1) Opening note (00:12-01:36)

Tim Diep: Good morning everyone. Welcome to the DCKAP eSessions 2021. This is the one for March. We’re going to have a special showcase for Midland Scientific and all the work that went behind it, including some of the technology partners that were integrated into the eCommerce site. My name is Tim Diep. I’m the host for today.

I’m the customer success manager for DCKAP. I’ve been with the company for about eight-nine years now. I’ve just been leading events on a monthly basis ever since COVID happened, which has been over a year now. And we’ve really taken the advantage of just really hosting these events online rather than onsite now.

Today we have a really good session and hopefully you guys are able to take lots of notes and enjoy it. I would like to thank our sponsors for this event. These are the guys that you’ll be hearing later today with a short presentation. We have Midland Scientific. We have Avalara, Nexcess, Magento, and DCKAP Cloras.

Now I’d like to bring up Rodrigo from Midland Scientific. He is going to be talking about ensuring growth in sales by choosing a robust platform. Rodrigo is the Director of Information Technology at Midland Scientific. He has over five years of industry experience focused on digital transformation and leading results-driven teams, managing short and long-term projects from concept to completion. So I would like to bring up Rodrigo and he’ll be giving the presentation for this.

2) A brief introduction about Midland Scientific (01:38-03-12)

Rodrigo Neves: Thank you Tim. And good morning everyone. As things are today I’m going to be talking about the process for us to choose our new eCommerce platform and also some of our partners, how was the process for us and sharing a little bit about some of the results that we got so far.

First I just want to explain a little bit about what Midland Scientific is. We are a full line distributor of lab supplies equipment, mainly in the U.S. We have been serving the industry since 1975. We have five customer service centers in the U.S. and seven distribution centers.

Talking a little bit about our customers, they are mainly in the food and beverage industry and agriculture also. We have more than 35 active customers here in North America and one of our main competitive advantages is that we try to be a customer-centric company.
So everything that our customers ask us to do or to change our process, mainly also in the eCommerce area, we try to adjust and accommodate our process to our customer’s needs. That has a huge impact on our eCommerce platform and where we were looking to find a new eCommerce platform, this was one of the main things that we were looking for, like a way to be flexible and be able to adapt to our customer requirements.

3) The hurdles in their way (03:14-08:45)

Talking a little bit about how we were before, we were using an eCommerce platform called B2B Seller, we already had around 20% of our orders online. Over the years, we had a lot of customization that we had to make on that platform to accommodate all customer requirements, especially in the B2B market.

We had some corporations that had a lot of different sites and sometimes they have different levels of shoppers. So they would have the person in their lab join to purchase something for their laboratory. Sometimes they would have multiple roles. So you would have a lab person trying to buy something for the lab, also a lab manager, and on top of that, sometimes a purchasing team also.

We had to accommodate all of that inside our own website, having different profiles for people to see different things inside our website. But the main challenge that we were facing was search. It is something that we used to try to adjust on our site, but its speed and accuracy were some of the big factors that were affecting our site.

Normally most of our customers have part numbers. They know exactly what they’re looking for. So if they already have a product, then they’re just trying to purchase again. We were being successful on that, but when they were trying to search for all the options and describe the product that you’re looking for, we were struggling a lot.

Not being able to customize our website was a huge thing for us. We were able to adjust a couple of things. There were some core features that we were trying to change. And now we have the flexibility to change those that were impacting us. Also we’re trying to improve the integration with our ERP and with other systems.

We have more than 400,000 products. So we adopted a PIM system to accommodate all the product information. We were trying to take more advantage of the features that we had on the PIM system, also on the eCommerce site. Then we decided to look for a new platform and when we were choosing our new platform and all of the systems that are around our eCommerce area, we had to answer some of the questions before we started even talking about requirements.

One of the things is, what are company goals? While we were like two gaps on the website and for us, the main thing was flexibility. As they said, we tried to be a customer-centric company. So we would have to have a platform that would be able to accommodate all the requirements that we have from our previous platform, but also be able to adapt and change in the future as well.

When we were looking for the requirements also, we had to talk to some of our customers, and our sales team has a big impact on that because they are in constant communication with our customers. They brought to us a lot of requirements of things that they were struggling with, and also things that they were seeing in the different platforms as well that they would like to see in our new eCommerce platform.

What were the main challenges that we were trying to solve? Or I put on the previous slide main things that we were struggling with, mainly on search and have a better user interface and giving more visibility also to our customers to their ordering process. So they place an order with us and they want to follow up because not all the times that we would have their products in our lab, some of the products go to a back order status where we are still waiting for some of our suppliers to have the products available and sending information to us.

So we had to give them full visibility. If we have the product we already shipped, what was the tracking number? If it didn’t have them, then when were we planning to send that information to them.

Also after we shipped the product to them because a lot of our customers pay on terms. They don’t pay before we ship the product to them just after. Having the visibility of also the invoice side, the ability to see the invoices, verify their invoices online. So we were hoping to accomplish, to give them visibility to all of that.

Looking at our competitors, what were the features that were seen in some of our competitors’ websites that we couldn’t include on our website and we made some adjustments, we created some custom modules trying to accommodate some of that features as well.

Especially in our industry, we are a little bit behind in terms of technology. So we’re trying to figure out what are the new trends of technology that we could be applying to our site. One of the things that we’ve tried to focus a lot on is mobile. We don’t have a lot of customers using mobile. Normally most of our customers just use a desktop computer to place orders.

We are trying as the new generation started becoming part of the labs. Also it’s something that they expect and is not something that you would be having another advantage being compatible to mobile as well. There’s not a lot of customers of ours and also in our competitors using mobile right now, but it’s a trend that we are trying to adapt and change as well.

4) How their digital transformation journey began (08:47-16:26)

After we answered all of these questions, what we did was we just created a list of software business requirements. We interviewed a lot of different platforms trying to choose what would be the best one that would fit our needs. After we chose the platform, we ended up interviewing a lot of developers that would take care of adding all of this customization on top of our eCommerce platform, and also figuring out a way to integrate all the multiple systems that we have our ERP, our PIM system.

We also have a lot of images for our multiple products. So we had to find a developer that would take care of all of that. After evaluating some options for hosting, our choice for the eCommerce platform was Magento. We figured out that having an open source platform and that you would have access to the code and being able to change was a huge thing for us.

Also, they already have some of the B2B features that we were looking for, especially for quotes and the company structure, where you will have the ability to create multiple orders from the customers, but also some focus on B2C features as well because we like to treat our shoppers as B2C customers.

They are part of a corporation, but inside a corporation, they have multiple roles and when they are shopping, they will expect the features that they see in B2C. Their ability to extend also to being able to create more features using some models that already exist with some of the features that we’re looking for.

After we chose Magento, we were looking for multiple developers and the one that best fit our needs was DCKAP. They had experience integrating with our ERP system before. They had a really great tool for integration. It’s something that we were already worried about, how it would have been able to be flexible and be capable to integrate with everything and experience in developing Magento. Luckily they were also the one that has the most competitive price for us.

In terms of proposing before, we were hosting everything in-house and we have a small team who are struggling along maintaining the hardware, we ended up having limitations to buy new hardware and we don’t have a lot of experience managing hardware.

So we started evaluating hosting companies and we found Nexcess and we couldn’t be more happy than this decision that we made about hosting our website on the cloud, because now we don’t have to worry anymore about hardware. It facilitates a lot of our development process because now we are able to just duplicate our main production service and create new service for development, for testing.

So it facilitates a lot on that side. Also we already had to rescale. So we saw some limitations on the hardware after we went live on our website and also the search engine and we were able to adjust with a few clicks and communication with support just to rescale our server.

That would be a really painful process if we had bought the hardware before. So, hosting everything on the web and also for a company that specialized on Magento, it helped us a lot and for taxes, we were already using Avalara on our ERP system and to automate the taxes we looked for an extension to integrate also with Magento and the process was super easy for us.

I don’t know a lot about taxes and I didn’t have to learn anything about it. We just used the integration screen to put Avalara on our site and everything was working. So it was a super easy process for us.

For the integration with our ERP system and gathering some information also from our team, we are using Cloras. We have a lot of flexibility on integration and disability also. We were struggling a lot with the integration before, just because we didn’t know when the integration was working or not, when the information was syncing or not.

Now we have full visibility. If everything is working and when it fails, we receive notifications, but also we have the ability to change and adapt to the new requirements. So talking a little bit about the benefits, we thought we achieved our main goals when we went live. It was in August of last year.

We’re literally more than six months of life and we were able to achieve all the goals that we had in the beginning of the process. And the main thing that we were looking for was to have full control over the website and the ability to change and adapt to our customer requirements.

We’re still in that process. Now, one of the things that we decided was just to keep listening to our customers. We have a feedback link on our website and are trying to keep that link there to keep hearing from our customers forever. They’re always going to be in need of new features, new functionalities, and changing the requirements specific for them.

We’re trying to keep improving and developing our websites, adapt to them. Also with these surveys, we were able to just to start measuring, having some metrics about the search, because we were happy with the new search that we had and with the new features that we were developing. But we decided just to listen to our customers.

And luckily in terms of search, right now we are at 95% in terms of the customers being able to find what they were looking for when they are searching. Also another rating to measure how satisfied they are right now, we are now at 92%. Just with that question now, if our new website is able to meet their needs, and in sales, we saw an increase in 7% in terms of online sales.

Another thing that’s important for us is that we use what’s called a punchout system. Some of our big corporations are fully integrated with our sites. From their ERP system, they are able to just shop on our website and get all the information directly to their ERP. They’re able to create fields that way, and we are seeing a huge increase in the number of punchout customers and transactions as well.

We had a limitation of the number of punchout customers that we could have on our previous website, but now we don’t have that anymore. So we are able to adapt and change to that. And it’s something that is increasing a lot. We see a trend and some of our transactions go in that direction as well.

So we couldn’t be more happy with all the paths that we went through. We are still seeing a lot of things that we’re going to have to change and adapt on our website, but we are happy with all the choices that we made and the partners that we had. Yeah. Now, Tim, I’m passing the presentation back to you.

5) Concluding note (16:28-17:12)

Tim Diep: Thank you so much Rodrigo. Thank you for the opportunity to be able to work on this website and we wish continued success for many years, so thank you so much for that. Thank you again for all the sponsors from Midland Scientific, from Avalara, from Nexcess, Magento, and Cloras. Without you guys, this eSession wouldn’t be possible. Thank you guys once again for all your help and your contribution to this.

And then just mark it on your calendars. The next DCKAP eSession will be on April 13th and this will be in regards to the ADA compliance. That’s another hot issue within the B2B market. That’s all I have here. Thank you guys so much for your time and hopefully you guys have a great day and stay safe out there.

So we’ll see you guys. Have a good one.

1) Introducing Maria Tringali (00:00-01:33)

Welcome to the DCKAP, E-sessions, 2021. This is the one for March.We ‘re going to have a special showcase for Midland scientific and all the work that went behind it, including some of the technology partners that were integrated into the e-commerce site. My Name is Tim Diep. I’m the host for today.

I’m the customer success manager for DCKAP, then with the company for about eight, nine years now. And I’ve just been leading events on a monthly basis ever since COVID happened, which has been over a year now. And, you know, we’ve really taken the advantage of, just really hosting these events.

On online rather than onsite now. So today we have a really good session and hopefully you guys are able to take lots of notes and enjoy it like to thank our sponsors for this event. These are the guys that you’ll be hearing later today, with a short presentation. So we have Midland scientific.

We have Avalara, we have Nexcess, Magento and DCKAP Cloras. So next I’d like to bring over Maria Tringali from Avalara. She’s the Senior Solutions Consultant at Avalara, which provides end-to-end tax compliance solutions for any business, large or small in any industry. As you move your business online, we know there are tax compliance concerns.

She’ll be sharing a few best practices. You can leverage this to make this transition easy while creating a seamless customer experience. She’s going to be talking about the importance of tax regulations for B2B e-commerce setup.

2) The basics and diving into tax regulations with Maria(01:34-05:12)

Awesome. Thanks Tim. Happy to be here and thanks Rodrigo for that introduction.

Great overview and Kudos from Avalara. We really enjoy working with you. I’m so happy to be here. Let me share my screen and let’s talk a little bit about Sales tax. So, first of all, just a little bit about Avalara. So as Rodrigo mentioned, he’s partnered with us for his tax compliance for all of their business, not just their e-commerce business, but all of their sales and tax compliance.

So Avalara is a global company and we’ve been in business since 2004. We have over 30,000 customers worldwide. We are a publicly held company. We go to market with integrations and Rodrigo did mention their integration with Magento and with his ERP. So we actually have over a thousand integrations now with different accounting platforms.

So pretty much whatever you’re using our platform can integrate with it. We also work with every type of industry. So one of the things is that I work a lot with manufacturers and distributors and B2B businesses, and they sometimes say, we don’t charge tax. So it doesn’t apply. Well, every business has tax compliance.

Our platform is not industry specific. It is absolutely available to assist you with tax compliance across any type of business that you might be in. Everybody has clients, so let’s start with that subject. So what most of us think of it, when it, when we talk about sales tax is the sales tax rates. And that’s what we generally see on our receipts. When we buy something, I kind of call it the sexy part of sales tax, because it’s what we see. It’s the popular part. But the truth is when you’re in business, there’s a lot of things that a business has to worry about or think about, not worry about cause you have us.

But to think about when it comes to tax compliance. So it’s not just the rate calculations and most of us in manufacturing and distribution, or have a B2B component or who sell to businesses who are exempt like the healthcare industry, we don’t charge any tax at all. So all those things under the iceberg are things you really need to know about in your business.

And that’s one of the things that we can help you with is like Rodrigo said he doesn’t know anything about sales tax and he doesn’t have to, but you do have to worry about where you’re, which means where does your business have the responsibility to collect and remit tax? You need to worry about your exemption certificates, filing those returns, even if there’s $0.

You still have to report to the state, just like if I don’t owe any money at the end of the year to the federal government, I still have to report. So people say, Oh, it’s $0. It doesn’t matter. You still have to fill out all the forms, understand your tax compliance, be prepared for an audit. Yes, they can happen.

Also, customer satisfaction is important. We sort of tend to underestimate, and I think Rodrigo alluded to this a little bit. We wanted to make a really easy platform for his customers to buy from him and customer satisfaction is something that we tend to overlook a little bit, especially if you’re in a highly wholesale or exempt business, we make them jump through hoops.

We get calls to set up an account, create orders. And our goal here is to help make their process, our biggest customers, our B2B buyers, a little easier, whether it’s locally or whether it’s online.

3) Audit and importance of sales compliance for B2B (05:13- 07:19)

Rodrigo was talking about why is this all important? It’s important because manufacturers and distributors and B2B businesses are at very high risk for audit auditors, know that getting a sales tax rate wrong is just a little bit of revenue, but not having an exemption certificate on file for a sale.

Can be a lot more money to them. If you had a $10,000 item that you sold and you did not charge tax and you can’t prove why you didn’t you’d have to pay the full tax rate to the government, that you did not charge the customer. And believe me, trying to recoup that from your customer is not easy, especially six months or three years post sale.

So it’s an industry wholesales and manufactured. Wholesalers and manufacturers are high target industries for audit as well as for use tax are not going to go into use tax so much today. But use tax is something that a lot of manufacturers have to account for, especially if they have multiple locations and States know that businesses generally aren’t very good at this.

So they tend to really try to analyze your purchases and what you might’ve paid or not paid. So we definitely need to think about tax compliance in our world. So, um, as I said, a lot of people are telling me, well, we don’t have a sales tax problem because we don’t charge it. We’re talking about tax compliance here.

We’re not talking about just charging retail rates. You do have to charge retail rates to that customer, but there’s a lot more to do with tax compliance. And the key things here are a poor process for handling these exemption certificates or your exempt businesses. Creates a negative customer experience your customers want to buy from you quickly.

Rodrigo said they don’t have mobile phones yet. Something they’re thinking about. He wants his B2B customers as well as his B2C customers to go on his website and be able to purchase very quickly, very seamlessly without having to worry about providing extra paperwork and being asked questions and pause the sale to have to call them.

4) Your duty towards your employees (07:20-09:45)

We don’t want your employees to have to have the responsibility of knowing what they’re collecting. Our credit manager doesn’t have sales tax experience. They’re not tax professionals. We need to help them understand and guide them through the process of what they’re collecting and make sure that it’s the right form.

Make sure that it’s not the business license. It’s actually the sales and use tax license or something like that. We need to make this process easier on our staff. They’re not tax experts. So, a lot of people ask us about the economic nexus laws. So you may or may not know that about two and a half, little more than two and a half years ago.

I guess we’re heading up three years ago, laws were passed where States are now allowed to ask for essentially a cut of your sales. Any items you ship into their state. So you no longer just have to have a physical presence in a state in order to register and collect and remit sales tax to them.

You just have to ship into that state. When these laws were first passed, they kind of got dubbed as e-commerce laws and only for e-commerce sellers as if e-commerce sellers are the only people that ship something into another state. So that was a big misnomer. And I can tell you over the past year, and it’s still happening in 2021, we have so many manufacturers and distributors that never registered.

They are hitting these economic nexus thresholds that you see here on the right side of my screen. If you are selling a certain amount of revenue or a number of invoices, a certain number of orders into a state can definitely require you. To collect and remit sales tax, even if you’ve never fully set foot in that state.

So we need to make sure that you have your nexus footprint in line and you are collecting and remitting either certificates or sales tax in all the States where you have a legal obligation to. And this can have a big effect on the number of exemption certificates. So you may have like this example on the left, you may have 75 on file now, but once you’ve had to register in New States, you may end up with over a thousand.

And these are actually two real cases of customers that I spoke to is we had another national retailer that had 500 on file. Now they’re going to have to have 500. How on earth are they going to collect, manage, and track these certificates now? That their exposure is in all these States because of the new laws.

5) Moving ahead of Excel: (09:46- 13:05)

Excel is no longer a viable way to collect these or a file box or an online share account. File alphabetically. That’s not practical when you get up to these higher numbers. So what is a B2B seller to think about? Let’s go back to Rodrigo as examples. So he wants to bring B2B online for both his, B2B and B2C business.

So regardless of whether you are B2B or B2C online, you still have to be concerned with nexus. As we just talked about. You have to be concerned with your exemption certificates. How do I collect them? Does my staff know about them? Do I have the expertise to know what I’m collecting? How much time is this taking me?

And of course, that customer experience. So all of these things apply to your local business as well as to your online business. So what does end to end tax compliance look like? What it looks like is that the process needs to start with your customers as, especially if you have expanded next as meaning you’re adding, or you have recently registered or you need to register in additional States, or even if you’re still in your home state, do I have the right.

First file for that customer. So making sure you’re compliant from end to end is making sure that everything that you have on file now, or that you need to have is currently valid and accurate. So you don’t get caught in an audit. And then ideally as Rodrigo said, you leverage a platform like ours.

That is cloud-based. And that will allow you to do tax determination in real time. And by determination, I mean, notice it doesn’t say calculation tax determination means your platform. And this is what Rodrigo platforms are doing. Both his ERP and his website are checking to see if a customer is exempt.

Before it calculates tax. So it’s a check to see that little blue arrow going back to exemption management is first checking the address. It’s then checking to see if he has nexus there. And then it checks to see if a customer is exempt. And if the customer is not exempt, then it does proceed finally with the tax calculation.

That is the last thing that it does and then, because we’re connected to both the Rodrigo invoice platforms. He has everything he needs for us to file and remit his sales tax returns because all of his transactional data is coming through to this platform. So what you need at the beginning, there is not Excel, but you need a compliance platform for your exemption certificates that connects with your tax determination engine.

And I won’t go too deep into this, but Avalara cert capture does manage all those incoming certificates and make sure that they are current and valid. You can send reminders to those about to expire. It is a platform specifically for managing exemption certificates, which is not document management, document management.

Doesn’t do any of these. Things that can maybe track one thing like an expiration, but it doesn’t validate documents for you to communicate with your customers, um, provide access to all of your employees, etc. And then vendor exemption management. I wanted to mention this. I don’t think that Rodrigo company’s using this yet.

6) Certification collection and Vendor exemption: (13:06- 14:51)

It’s actually a relatively new capability of the same platform. So not only can you collect certificates from your vendors? You can also easily send certificates out to collect them from your buyers. Sorry. You can also easily send them out to your friend’s vendor. So if you’re a distributor and you send a lot, you provide a lot of exemption certificates, because you’re going to be reselling their items.

You have a lot of certificates you’ve sent out to vendors. So the platform also allows you to do that. So now to the fun stuff that Rodrigo was talking about on an online platform like cert capture, actually, we’re the only ones who do this, allow you to create a seamless experience on your website and Rodrigo, you talked a little bit about being as good as the competition.

I will tell you these two things here. Our competitive differentiators and you were doing them, which is amazing. We have a lot of businesses that see this experience on a shopping cart where they’re buying something and they come to us and say, I want that too. So what we have here is two options. If you’re in a business where you want someone to provide an exemption certificate on the fly, in a shopping cart, you can do that.

I’ve totaled up in my little sample here. I’ve bought a laptop. And a laptop case, and it says it calculated the tax of $31 there. And it says, do you want this purchase to be tax exempt? If I do, it will launch a little portal and I can literally submit an exemption certificate in real time that would apply to that sale.

So if I’m a designer and I want to buy just one item on a one-off, I can do that in my shopping cart. What Rodrigo has done is taken that one step further. So this is now I’m logged into my account here. You can see over here on the left. I’m in my customer account. I have my orders and I also can manage my tax exemption certificates.

7) Understanding the process (14:52- 16:15)

So the same process. Now that I’m logged into my account, I can pop up an exemption certificate and renew it. I could submit a new one. If I have a new ship to address. So what you’re doing here, what I love about this is you’re pushing the responsibility of collecting the right certificate and providing those certificates gently over to your customer and away from your staff.

Your staff doesn’t have to have the sales tax expertise. They don’t bill without tax and then get, have to do those darned credits and rebuild. You’re putting the responsibility into the hands of your customers to be proactive here. So again, it pops up a portal that can fill these out online in a flash, provided it goes right into your system.

And literally the next order can be tax exempt and you can be comfortable that it’s a complaint. So with that, Tim, I’m going to leave you with this little slide for those of you listening, I highly recommend that when you get this slide deck that you print off this one slide, stick it up on the wall in a conference room and take a look at your business.

How many States do we have? Have we registered in or do we need to register in a nexus study that is worth its weight in gold or a sales tax risk assessment. You can do those through Avalara and can do them through an accounting firm. That has assault practice, typically a local firm that wouldn’t have this national expertise.

8) Key takeaways ( 16:16-18:14)

You need to affirm the as is state and local tax practice, but have someone do a nexus study for you to understand your nexus footprint? Uh, talk about, is that our current processes scalable? Are we adding B2B, Rodrigo? Are we adding our B2B online? Are we moving more B2C online? Do we want to make B2B easier for our customers?

To buy from us. Think about your business and how you’ve talked. Some clients are affected and can we afford delays? Uh, you know, really, we don’t want to have to stop the presses. People want a fast purchasing experience. And I have, uh, another, um, program that
I did where we surveyed some businesses and most B2B businesses.

Like 75% of them say it is cumbersome to purchase from their vendors. They want a better experience and tax compliance is definitely part of that. So with that, I’m going to stop sharing Tim and turn this back over to you. Thank you so much, Maria. It’s a great presentation and we leave all the tax headaches.

You guys do such a great job, so thank you so much for that. And, thank you again for all the sponsors from Midland scientific, from Avalara, from Nexcess Magento, and CLORAS without you guys, this presentation, this E-session wouldn’t be possible so that you guys want to get for, for all your help and your contribution to this.

And then just mark it on your calendars. The next DCKAP e- session will be on April 13th and this would be in regards to ADA compliance. So that’s, another hot issue within the B2B market. So, but that’s all, that’s all I have here. Thank you guys so much for your time and hopefully, you guys have a great day and stay safe out there.
So we’ll see you guys have a good one.

1) Diving into the session (00:00-01:33)

Welcome to the DCKAP, E-sessions, 2021. This is the one for March.We ‘re going to have a special showcase for Midland scientific and all the work that went behind it, including some of the technology partners that were integrated into the e-commerce site. My Name is Tim Diep. I’m the host for today.

I’m the customer success manager for DCKAP,, then with the company for about eight, nine years now. And I’ve just been leading events on a monthly basis ever since COVID happened, which has been over a year now. And, you know, we’ve really taken the advantage of, just really hosting these events.

On online rather than onsite now. So today we have a really good session and hopefully you guys are able to take lots of notes and enjoy it like to thank our sponsors for this event. These are the guys that, that w you’ll be hearing later today, um, with a short presentation. So we have Midland scientific.

We have Avalara, we have Nexcess. Magento and DCKAP Cloras.

Introducing Gary Smith

Next I’d like to bring up Gary Smith from Nexcess. He’s a strategic partner. Um, Partner development manager at Nexcess. He’s worked in the e-commerce industry since the early two thousands as a merchant consultant and emergency manager. Since early days of Magento, he’s seen the potential in Magento’s customizable and extendable platform.

He currently lives in Huntsville, Alabama, and he’ll be talking about enterprise hosting made easy with Magento commerce. So Gary, I’d like to welcome to the stage.

2) Handing it over to Gary Smith (01:34-03:11)

All right. Thanks Tim. Well, we’re going to move now tax Nexcess to Nexcess Nexcess hosting. And I don’t know that I’ve heard the word Nexcess that many times in 15 minutes before in my life, but I have lived through some of those problems, Maria, and some of my previous work.

I worked with the Nexcess partner team. And I worked with DCKAP primarily as a partner manager and together we support customers like Midland scientific. I was what Rodrigo had to say about his site and the things that they’ve accomplished with it is really outstanding.

It really shows that the value of open source software, when Midland scientific began hosting with us. Midland scientific began hosting with Nexcess in mid 2019 with an extra small cloud plan to begin development work. And they’ve since scaled up to a larger production instance, but they continue to operate a number of development and staging environments.

That’s one of the main things I want to talk about today is how, what they’re doing with those development environments differs from the typical progression where we have local environments, which often live on a developer’s own machine. We’ll briefly talk about the disadvantages of that through various stages and I’m sure QA and automated testing and so forth that they do together with DCKAP to the live site.

3) Overview of Nexcess and evolution of cloud hosting(03:12-04:55)

And we’ll talk about that in a moment, but I want to begin with an overview of the Nexcess cloud services that make this setup possible. A few years ago, a typical Magento server set up consisted of one or more physical servers. Rodrigo talked about, the headaches of dealing with hardware. So frankly, whether you’re literally on prem or even if you’re using a hosting company like Nexcess and the older days,It was a box. It was a server or a combination of servers like I’m showing on this slide and they are actually still the right choice in certain circumstances.

If you need to do certain things, then this can still be the way to go. We have many, many customers on them, but increasingly virtualized servers, which we host in our own data centers allow us to provide highly performance server instances and they range all the way from extra small, which starts at $49 a month scaled for about 20 users all the way up to two X servers at $849 a month.

And those are conservatively scaled for 120 concurrent users, 800 gigabytes of storage. And so on three 30, two virtual CPU’s 32 gigabytes RAM. So highly, you know, Really really massively scaled up cloud plans for medium to large businesses. Midland is a company that works actively on their site regularly together with DCKAP and they have a number of plans deployed both for production and development. So I’ll just talk a little bit about concurrent users and scaling a site.

4) The top features offered by Nexcess (04:56-07:34)

Those concurrent users or visitors who are actively clicking, downloading, adding to their cart, that sort of activity, given that many users arrive at your site and spend time reading content, product descriptions, looking at images that have already been downloaded. The actual number of users that these plans can support can be considerably higher.

And for traffic spikes and heavy admin usage, which often occurs, especially in a B2B site, we’ve got another resource to improve performance, which is auto-scaling Midland’s cloud plan that they’re on and production allows their site to flex a little, when resources are under heavy load, we provide 24 hours of auto-scaling at no charge every month.

So you don’t get a surprise bill when you have those relatively contained. periods of auto-scaling. For significant more significant load events. Like a retailer might see on a black Friday cyber Monday kind of situation. We also have advanced auto scaling. Those do carrier costs, but they also allow the merchant to significantly increase the resources at short notice and without incurring long-term contracts or charges like that.

Another way we make resources go further is the way we containerize resources and set up your development instances in a way that they don’t take up any resources from your production environment. Again, thinking back to a traditional server situation. Have you set up development instances on that server?

You can do it, but you’re taking some resources away from production. So if you have a busy day in development at the same time, you’re having a product launch or something, you may be in a bit of a problem. Our development environments allow you to just add them in a kind of a push button basis at different sizes and scales.

We can also extract the data from your production site in case you want to look at that in development, and you can even anonymize that data so that you’re not putting confidential customer information on your development site, where you have another vector for exposure.

5) Diving the resources for perfect output (07:35- 10:01)

Containers are a way that we take certain services and we, again take those resources where they’re not being consumed by the main site. Biggest instance, which is now mandatory for magento 2.4 and higher additions is elastic search. Now,it’s required. So everybody needs it. A rabbit MQ is another popular container that we have for many customers.

it’s an open source message broker that helps websites to exchange data between processes, applications, and servers, and that reduces load and delivery times by delegating those tasks to a third party and a solar and varnish round that out varnish in particular acts as a reverse proxy for cassius dynamic content.

So by provisioning, all of these are services, dev servers, as well as containers with various sizes as needed. We avoid bogging down the cloud server and taking up your main resources that you need for traffic.

I mentioned earlier that Midland is using Nexcess cloud instances where, where some development teams might be using local dev branches. When I was with an agency, this was how we did things. We would, fire up XMP on a, on a laptop or a PC. And we would set up that local branch and different team members would merge those branches.

We’d go to testing and then we’d take it to production. This requires a high end machine to do this right. I’m talking to you right now on a basic entry-level Macbook Pro. it’s still not a cheap machine, but it doesn’t cost nearly five grand. So when you add the horsepower to a local machine that you need to do this kind of work.

You can really run up your costs and that’s not really the least of it. We can, you can also wind up with inconsistencies with the production environment. And another thing that we experienced when I was in the development world is your local environment becoming corrupted which often required four to six hours to restore.

6) Key takeaways (10:02-11:19)

And you can’t always, you know, certainly if you’re the merchant, that’s just dead cost. And even if you’re a development firm like DCKAP, you can’t always charge that by contrast deploying different, cloud plans with Nexcess, you know, just adding those $10 development instances. Allows you to deploy as many as you like.

Um, you can anonymize the data. As I mentioned earlier, you can share common services like search and by doing it this way, you can save time, you can save cost and you can also skip spending those up and down. You can destroy them at will if you don’t need them anymore. So that’s the main things I wanted to cover as far as Nexcess hosting, when it comes to Midland, again, they’re a great customer, really happy to be on this panel with everybody and for a really competitive price.

I think Midland has got a hosting set up that allows them to scale up as they need to, depending on their live traffic and development environments. And I look forward to hearing your questions when we get to the panel. And I’ll turn it back to you, Tim. Thank you so much, Gary. Thank you for the presentation.

7) Closure (11:20-12:17)

That was great. You know, it was great to, to be a part with you guys on this success story for Midland scientific and thank you again for all the sponsors from Midland scientific, from Avalara, from Nexcess Magento, and CLORAS without you guys, this, this presentation, this E-session wouldn’t be possible so that you guys wants to get for, for all your help and your contribution to this.

And then just mark it on your calendars. The next DCKAP session will be on April 13th and this would be in regards to the ADA compliance. So that’s another hot issue within the B2B market. So, but that’s all, that’s all I have here. Thank you guys so much for your time and hopefully you guys have a great day and stay safe out there.

So we’ll see you guys have a good one.