OK, everyone. I'm Paul Demery, Editor for B2B at Digital Commerce 360. I will be your moderator for today's webinar. Thanks for joining us. Today we're joined with Don Davis, Editor at Large at Digital Commerce 360 and Ben Smith, who's Chief Digital Officer at Banner Solutions. And we have Mike Powers, Director of e-commerce and Digital Marketing at ARG Industrial. Until recently known as Alaska Rubber Group and we have Naveenchandra Karna, who's the global Head Solutions, Customer experience, Transformations and Digital Commerce at Tata Consultancy Services and Philip Jacus, Senior Digital Commerce at Tata Consultancy Services. Operating a B2B e-commerce site doesn't even qualify anymore as table stakes in today's post pandemic world. Business customers expect suppliers to solve their problems and to offer a full array of digital services that help them get their jobs done more efficiently. And the B2B companies lapping their competitors are also marketing their services effectively through the full array of digital channels, including search, social media, ads on major marketplaces, text messaging and more. But achieving excellence in e-commerce is easier said than done. To achieve true excellence and B2B organizations of all sizes need. Need a road map and guideposts to aid know to aid in their journey in this webinar will provide you with just that. Just a few housekeeping notes before we get going here. We'll take questions at the end of the presentation, but you can submit them at any time using the chat box on the right side of your screen there. You can also use that box to let us know of any technical difficulties you're having and someone will help you out with that. With that, let's get started. Now you'll hear from my colleague Don Davis. OK. Thank you, Paul. So what I'm going to be reporting on or summarizing a report that the Digital Commerce 360 produced in collaboration with Tata Consultancy Services about. What Just what Paul talked about a road map. To B2B   e-commerce excellence, I'll talk briefly about the e-commerce B2B commerce growth. Some of the key technology building blocks that are necessary to future future proof your e-commerce system and then go through each of the seven main tips that just at a high level and then the panelists will go through it in much more detail. The context for our discussions, the reality that B2B commerce is growing rapidly even before the pandemic business, buyers, government agencies, other enterprises were already buying more and more online. But COVID-19 really accelerated that and that was really illustrated by a couple of surveys that Amazon business done over the last couple of years 2021 85% of the business buyers they surveyed said that they were buying more online because of the pandemic. And then last year when they did a similar survey, they found that 2/3 of business buyers now say that they will do at least 40% of their purchasing online. That was up from 56% just a year earlier. And only 2%, so they don't buy online so. This is forcing Manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors to, in some cases, in a big hurry. Adapt to the way that business buyers now want to buy. And as we know, probably everybody in the call knows this. Selling to business buyers a lot more complicated than selling to consumers. There is often very extensive product catalogs that the products may be very complicated. They're regulatory concerns. There are multiple multistage approval processes. All these elements that go into serving buyers well, which is why many business now are looking for a road map to serve their business customers in the way that they expect. And throughout this, we highlighted in the report four key building blocks of technology that are important to understand and the panelists will probably talk about them at various points and they summarize by the acronym mock. One is micro services, which basically means breaking down all the features and functions of an e-commerce platform into components so that you can optimize each one and provide just exactly what your customers need for your business. API's are a way to allow different data source, get gathered data from different sources and send it to the where it needs to go so that all your customer touch points have the most accurate and up-to-date information. Cloud computing is a key component today of all kinds of e-commerce. Data and applications are increasingly stored in these large clouds. But there are many kinds of clouds, private and hybrid and different organizations have there own cloud so getting comfortable with accessing data from multiple clouds is a big part of the challenge. And finally, headless commerce, which basically means separating what your customers see, like the pages on your website or what your app looks like from the underlying infrastructure so that you can provide your customers just exactly what they want in a personalized, efficient, convenient way. And this graphic which is in the report and by the way you all will get a link to so you can download a free copy of this report, but just illustrates kind of how mock helps you serve your customers better and how the data flows between different layers within an organization and with its suppliers and distribution partners. So with that, but before we move on, we don't want the technology to overlook. A key point, which is that it's all about customer experience. As Steve Jobs famously said years ago, you don't start with technology, You start with what the customer needs and then implement the technology you need. And that is, you know, the starting point for our discussion. So the report quickly sort of summarizes step 7, stepping stones and I'm going to quickly go over each of them. So one is unifying content. Now the reality is and probably a lot of people on the call know this from your own experience, is that a lot of organizations, they got into e-commerce kind of on a 1 by 1. Basis they maybe a certain business unit or a certain country or a certain product line started selling online and things developed in kind of a incremental way, so as a result, very often. Customers aren't getting necessarily the same information on your website, through your app, from your call center, from your sales reps, And so one of the first steps of many companies will want to take is to create a unified content layer so all the product descriptions, images, spec sheets, all the information is uniform. No matter what the customer touch point is, they're getting a an accurate and a consistent experience. And the secondly is to integrate digital platforms, again because many companies. Built their ecommerce system incrementally. An e-commerce platform or marketing? Platform Customer History Database. Information does not necessarily flow easily between these systems. So what we want to do is integrate these all these digital systems so that for example if a customer on your website is looking at a particular product, that can trigger your marketing system to send that customer an e-mail or perhaps. Trigger an alert to your sales rep to give that customer a call. Or if there's sales on your website for a particular product or more than anticipated, that can result in a inquiry to your supplier about how long will it take to get more of that product. So basically the idea is to move from fragmented and regional to harmonized so that all the information is consistent and accurate and up to date. Step three is to think, you know, beyond just today's challenges, you want to think about where you want to be 3 years from now, five years from now. And that could involve a different business model. So, for example, if you're selling expensive equipment that customers only use part of the time, they may prefer to subscribe to a service where they get access to that equipment when they need it and not have to buy and maintain it. Or they it may make sense for you to create a marketplace where you invite other sellers to sell on your website, increasing the selection that your customers have. There are lots of different new business models that are evolving very, very quickly. Just to give an example of the marketplace model, we have a case study in this report about Honeywell Aerospace and how they produce created a new online marketplace called GoDirect Trade. One of the problems is for aircraft spare parts, and buyers of spare parts for airplanes need to know a lot of information about exactly what the part is, what was produced, what its history is, what's maintenance history. And what Honeywell did was use blockchain technology so that sellers can upload all this information and buyers can see it. And it's all done in a very secure way. And it's helped make Godirect trade a very quick success. Step four is to improve every step of the customer journey. Now we know that many times B2B buying journey is complicated. Buyers are going to do a lot of research. They may need. There may be multiple approval steps, so there's. May be channel partners involved like distributors and wholesalers. So what you want to do is look at every step that the customers go through on your website, on your app, through your channel partners and see where they're dropping off, because that's an area where you can improve. And it may be in some cases that the problem is with the channel partners. So for example, if you're a manufacturer sending a lot of solid leads to a distributor, we're not getting the sales you would expect. That may be something you you're going to want to look at. And Step 5 is just moving to a more advanced technical architecture. As Paul said, just putting your catalog on a website and allowing people to buy is no longer even puts you in the game. You need to have all the information from all the sources, whether it's your ERP or customer relationship management system, your inventory systems. Suppliers ,Regional Distributors. All of it has to be unified and going back and forth so that you can provide customers. The kind of optimal experience that they now expect. So for example, if a customer's in your physical location, they should be able to go on your app and see not just where in the store product is that they're looking for, but how many of them are there. And if there aren't enough, how long would it take to get them? So that means get finding information from the store, planogram, inventory systems, ERP systems, supplier information and having it all available to the customer when he wants it. And so basically we're talking about going from product centric, which is being focusing on your company and the product you produce and how you produce it, the thinking like the customer, what do they need And there's a lot of moving pieces in this. I'm not going to try to summarize all this, but it it's graphic, it's in the report and I'm sure our panelists will take up many parts of this. Step six, We emphasize designing for speed because the world is moving fast. And this is where having a module architecture is absolutely essential because when you're only. Having to optimize a particular small component within your system, it's a lot easier to develop. And test it rather than if you're trying to optimize a monolithic e-commerce platform. Doing this quickly requires that you get familiar and comfortable with operating with multiple clouds that may be internal and external. And also that governance is key. You've got to make sure that everyone within the organization is following best practices and company policies. And the final point is that you want to develop and deploy continuously. You want to be always making things better. Based on the feedback from your customer and market developments and many companies are finding that the most effective way to do this is to create a digital Center of excellence which maintains a library of documentation and tools and that prioritizes projects and monitors to make sure that they're going as anticipated. And this is the way that you can move quickly but still avoid unnecessary mistakes. So that in a nutshell is the summary of the report. It's obviously a lot to take in and a lot more to do in real life. So that's why we have a panel of four experts. Who have been involved in doing this in real life and they're going to talk about different aspects of this. So at this point I'm going to give the mic back to Paul Demery and he's going to introduce your panelists. Thank you, Don for that very comprehensive presentation. Great point there at the end about going on to continuously improve the customer experience. Now I'd like to invite our panelists, Ben Smith from Banner Solutions, Mike Powers from ARG Industrial, Naveenchandra Karna and Philip Jacus from Tata Consultancy Services to join me. So welcome everyone. Everybody has their cameras and audio on. Yep, there you go. Happy to be here. So my car is I want to start with you here. Tell us a little bit about the B2B customer journey at ARG Industrial. And you know how it has intersected, if it has, you know, with the themes that Don outlined in this report here. Yeah, no, that was a fantastic job, Don, and a very good, pretty, very actually extremely thorough report. One of the one area I want to focus on is the API part of it .In our journey with launching  a B2B e-commerce platform, it was imperative that we had our API established with our ERP company, right. And so having you know those first hand meetings talking about how and some of the expectations of our platform, what we wanted it to do, the information pricing and availability, the multiple pricing levels, it was imperative that our ERP and our folks over there were supportive our journey there so that API development was really important. As well as just making sure that we needed to be able to provide product data for the 36,000 plus items that we sell. So making sure that we had a direct connection to a PIM to pull that data into our commerce platform as well as making sure getting that pricing and availability from the 12 branches across the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. I think the API portion of that presentation, getting everything integrated is really important. That's amazing what you can do these days with the integration. So Ben, can you add to more about how does how is all this played out for Banner solutions? Sure. Yeah. Thanks Paul. And Mike did a nice job of summarizing a lot of the things that we've really pursued with in partnership with TCS over this past year, essentially 130,000 plus SKU catalog on our site driven through an API connection to our PIM platform. Leveraging micro services for things like search and product recommendations. But our journey started with a growing and really robust e-commerce customer base and we wanted to basically go from, you know, we had already taken those initial steps and we looked at it more from the lens of how can we supercharge our business by leveraging this e-commerce platform and really expanding that e-commerce platform into something that's more than just a place for customers to place orders online and so tying back really specifically the customer experience. Our entire process started with journey mapping and understanding our core customer segments. And how each one of those users interacted with Banner Solutions, what their expectations were around identifying products, understanding what their expectations were around service and lead time and delivery. And from that we had some very clear takeaways and some very specific ways in which we had addressed those things in a per channel methodology. So driving unique experiences across our different channels for us, we sell to building material suppliers as well as contract hardware distributors and locksmiths. And each one of them has a different need and a different understanding of how they're going to find those things. So again, working through some level of personalization from a customer experience perspective to figure out how we can make bannersolutions.com not just a place to place and submit an order, but a place to operate your business more efficiently. I would imagine you could probably comment on some of your best metrics there. I mean whether it's this increase in sales or increase in activity or customers buying, you know, larger average order volumes or more of your products, that sort of thing. Yeah. So you know we're only really we launched in November. We're really not even six months into this yet. We've seen an increase in the average lines per order. We've seen an increase in average order size and we like to watch median order size very closely as a large orders can obviously throw off your averages. We've seen a very, not a huge jump in order size, but a progressively increasing trend in that. So what that tells us is that the customer's confidence in the platform has grown. And our ability to take maybe a little bit more complex of an order through that system has improved as well. Yeah, I'd love to add to that Ben, that those are all the same metrics we're following as well. And you know as part of our customer and customer adoption strategy really identifying the new revenue that is being generated from existing customers through the website. I will tell you team that we're also noticing that you know we have some large scale oil and gas customers in Alaska, right, and you know with their own procurement systems and having to generate their own POS on a per order basis. We are also understanding that our website is a an assist to the business, right? There are some customers that are unable to place an order through our shopping cart. However we are realizing that with close to you know $600,000 in revenue and shopping carts and saved carts as well as shopping list that it's you know we're we're attributing the revenue that is being used in both shopping carts and lists. We're seeing that come through the business and traditional manner as well. So yeah, it's been all those metrics been just outlined, we're following as well as you know making sure that we're tracking. The offline revenue that's coming to the business by seeing the web assist, that's happening as well. Sounds great. I'd love to learn more about that with you guys, maybe at another time. So Phil and Naveen, I'd like to get you guys in on this next question too. So when one of the major strategies advancing this report obviously is the, you know, the B2B companies have to move beyond the monolithic e-commerce platforms, you know, the old spaghetti code everybody talks about in order to deliver the kind of personalized and flexible experience. That your customers want these days, especially in B2B where you said it's more complex than B to C, certainly the orders. And so fill in Naveen, what I mean, what I mean, can you expound on that argument, I mean where have you companies to you know take that step? Sure, I'll start to me and if it's OK. So first of all, you know when you look at you know commerce platforms, I think it's important you know that you invest, invest in a platform that has the flexibility to meet the growth needs and you know the customer centric experiences, right. We know the top pThat your customers want these days,latforms that are out there by the analysts, right. I'll have end to end functions that specialize kind of in their founding functions. So we know the force, some come out of CRM, some kind of come out of customer experience and so forth, right. However, you know you want to make sure that you're picking one that has this modularity or ability to become headless, right, because the business may drive certain decisions so that you may want you know your experience to be layered to be one technology you may want. Your customer service to be a different technology, so it's not just an end to end monolithic system, right? As well as understanding when you're on this journey, right, you, you've got your business drivers, your technology drivers and your experience drivers from the business, right? You know, we're really taking a position that the experienced drivers really need to take the forefront, right? And they really need to drive that strategy and leveraging design thinking, workshop, customer journey, mapping, just defining who these personas are and so forth, right. But that doesn't mean the business strategy isn't equally as important, right? Because we need to understand that at the end of the day, it needs to fit the needs of the needs of the business. Right. So there'll be a matter if you want to add to that. Sure. I think the one thing we need to consider that is we are building an application to an end customers. So their expectations are going to change frequently. So when their expectation is changing, you should be able to accommodate those expectations. If you go with a monolithic program, it is stuck with the process because you have to make it a lot of changes. We had our customer where making small changes to the application takes and releasing that one takes nine months time. By that time customer expectation is going to change. So we have to make sure that the architecture so flexible and composable and easy to use, so that whenever any changes, any requests coming from business or to meet the customer needs, we should be able to deliver that one quickly within four weeks or six weeks cycle time. So that's what we need. We request most of the customer focus on the decoupled, the composable architecture, Mac principles we use for that, right. Do you how do you know like when to be, when to make that switch from monolithic to micro services and mock and all this? Because a lot of companies still need their old monolithic platform, at least for part of their operations, especially if they're like a distributed company. Mike, can you talk about that a little bit? I mean, how did you know? And you've done this before, right? At other, even other companies? Yeah. From the distributors perspective, it's kind of a crawl, walk, crawl, walk, run phase for us, right? I mean back to how I started the conversation about just really aligning with our ERP now is our ERP five years from now going to be the ERP we're we're working with? It could be and it may not, it may be another ERP, right. So to Phillips Point and Naveen's point, you know for us, we're kind of looking at this in 12 to 24 chunks, a 24 month chunks, right? So you're right, I've had the opportunity to launch the e-commerce platform that I've integrated with ARG Industrial in the Jansen space in a previous life and saw a substantial amount of revenue come through and stability with the ERP. And so you know for me starting there and then looking, peeling back the layers like Ben said, right, customer journey mapping, how are people using our search, are the attributes in the taxonomy working the way that our end users are looking to engage with it. You know, we're finding that a lot of our customers. Are using our website in the market segments or industries that they come from, right, So developing micro taxonomies for them. So looking at the different layers of our commerce platform and seeing how they're scaling, what their product road map is, I'm keeping an eye to that and eventually I could see us looking outside of our all-in-one platform, commerce platform today. If I could add just briefly on that I one of the terms that we're that we're using in a somewhat reluctant to say it out loud sometimes but as is an ERP agnostic. E-commerce experience and what I mean by that is let's pull our order entry team out of the ERP, let's pull them out of the engine Bay and get them into a place where they're using the controls to operate the vehicle. And so part of our e-commerce road map is actually to take these tools that we've now delivered for our customers and designed for our customers and reverse leverage them into our internal teams, into our internal teams process. We're a we're an acquisitive company  we've merged 8 total brands at this point in time. The varying levels of expertise in certain pockets of our catalog. So by pulling all of the information utilizing the PIM, increasing the attribute data and descriptive data around those products into the e-commerce experience and then giving that tool to our e-commerce or to our regular off offline sales team. We can unify the experience. We can ensure that our team understands the full product suite a whole lot better and that we're promoting the right products to our customers as their consulting with us over the phone and they'll get that same experience online. So really kind of I'm just kind of dovetailing off what Mike says, you know the ERP. We can get more out of it by expecting less of it and moving more into the technologies that are really more enabling for catalog traversing. To Ben's point, I want to add one thing, You know what we're seeing this first hand at our counters at our 12 branches. So ARG industrial, we're we're housing fitting distributor. And so the fact of the matter is a lot of the action that's happening our business is when somebody's walking in with a hydraulic hose that broke off a Caterpillar right or a piece of equipment or somebody that is working in the wine country of Oregon and there's an a water spot that needs to be repaired. What's happening now is our folks that are work, our custom engineers that are working behind the counter for years, we're looking at the descriptions in the ERP and there were abbreviations and everything's in all caps, Ben, to your point, they're using the taxonomy in the e-commerce website, the end user website to get in there. And if somebody comes over the counter, they're using site search, they're diving into market segments, they're looking at the inside diameter that's in the left hand navigation. And what is also happening is that they're getting answers to questions out faster because they're leveraging the product knowledge of the taxonomy and the rich product detail information that can't be stored in our ERP. There's 20 character limits in a short description. So that has been amazing to see, but we're also seeing that our sales team and folks that are coming on board to ARG Industrial. They're ramping up quicker. In regards to training, we are leveraging the website and the rich product information as a training tool for our people as well. So I could talk more about this, but then again want to talk about how this is become an internal asset to our organization as well. Hey, Mike, can I just add on that because I have a question. I recently worked with a big HVAC distributor with a very similar counter experience, right? Can you elaborate a little bit on how you took that counter experience and brought it online, right, because I'm sure there's plenty of tribal knowledge that sits behind that counter and how do you take that and leverage it digitally, That's a great, that's a great question. And Paul, we talked about this recently. You know for us, you know we've been live for about a month, excuse me about a year now Phil and about a year and three months. Our north star of our digital transformation, today customers can find fittings and adapters and hose. Our North stars to provide a end user on our website the same ability from behind the counter to assemble based off our acronym we called Stamp,Size Temperature Application media. And so we're actually developing a an assembly, a Configurator on our website that is going to be tied into a rules engine that takes all of the years and years of data in our ERP, of custom assemblies. And all of the information that is done on the back end from our folks that are working behind the counter. So that when someone hits our website bill and they don't know what they need, but they know the size of the hose. The application how it's used. Our North star of our transformation is going to be building something that our end users can use online to take them on that journey. Today, you know we have a website that we're selling those components individually, but you can see from the orders that are coming in that you know the customer is asking for fitting 1, fitting 2 holes and then in special instructions they're putting in there how they would like that assembled. But that's a great question because in the hose and fitting space. There's reports out there. Our industry is late to the game because it's complex configuration and assemblies is really 80% of what our branches do. Yeah, thanks Mike, you're hitting, you're hitting on the confidence that the end user has that they're getting the right thing and that's something we think about in our business, which is specific to door hardware and security products in that they know generally what they're looking for. But the reason the consultative sale has been so important for us and the tribal knowledge has been so important for us as they're looking for us to give them confidence that they're going to get the right product that keeps them from having to roll a truck a second time or send something back. So the more you can increase customer confidence in their own self selection of the product. The more benefit to the business and obviously the more fans you're going to have and the higher the NPS that you guys will experience from that. So really good stuff,  yeah Ben, that you're absolutely right. And that's one other area where we're trying to leverage AI is helping use AI to pull in all of the years of transaction, invoicing, quoting data on these custom assemblies to really have a rules engine or guardrails that when an end user does come to that section of the website. With 80%,90% certanity we're providing choices that are really relevant to that end user. A lot of what you're discussing here is also getting into what I was talking about having a unified content layer, right. You get all your backend data manage correctly, you're going to have more accurate and up-to-date content on your website for customers to see, right. So maybe I was wondering you can talk more about what Don was saying in the report there that one of the first suggestions there was to create a unified content layer that all your customers and all these different touch points. Will be able to access the right the right information, right information. The content you that the seller wants them to see or that the customer needs to see. Can you talk about how you move to that kind of a unified content layer and are there risks involved there? Yeah. Paul, is that question to me. Sorry. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah. Ben, can you talk about that? Sure. Yeah. So our journey around this began some time ago prior to the activation of our most recent platform, which launched in November. It was really around we were one of the first distributors within our space. To move to a product information management system and the notion there was really to begin to apply. The absolutely it's attribute data, it's metadata and things like that really do inform some of the tribal knowledge or that the tribal knowledge is built off of is that understanding of each products attributes in the specific solutions that they provide. So that's one way that we've started down that path I think in terms of moving into a fully enabled. A platform that's fully enabled with all of the different pieces of information throughout our business. We have some work to do yet on enabling a really tight integration between our CRM product and the experiences that users and journeys that users are taking online to begin to inform our team where there are hiccups, but also where there are opportunities that maybe need a little bit more exploring. So that's some of the journey that we've taken so far. I apologize to add this one. So when you're looking from the organization purpose especially the B2B organization right, they're actually organized such a way that is a functional or the business functions based organization structure. So they were defined the goals and they set up their entire ecosystem of technology to deliver that specific goals. They may not have a shared goals across each department. For example, marketing departments only focus on lead generations. If you go for a commerce, they're trying to sell. If you go for a call centre, they're only focused on the outer side of the post purchase activities. So what is happening, this works well with the organization because they are well managed structure wise. But if you see from the customer point of view, it may get when they interacting with the brand, they get a different information from different channels. That's one of the reason we need to move from the siloed architecture to the book for the monolithic architecture, from the monolithic architecture to the unified architecture where all these functions can sit on top of those architectures so that they can get the same information across all the channels. So that way customer when they're interacting, customer point of view when they engage. Instead of looking from organization ROI point of view, look from the customers engagement ROE we call return of engagement. When the customer engaging, they get the same consistence experience across various touch points. That's where this is very, very important for the organization to move from the this monolithic architecture to go for the modular as well as unified ecosystem for the customer. Paul, if I could add to this part of the conversation. So as I'm part of the technology committee with our buying group and as I mentioned before, if you look at any of the market researches, I think you guys have done reports on it as well as MDM and some others talking about the different industries and the adoption maturity level. Again, I preface by saying I think in our space, the adoption maturity level is very, very low. So one of the things that we did was we basically formed. My distribution business and two others that are part of this buying group. Actually collaborated together and basically invested in our first batch of product data to be enriched. That was two years ago. What has now evolved is we've created an industry Co-op pim and we are now getting our key manufacturers to supply product data to that PIM. And the great thing about it is we've kind of developed it in a way that the manufacturers have levers that they can allow approved distributors not only in our buying group but other distributors that are wanting their data, so in the last three, I'll tell you right now. Three years ago when we were talking about payment product data there was people's were had a know a blank stare at us and now people are raising their hands being how do we get access to it. And the other journey that I'm seeing is from the manufacturer standpoint is for many, many years manufacturers would send the product data to the distributor or digital assets would be put into a Dropbox and said hey Mr. Distributor pull what you need. It's been really amazing to see that manufacturers now have the ability with their pims and APIs to drop. Massive amount of product data. And then having many, many distributors to be able to do a nightly sink or get in there when they want to and pull down that information. So that's been a really cool thing to see in the industry and that goes back to Ben's point about. Pam, product information management system, but also having  a CMS platform that allows us connect with our manufacturers. So by quick down the supply chain, right, it's yes, you're hearing that data up, but also with your if you have other wholesalers or resellers and then the young customers. So it's true like an end to end. Yeah. And The funny thing is manufacturers for many years and we're even having conversations with some of the large ones that are trying to identify the right person and right seat or they're developing their own digital teams. Ben, you've probably had conversations with some manufacturers and they're like they're not sure how to handle you because they're, I don't know who on my team can help you, but we want to help you because we're seeing the growth and we're seeing the metrics, what the conversations we're having many type of workshop conversations with them. And that we're all understanding that the manufacturers have kind of over time or over the years have kind of stopped at the distributor, but they're also realizing now that, you know, how do we make sure that we get that information to the end user but keep the distributor in the mix. And so in our case, we're developing almost manufacturer micro landing websites, right. So it's a mini version of the manufacturer's website, so that it's their brand, it's their marketing message, it's all their, you know, digital assets. But if they do want to put a link to our website on the distributor finder, it's an endless user experience. They're coming from the manufacturer website to a distributor website that has the same look, feel, but we have pricing, availability. In Alaska or Seattle or Fairbanks. So it's been a really cool journey to be part of. Hey Mike, real quick question regarding like this journey with this Co-op if you will of customer data from your partners and your know many manufacturers potentially, any challenges in the governance around the normalization of data whether you know it's feature sets and specs, I mean I see that as a huge challenge right? Massive, Phil, great question. Listen there some of our manufacturers. We learn first hand the importance of having weights, weight and dense, right. The fact is when all of a sudden yours now shipping products and when somebody, an end user goes to check out Phillip and the weight is 0 and it's a £15 adapter, right, that needs not having that information immediately. We reach out to the manufacturer and saying when we're calculating freight on our website, we need your weights. In many cases, a lot of them are like we don't even have them now, we don't have them ourselves, we need to develop them. So we've learned first hand that. Especially with some of these assemblies and the fabrication of these products, having the inside diameter of making sure the application is very clear in the specification and features, you need to have that information. So yes, that's a great question and we saw that first hand with end users buying online and trying to ship product. Gotcha. This also is getting a little bit to one of the other points, I think it was step four that says you know you should see, you look at where your customers are dropping off, you know if it's on your e-commerce site and or and then can you guys talk more about it, you know how you can benefit from that, how do you? Take that step and as it has, it worked for you and then how your technology have that you're talking about here helps you to manage that better. I can start on this one. One of the things that so in our business and Mike, you might have the same scenario and yours. Our customers purchase over the course of a very long period of time. So on our site, they might build a cart that may persist for up to two to three weeks, right that we're dealing with locksmiths who may be purchasing supplies that they don't need immediately. And so they're going to let those kind of rack up into a larger order. So abandoned cartwheel, it's an interesting notion and certainly something that in the B to C world makes a ton of sense, In the B2B world you have to think about that a whole lot differently. So one of the things that we've taken a look at to truly understand where the fall off is in our search. And we spend a lot of time combing through what searches are clearly hot spots for our customers in which they're typing multiple different ways of trying to get to a specific outcome. And they're and they're either not finding it or it's taking too long to find it. So we've come through that data to really kind of focus our lens a little bit more crisply on. What's the gap? How do we address that gap? And we're still learning like we're not done with that. It's something that's going to continue to happen forever, quite honestly. But there's in the early goings, there's so much that you can learn from that. So we've kind of started there and then further to the full customer experience. Managing things like returns and rma's and payments on invoices and things like that, there's. We tend to focus so much on the buying process. So we've really challenged ourselves to look at the other areas of frustration within the customer's journey that doesn't have anything to do with buying, but maybe back off as management for them to find those irritations. Because if we can, if we can provide a solution that feels really smooth, really frictionless. But and I'm hesitant to use that term sometimes, but something that makes it really convenient for them to use us for their business and really kind of complete that full 360 experience. Those are the areas that we're focusing on because they become the differentiators if table stakes is being able to find the product easily. Which I think it has become that then the differentiation is on those kind of secondary or what was kind of considered secondary use cases for our customers. And now also is the in the report it mentions you got to look ahead, try to see what your customers are going to want five years from now and if you have this kind of flexible platform that you can build on now. A Phil or Naveen, maybe you could chime in on this one. You know how you best take advantage of this kind of. Infrastructure you have now with the APIs, micro servers and headless and everything so you can, you know be in a position. No change course a few years from now. You have to if you're you need to build a new revenue streams or satisfy new customer demands. I think Ben actually mentioned about the product search, actually I'll take you to the next level of that. For example, today you have when they're searching for a product, you may see three or four products are listed out, maybe third or fourth product, maybe a profit margin for you. I have more profit margin than the first two products which the customer seeing for it. Hope you can use AI programs for that to drive that based on your industry, your company goals and drive that also as part of the search. It's not just a searching for an end customer point of view. Use your KPIs, your the profit mark, so many other parameters to drive that experience to the customer. Still you can make more profit out of that. Things are moving very fast today in the digital commerce ecosystems and AI is playing a big role today and also today we have seen on other industries is basically the metaverse is playing a big role as a twin digital twin what we use for the post purchase activities now. The Metaverse is acting like is the digital team for the pre sales activities like. And the customers want to explore your product, make sure it spits into the right combination. You can use the Metaverse to drive that. That's how the technology is moving very fast and that's where we need to think about whether your infrastructure ready to take to that level. So that's where we always think about when we work with the customers. We always make sure that it is thought through for next five years. So your AI think you'll come in the next six months itself it starts hitting the already you know that ChatGP is already making a lot of noise in the world. It's actually going to help a lot of for the companies. Business. Yeah. And I think just to add on that, right, like this future proofness, right. And you know, we showed the illustration earlier of the mock technology. We've talked about headless, we talked about composable and so forth, right. But we just don't know 3-4, five years down the road what's coming next. And what's important is that we can continue business as usual, right? And we can, you know, enable our experience to be, you know, consistent while we're potentially just changing these back end. Modular systems. And then bringing it into production, right. So it allows for the next festive breed, whatever element may be in the modular ecosystem to bring it in into play, right? That's just to add one example to that Phil. For example today you may be your billing system maybe IPO based or invoice based billing systems. You wanted to move a, you want to increase your customer loyalty, you wanted to move a subscription based model. If you are, if your backend system is not modular, it's very easy for very difficult for you to move to that model. If it is already a model or architecture, just swap those particular functions with a new product or new services so that you can deliver that quickly to the customer. That's a great point of being in as we speak. We're dealing with the customer right now that is looking at marketplace functionality, not to build out a whole marketplace, but they're trying to enable their dealers to mute more in control of their data, you know, their product data and their customers and all this sort. So how do you enable those dealers, you know to self-serve if you will with the marketplace functionality rather than your typical order management system, right. I want to add one thing part to Naveen's point. So one example of AI and yeah, you're right, in the ChatGPT, if I see that, it's everywhere, right, it's all over the news. But I'll give you one example from a distributor perspective where we're leveraging some AI. And so you know and then you probably know this for years when you had a product detail page where you had related items, complimentary items or customers also purchased those carousels on a product detail page, most of the time those were manually managed. Tell you that we're leveraging AI so that when a customer's about to check out or purchase on a product detail page, depending on their frequency of ordering, instead of having related items due to reorder, Carousel will display for them. So that it's an item that is you know it's a it's probably around the time that they're due to reorder it or customers also purchase related items. So on our product detail pages we're actually leveraging AI to display products at the right time of the journey. And that is something moving from manually operating them to now seeing a lift in ROI and revenue from those carousels. It's we're we're doing something similar Mike. And one of the other points along those lines which is less, it's less AI driven and more kind of points back to the need to really acurate your specifications and attributes really well as we look at products that are equal substitutes from other lines, right. And to do that it's basically asking is this is this product checking all the boxes that the product that currently on page is checking. So it's not just saying. If sometimes people buy this as well, which could be a complete complimentary item in our world, A door lock and a door stop, which are two completely different things, but frequently purchased together. We're continuing to do that where it makes sense, but then we're also looking at what's the margin profile of the product that we want to sell the most. If it matches all those other criteria. Maybe we put that one in there and we're being sensitive and you have to because you have manufacturing partners that would take exception but so we're navigating that in the right way and being respectful to those relationships while also providing you know recommendations to our people that we to our customers that we feel are the ones we we'd most like to sell. That's awesome. That's great. We have about 5 or 6 minutes left here. It was one other, one of the other points in the report, was that suggesting it was a six strategic point to design, test and implement quickly. You got an opportunity, you want to test it and get it out there soon. Can you guys talk about the how you do that but without taking on taking on risks that might hurt you? Phil, do you want to? Bear with me. Can you take that? I just had some connectivity problems. I didn't hear part of that question. Sure. I think see it's all the how you set up your organization right. It should be like a start up thought process is required because you should allow the fail fast and learn from that. So if you're not, if you're thinking that I want a solution I it has to work perfectly then you take long time to implement. So after implementation then you realize that that's not we had a very interesting case study in the UK customer base, they went with the implemented the commerce platform. For a B2B ecosystems and after six months they realized that the ROI they're looking for not getting it. So they approached us when we looked into that, the problem is same thing, they built entire ecosystem without engaging the customer. So we started engaging the customer into the ecosystem, their customer and started building a chunk by chunk and testing it. So because of that we know that it fail fast then we have the time to you know fix it and go forward it. Now the platform is completely up and running with how the customer wants to interact and that's actually helped us to create multiple personas because you're different customers. Segment is looking for a different. They want to engage with your customers. Previously they had one personas across all the segments. So this actually helped us to build that because we targeted a low hanging fruit where the we have low impact on the business. We identify those personas first started building that equation. That's what I always recommend customer think about, allow your team to feel fast, so that way you can have a better approach. That's what we go with continuous approach and take the use cases and design quickly implement and then test it on the ecosystem. Yeah. And just to add to that you know breaking down some organizational silos right within your organization. And the effective governance across your connected ecosystem? Right? Your content, your data, all the moving parts, right? We need to make sure the communication is key as you roll out, right? Hey, Paul, I and Ben this. I have a question on here. I'm curious what size staff Mike and Ben have to manage B2B &  B to C respectively. Ben, I don't know if you want to take that, I can. I'll answer after you if you want to give it a go. Yeah, sure. So we don't have a huge team in fact prior to prior to the current e-commerce platform that we're now on fully internally developed e-commerce system and even there our team was comprised of primarily a systems architect. A couple of folks on product information management and a couple additional users who were really more on content management on the front end of the site. As our organization grows. Our team has grown obviously now kind of the power of this. So we have a really talented development staff of two, two folks and we've now moved to off the shelf platform and we don't own that code fully. So we work with our partner to make those adjustments. So what has that done for our development team? Well, we've reprioritized or reappropriated their skill set into developing our API out in further ways that we could actually turn into value drivers for our customers as well as for our internal team. So at this point in time, my entire organization. Which in my in our business includes IT and know that it is not fully e-commerce. In this case, I have about a team of 15 people including IT, our digital team and our e-commerce support team, which is a little bit of an anomaly and that they're really a shared service to the entire business. About a minute left. Mike, did you want to answer that? Yeah, no, it's a little smaller in scale. You know, for us, it's myself. We have our commerce and product data outsource team. We also have a NOAA firm or a consultancy slash agency that we work on, work with. Both of those parties are an extension of our team, but in house. Mike, who asked the question, it's myself, a person that works on the product information. Digital Product specialist. I have an asset under the IT team that helps with the API and then we have a digital sales Specialist. Why we have a digital sales specialist? They that person works with all of the branch and assistant branch managers for those complex orders or assemblies that might be coming through the shopping cart, but they may need kind of somebody to speak to before they submit it over line. So he kind of guides them. It's kind of a train the trainer model with our 15 or 13 branches across the Pacific Northwest, so might 3 in house and then two separate companies that we have support teams for. And that's in your, in your case it's just B2B, right? Or do you guys also have  B to C channel? just wanting . We are finding I mean, listen, we had an order for out Of Montreal ship out of Anchorage, Alaska to send earth anchors to Key West, Florida. It's not our main driver of our business. And I was, we were very surprised that these organizations, even looking at the substantial cost of freight at the end of the day, it was a product they needed, it was in stock and they knew that when they could get it. So those transactions are happening on our website as part of our acquisition strategy, but again, the main driver for us to service our customers in the territories we serve, but we are selling to retail as well. OK, great. Well, thanks. Looks like we're out of time here everyone. And thanks very much again to Don and Ben and Mike, Naveen and Phillip for the discussion and to all of our audience for listening today. Of this webinar available, and after we conclude, you'll see a pop up window on your screen asking you to provide feedback on today's chat. If you can, please take a few moments to fill us out. Your feedback helps us plan future webinar topics. And understand what kinds of presentations work best. Also, please keep an eye out for our weekly e-mail to find out. What other webinars we have planned? Or visit digitalcommerce360.com to see our upcoming schedule or view our library of archived webinars. Thank you everyone and have a great rest of your day. Thanks, Paul. Thanks a lot. Thanks, Paul. Thanks Ben. Thanks Mike. See you in a bit. Bye, bye, bye.