by that is we are secured and vetted by coal fire ISO certification.

It’s an international gold standard for security. We allow for unlimited bandwidth on Google flat Google Cloud Platform. It’s one of the most flexible and most secure global hosting providers. And we do have the industry-leading uptime at 99.99% backed by an SLA. And we can compare that to an industry average of 99.5. from other platforms like Magento, just as an example. And then, one of the biggest reasons that we win lots of deals. On top of just having that open SAS mindset, infrastructure is just our low total cost of ownership. So the cost savings of up to or up to 50%, compared to a different open SAS platform, we actually have the fastest and most optimized mobile shopping experience. We have benchmarks again to back that up. And then when you do sign up with BigCommerce Enterprise plans, you actually do get an unsigned implementation project manager. And we’re able to get sites on average up up in just 90 days.

And if you compare that to other platforms that might be available. Those can take up to this can some of the fastest civilizations can take up to six months. So that’s all I have for today. First, if you have any questions, throw them in the chat. I’m happy to address them. But otherwise, Tim, I can give it back to you.

4) The Wrap up (11:54:14:15)

Thank you so much, Adam, great presentation. And I’m jealous that you’re late to get one of my favorite cities. So yes, you have good Wi-Fi.

Yeah, it’s beautiful out here. And we were lucky on the Wi-Fi. Thank you.

Tim Diep: Yeah, thank you. That’s a great presentation. And BigCommerce is one of our partners, premier partners for DCKAP, It has been a pleasure working with these guys.

So again, I would just like to thank all the sponsors for all the speakers as well. So that from distribution, one from BigCommerce and for Cloras, that was a great informative session, just by looking at the poll. Section two, it seems like a lot of you guys were looking for so for some help in integration, that was the number one aspect for maybe some of your pain points. But then also managing data, and even gathering requirements and better design. So if you guys do need any help with that do reach out. We will be having a post-event networking session after this. Let me click on that real quick. So I’ll share that you guys could join that immediately after this session. So yeah, so what we’ll have our sales team, we’ll have other people in the ecosystem join that room as well. So there’ll be a great way to network if you guys are still available.

And just upcoming. We’ll have our next session on March 9, and look forward to having the next session on March 9. If you guys don’t have any questions, we’ll see you guys then.

  Download this Transcript.

  Download this Transcript.

1) A warm opening note by Timothy Diep, DCKAP (00:12-02:24)

Timothy Diep: Good morning everybody or good evening, depending on where you guys are at. Welcome to the DCKAP eSessions for 2021. This is our February edition and we’ll be talking about how we went live with Cathy’s Concepts. So looking forward to this event. We have an awesome lineup of just all the partners that were involved with the process of the Cathy’s Concepts website.

Cathy’s Concepts is a premier customizable gifts provider that sells items ranging from travel, home, wedding and other related product lines. Information related to new orders, product details, real-time inventory and customer information were to be manually transferred from one application to another. This was one of the biggest pain points with their site.

Orders placed in BigCommerce had to be manually entered into Distribution One, and the latest information on inventory and product details from Distribution One had to be updated manually into BigCommerce. Cathy’s Concepts required the automation of data entry related to orders, products, inventory and other key business data from and to their ERP and eCommerce software.

Today, we’ll be going over the case study with some of the partners who were involved with this project. I’d like to have a big shoutout to all the sponsors from Distribution One, from BigCommerce and from DCKAP Cloras. These are the guys who will be speaking today. With DCKAP, we are really big in community and we love to bring the ecosystem together. All these different companies have lots of skills, and they’re very good at what they do. So if there’s anything that we could do to help to even connect you guys to the right technology partner, do let us know. You can reach me at timothyd@dckap.com.

Next, I’d like to bring up Praveen Venugopal. He’s a solution consultant with DCKAP and Cloras. Working closely with B2B customers, he comes with a solid eCommerce background. He has spent over seven years of his career with Amazon, and is a PMP certified professional. So I’d like to bring up Praveen, one of my colleagues.

2) Dive in to know what Cloras is all about with Praveen Venugopal, DCKAP (02:24-07:02)

Praveen Venugopal: Sure. Thank you Tim and let me just share my screen here. So first of all, thanks a lot, Tim for the introductions. It was a great session by Adam and Bijal. It was really insightful in terms of what Distribution One does and what BigCommerce does and now we will talk about Cloras, which is residing between BigCommerce and Distribution One.

Today we’re going to be talking about Data Automation And Smart Integrations: The Future Of B2B Commerce. With respect to today’s agenda, initially, we’ll talk about what Cloras is all about and then we will proceed to a case study of Cathy’s Concepts. We will conclude the session with the key takeaway for the B2B merchants from the session.

I’d like to get started with a quote, which says simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean, to make it simple, but it’s worth it in the end, because once you get that, you can move mountains. It’s a very strong statement from Steve Jobs, who was one of the most influential figures in today’s era, I would have to say, and as you could really think about it, it is not just the design, right. We generally associate him with design, but then there is a lot more to it, even with respect to our day-to-day stuff. As long as you’re able to give the simple experiences to your customers, that would go a long way. Let’s see how that can be done and that’s why I just wanted to get started off with this particular quote.

To give a quick intro about myself, I work as a solution consultant at DCKAP. I work closely with the B2B merchants, understand the pain points of customers, and come up with solutions for that. So that’s what I have an expertise on.

So now let’s dive into what Cloras is all about. With respect to Cloras, it is a Cloud Rapid Automation System. We have been working on integration for over a decade, I will have to say and over the last 10 years or so, we have done multiple integrations of multiple sorts. We have seen this as a persistent pain point from each of our customers. So we keep providing some of these custom solutions.

But then, again, there is always this dependence on the developers and again, the synchronization was not reliable and over a period of time you need to keep investing hours and efforts as part of the integration. So that is when we came up with the product Cloras and we started off with our customers, and then we started working backwards. So that’s how we came up with the solution. With respect to Cloras, it’s a platform agnostic solution. So you’re not really dependent in terms of what we can integrate. We can integrate any of the systems as long as they have an API associated with them.

That being said, Cloras could integrate multiple systems, but then most of our customers leverage Cloras for integrating the eCommerce, maybe just in this particular case, like BigCommerce or ERP, like Distribution One or CRM like HubSpot, or Salesforce, for instance. Having all of this integrated is what Cloras pretty much does. It’s an omni channel solution. And yeah, it’s not a multi channel. The only difference being, we have everything under the same umbrella, so it makes it easier for the customer. You’re not just doing integrations for two systems, and then going on to do an integration for two different systems. It makes it easier. Everything is under the same roof. So that is where Cloras plays a very pivotal role.

We have been fortunate enough to have an elite list of clientele. And some of these are on the likes of Viking Range, T J Snow and some of the bigger brands like Cathy’s Concepts. We have been fortunate enough to be working with a lot of these customers. And we have learned a lot from the community. As I mentioned, we started off the product, starting off with the customers, and then we started working backwards. We have learnt a lot from the customers. And we have evolved and came along a long way. We’re really grateful. At this juncture, I want to pay my gratitude. We are very thankful for all of the learnings that we have had, and for having the trust in our product. So thank you for that.

3) What makes Cloras stand out (07:03-11:20)

What sets us apart is automated integration. With respect to integrations, there could be integrations you’re doing just for as a patch-up. But then you need to have that in an automated fashion. There’s no manual intervention. So that is where Cloras plays a very pivotal role. It’s a cloud solution. You’re not really dependent on on-premises infrastructure, which you need to install, and have everything set up. There is no dependency over here, it’s on the cloud.

In case even if with respect to upgrades and all of that, we are always there. We do some basic sanity checks, but then you wouldn’t even really know that an update has happened. So that is where it comes into picture. And it’s a safe and secure solution, which means that we are PCI compliant, and we are also GDPR compliant. And with respect to Cloras, we do not store any data within the system as long as the customers want to enable them. But then generally, it is disabled by default.

We have a seamless flow designer. With respect to the development aspect of it, we take complete ownership of developing and delivering it for our customers. But then that being said, we also have a developer intuitive interface, which makes it easier for the developers to code within Cloras so that way, you’re not really dependent on the Cloras developers down the line.

If you might want to make some minor code changes and all of that, you could do that in-house or you can even engage a third party developer to code within Cloras. And as I mentioned earlier, it’s platform-agnostic, and you can have multiple systems integrated at once. We have customers who only integrate four or five systems all under the same umbrella.

The mappings and modifiers are one of the key differentiators of Cloras, I’ll have to say. With respect to mappings we have a very intuitive interface. So it is more of a drag and drop interface. There could be two systems, right? In this particular use case, it could be Distribution One and BigCommerce. And you could pretty much drag and drop what fields from Distribution One need to go to what fields on the BigCommerce. Even that can be changed by yourself from the Cloras back end. That makes it easier, even with small updates and all of that you’re not even dependent on the developer. So all of that can be done in-house.

Modifiers add an additional flavor to it, I’ll have to say. That is what incorporates the business logic. The data is not meaningful as long as you’re able to manipulate information before it is sent over to the target system. A good example could be maybe that could be within Distribution One the state name could be AC while on BigCommerce it could be Arizona. Both these systems need to understand the nomenclatures so that it makes it easier for us to communicate data between both the systems so that is where the mappings and modifiers come into picture.

It’s a completely custom solution, so it’s not a preset solution, right, where you have four or five services, and then you’re done. It is a completely customized business solution, which means that even in case you have specific requirements for your business, Cloras will scale up on those lines.

With respect to integration, it could be a real time or a batch-basic pronunciation both can be handled within Cloras. With respect to the scheduler, that pretty much helps the cause. So sort of batch-basic synchronization, you can set up schedules, in terms of how frequently the data needs to update, it could be once a few minutes, or once a few hours or once in a few days. And the real-time synchronization is also equally important, right? Which means that you could process information in real-time. It could be the pricing data, or it could be the inventory information, which needs to be sent across in real-time. So you get complete flexibility on both sides.

4) How Cloras helped Cathy’s Concepts (11:22-14:34)

Now let’s proceed on to the case study on Cathy’s concepts, with respect to the challenge that Cathy’s Concepts had faced initially, and then the solution that we had provided for Cathy’s. As Bijal and Adam had spoken about it, choosing the ERP and the eCommerce was the first part of the overall equation.

First they had chosen the ERP. Distribution One was specifically aligning in terms of what they wanted to accomplish. BigCommerce was pretty much a scalable solution that they can scale up to any degree. But then with a solution like Cloras, it makes it easier to communicate between both the systems and make sure that the information is consistent across systems, and there is no redundant work which is being done over here.

Specifically, this was a challenge that the team had over here. They had to manually update in BigCommerce and Distribution One, which led to inaccurate inventory and the inventory was not updated. And then it led to return as such. The customer information was manually moved between the systems. Again, it is also a manual process, but then it doesn’t make sense to invest your time when you have already done it on one of these systems.

The order fulfillment in terms of carrier tracking and all of that had to be brought back from Distribution One into BigCommerce and then eventually it was error prone, and it led to redundant work. Obviously, with all of this into perspective, it definitely has a negative impact in terms of the sales funnel conversion, because it makes it a little more difficult for customers, or if in some cases, it is a little delayed in terms of when they get to see that. So this was a challenge pretty much Cathy’s Concepts was handling in the first place.

With respect to the solution that we had provided with Cloras, we have provided seamless integration between these systems. And these are the services that we had integrated from BigCommerce to Distribution One. Whenever new customers are getting created on BigCommerce, those are moved into Distribution One, and when new orders are created, the orders alongside the customer information are moved to Distribution One on their own, so that they are not doing it multiple times. It was consistent as well.

Regarding the integration between Distribution One and BigCommerce, the order processing information like the carrier codes, and the tracking information was sent back into BigCommerce. This was happening in our batch-based synchronization and with respect to product data, the basic product data was coming in from Distribution One into BigCommerce. And within BigCommerce, the enrichment was happening and that was done by Cathy’s Concepts team.

With respect to inventory, it was happening in a much better frequency, which made sure that they were not having some of these orders which are getting missed because in some cases, they had this concern where there was no inventory but then the orders were being placed. So those are some of the things that we had provided through Cloras.

5) Key takeaway for B2B merchants (14:36-19:00)

I would like to move on to the next piece of it, which is the key takeaway for B2B merchants. So having Cloras in perspective could be one part of it. But then I would like to emphasize on the bigger picture in terms of and again, this is based on the discussions that I’ve had with a lot of B2B merchants over the last few years and based on the common pain point. One thing that we see which has been hindering businesses to grow, or which has not been considered as opportunity is what I’m going to be talking about right now. And that is basically providing them with a low effort experience.

Providing a low effort experience is the key, I will have to say, because a low effort experience is what drives customers to be loyal with you. And we’ll also see as part of the next slide on how that transforms. We start off with the customers and work backwards, just like what we do with Cloras. So that’s what we had been doing. If you could start off and see what it is that they want, and keep providing them with low effort experiences, and that could come a long way. So that’s what we have seen.

This is a cartoon series, which I used to follow when I used to be a kid, which is Richie Rich. Even then there was a lot of emphasis on the low effort experiences and making things easier. So I just wanted to put this across.

With respect to low effort experiences, even before I delve in further, I would like to quickly touch upon the customer journey. This is something which most of you might be aware of. But then I’ll just quickly go through this just to make sure we are all on the same page. With respect to customer journey, there’s this initial trigger. Then there is this initial brand consideration in terms of multiple brands that they’re considering. Then there is an active evaluation in terms of who they want to choose as a merchant and then the decision is made based on the experience you provide to them.

So if it is a low effort experience, and if they are having a great experience with you, it drives loyalty. And yeah, in case if you’re not able to provide them with a great experience, that would drive disloyalty as well, and then they tend to move out of the market.

Ideally, we would like to retain our customers. So that is when we are able to keep providing them with the low effort experiences and that keeps driving loyalty. So that’s the ideal situation that we would want to be in. And we spoke about lower effort experiences. And you could be wondering, so this is anyways taken for granted, right? So providing anybody with low effort experience is definitely going to help the cost. But then what I wanted to emphasize here is the magnitude in terms of how it impacts behavior.

With respect to high effort experience, it drives loyalty by over 96%, it’s a huge number as you could think about it. And the high effort experience also increases the negative word of mouth by over 81%, it is a huge number such as you could think about it and you’re losing out on a lot of customers just because of this. On the contrary, if you’re able to provide them with a low effort experience, it reduces the cost by 37%.

The last one is a little more of an interesting stat that you could think about. So again, in today’s world, we keep thinking that differentiation is more in terms of the pricing that we can provide for our customers, how we can differentiate from our competition. So that’s what we think about. But then with the low effort experiences, 88% of your customers are willing to spend a little more in case they get the low effort experiences. That’s what we need to keep doing at each of the phases in terms of the initial trigger or initial brand consideration.

As part of the initial brand, how easily are they able to identify your brand, or as part of the active evaluation. Even if they are looking at your website, do you have a self service model for them to get all of the information? These are the things that your customers are really looking at as part of making a decision and choosing a vendor. These are things that you should be really thinking of, as you’re coming up with solutions.

6) Concluding note (19:00-21:24)

With this, I would like to conclude my session. And at this juncture, I’d like to take the opportunity to thank Bijal and Adam and the entire BigCommerce team. So Bijal has been really supportive for us from the Distribution One side which helps the cause, which makes it easier for the customer. Even from the BigCommerce side, it could be Adam and a few folks from the BigCommerce team and what makes it easier.

Even if there are a couple of bottlenecks, it makes it easier for us to communicate with the partnership model that we have. And from a customer standpoint, it makes it easier for the customer to easily have a single point of contact and have everything sorted out that way. At this juncture, I would like to thank both Adam and Bijal for all of the support that you guys have provided for us. And yeah, and that’s pretty much what I had. In case if you have any questions, feel free to drop me an email, and I should be able to look at that. Thank you and I’ll hand it over to Tim.

Timothy Diep: Awesome. Thank you so much for being here and just stay on the line too. So we’re gonna have every other presenter again, and then we’ll have a Q & A discussion panel. So, again, I’d like to just thank all the sponsors and all the speakers as well from Distribution One, from BigCommerce and from Cloras. That was a great informative session and just by looking at the poll section too, it seems like a lot of you guys were looking for some help on integration, that was the number one aspect for maybe some of your pain points, but then also managing data, and even gathering requirements and better designs. So if you guys do need any help with that do reach out.

We will be having a post event networking session after this. Let me let me click on that real quick. I’ll share that and you guys could join that immediately after this session. We’ll have our sales team, we’ll have other people in the ecosystem join that room as well. So that’d be a great way to network if you guys are still available. We’ll have our next eSession on March 9, and I look forward to having the next eSession on March 9. If you guys don’t have any questions, we’ll see you guys then. So talk to you soon.

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