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If you are seeking new ways to increase your ROI on marketing with your commerce platform, or you may be an entrepreneur who wants to grow your team and be more efficient with your online business.
Talk Commerce with Brent W. Peterson draws stories from merchants, marketers, and entrepreneurs who share their experiences in the trenches to help you learn what works and what may not in your business.
Keep up with the current news on commerce platforms, marketing trends, and what is new in the entrepreneurial world. Episodes drop every Tuesday with the occasional bonus episodes.
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Brent Peterson (00:02.446)
Yeah.
Brent Peterson (00:07.202)
This is Brent from Talk Commerce and Scott from Always Off Brand. And we are here at Shoptoberfest, sponsored by Shopware. It's fresh. It's fresh? Is that a new tagline you just came up with? We did that in the... we did? Yeah, did you remember that? God, that cracked me up, Brent Peterson. Jesus, you cracked me up. That's right. That was a funny bit, then...
Not funny anymore. All right, so we have Robert Rand here. Do we? Yes. Are ours in the house? Not from the Rand Corporation. know that you tried to make that joke. No, you did. Yes.
Robert, go ahead and introduce yourself. Tell us who you're with, why you're here at Shoptoberfest. fresh. Well, I'm Robert Rand. head partnerships and alliances at ipass .com, integration platform as a service. There you go. I explained that earlier. it right, didn't I? I can't understand that. Robert, I'm a plain guy. I grew up in Iowa, went to Arizona State, jokes later. You've got to just tell what the hell does that mean?
at Yonkers? I did. Yes, I shopped at Yonkers, a great department store. I don't know if they're around anymore.
But Robert, if I'm e -commerce, I'm either B2B, D2C, it doesn't matter. What do I need from IPass? What do I need from you? What do you need from IPass? Well, you've got a tech stack. You've got an e -commerce platform. You've got something for accounting and ERP. Maybe if you're retail, you've got point of sale. It's complicated. You've got CRM. You've got a product information management system, different software for fulfillment.
Brent Peterson (01:48.63)
At the end of the day, need all that software talking together. You need to break down those silos and get your customers orders products all flowing together. You fix all of that? Yeah, in a nutshell. Genius. Yeah, think of it as that multi -tool that is the central point where you plug everything in.
or think of it as your recording board where all the things go into one place. Sorry. Brent is now charading. I'm going all over the place. We're playing Pictionary with Brent. Yeah, nobody can see me. No, see, I... trying to explain Even I can't see him and I'm sitting right next to You don't need to mansplain it, Brent. He explained it perfectly. Yeah, sorry.
Are you are you regretting this invite accepting the invite now Robert? he comes on my show he says, God why did I do this? Usually it takes until we get to one of the dad jokes. Yeah. Yeah. It's really it's just upsetting that it didn't start with me.
Okay, so this is vital. This is a critical situation right now. What do you do? Absolutely, and it only becomes more critical the more that all these businesses are evolving, the more software they wind up with, the more that they need the software interconnected. Now, even as we look forward toward AI and other things, that only really helps when you're getting your data where it needs to be, when you're pulling it all together and seeing all the insights in one place.
And so we see it as really just this critical point in a business where for years and years they've been paying system integrators to do it all custom, they've been using legacy integration platforms where they've got to write custom software in the middle to get it all going. And here we give one nice user -friendly platform to...
Brent Peterson (03:33.559)
keep it all moving in a proactive way, know, not just trying to build a connector from here to there every time you need something, but something that'll grow with you. Yes! Yes! Yes! I mean, preach, preach. You need a hallelujah for that. Yes, definitely. I mean, I love to use control C, control V. That's my integration system. We have a gentleman right listener. The person to the right of us is just climbing know good news is that we're recording all this on video as well. We're going to get that.
We're going to get that guy literally climbing through the window behind Scott. I I just passed like seven doors to the room that he was climbing through.
I want to, can you come on and explain that? We have an open mic. should get some pretzels. We should get some pretzels. Anyway, back to you, Robert. This sounds interesting. So I'm envisioning like a big, like a, you know, like electrical panel, like at your house, like everything kind of plugs in there and the panel just does, it makes it all work. Well, that's really at the heart of it, what it is. It's very flexible because different businesses are going to have different.
fields of data, different types of product data, different things. But you really want standards in the process. You don't want to have to build that thing from scratch and build you an electrical panel with your own machine tooling. You want something that you can put in there and get the right breakers and get the right instrumentation and get it right quickly and easily. And so that's what we deliver on. It's the ability to get up and running quickly and maintain it and evolve with it and turn off spokes to our hub and turn on new ones.
Roll with the punches really and I think you know one of the critical points that we work really hard to continually Deliver on is not just being able to turn on an integration But then it's what happens the day after when you put a typo in your data somewhere You can't just have an order not get to the warehouse and not get fulfilled You know it's being proactive in that process to making it all easy giving you real -time Notifications I get this this this hits so deep to me
Brent Peterson (05:40.481)
Brent, told you this was in your interview, but he's really You're doing much better than me. Am I? You guys are doing great. I'm just going to sit and watch. He's speaking my language. Yes. I think, I mean, I'm just going to piggyback on one thing he said just about the custom data and the custom integrations because I was involved in a system where one error, one typo would kill everything. my God. And so all orders would stop. And then you've got to figure out where did the order stop and why did it stop? I spent. And everything going to the warehouse would stop working. I spent years in.
years and I had my own shop years and years and a bazillion dollars I don't I'm embarrassed to say to be frank of trying to automate a system and it was creating custom things and it basically if one rule was out if one I'm telling you if one column was changed the data flow was screwed yep
And it happened all the time and then we put an if thens and we tried to basically solve out, right? We rooted And you're trying to do that for every single client. Yes, For every single business. For the SIs, it turns out that the dealing with all that, so they get paid for all of that, but it's very hard to retain a customer, keep them happy. And for the systems integrator,
everything's an emergency. Exactly. left and right, that they've got to stop everything that they're doing to put out fires. It's not healthy for anyone in the system in that way. You want to be able to, you know, wash, rinse, repeat, and be working on the next thing that brings value, not digging in and finger pointing. You know, we find that most of the time with integrations.
something doesn't work, the customer calls, hey, where's my order, what's going on, and then everybody scrambles and two weeks later you've got four teams on a call together, duking it out, pointing fingers, fighting about it. Four meetings helps, definitely always helps. Always. Let's back up for a minute because our last guest had a Whiskers, it was Whiskers, right? They had a cat litter box. If you haven't listened to that episode, check it out, Shane from Whiskers. This is going to be one after the other. is it?
Brent Peterson (07:45.711)
Let's give this to Robert. Let's say this guy has multiple channels. How is he going to connect all these different channels together? He's either going to hardwire it together or he's going to have some kind of platform that allows all these channels to come into one place, right? That's fine, Robert. You talk about it and then I'm going to throw holes. I'm sorry, I'm I'm sorry. And he's Frank. He said he was. Or at least he was going to be. Go ahead, Robert. I need you to reply to that comment by Brent. Well, I think, the other...
I'm gonna try to take it seriously, right? The other piece that you know that's traditionally... serious! This is serious! I'm envisioning 8 ,000 cords going into one panel and one going out. Well, because normally you'd have one cord going between each and imagine like a phone system where you've got for every user, for every household and every business, a different cord to every other. Yes! And that's how it's been for years and years. The way that we operate, it's a one to many.
you get, let's say an e -commerce order comes down into our hub, and that can instantaneously flow to as many places as you need, maybe to your marketing stack for your marketers to send them messages that are going to trigger based on it. It's going to go to your CRM for your sales team. It's going to go to your...
ERP for accounting to your point of sale for store pickup, know, there's some fulfillment warehouse system shipping system and so not having to go to the same platform over and over and over again for the same data and not having to reset that up over and over because that's where a lot of businesses they give up that it becomes too expensive too cumbersome and yeah, you know that they they get some core stuff and then it all stops
And what we're seeing is that when you simplify this and standardize it, now they can think about what comes next. can, you know, if they're a retailer, they can be thinking about not just store pickup, but hey, how do we have a loyalty program in store and online that's synchronized so that it's seamless for the shop or gift cards that are seamless.
Brent Peterson (09:43.179)
between the different sales channels and really getting into the next level and competing and meeting the shopper where they want to be and on the operation side being able to really deal with, if you can shave a few percent off of operating costs, it's huge. really just being able to be more creative in that moment. I'm in.
I love this. I love this. He's got me. I had you at hello. Yes you did. Sign me up. Not only do I already own 20 timeshares, but now I have a full Ipass system. I'm telling you, people are apt out.
Even, you name the platform, okay? We're here at ShopWare, but I don't care what platform. We are apt out. At Quickfire, we take over, we go into these little tiny businesses, right? They've already got so much garbage. They got so much Hazarai. They got so much crap on the back end. What's Hazarai? Hazarai is just a bunch of shit that you don't need. It is. yeah. You got a bunch of Hazarai. Don't you know Hazarai? No. Yeah. We've already discussed this. I'm a Lutheran, so.
They have so much. Everything is stoic. Again. It's like you're pigging out that you just got all this excess that you don't need and you should never have. Yes, exactly. And you got Drek in there. You got good stuff. You got other things. So anyway. Drek. Drek is just bad. You want to stay away from Drek. Drek is a bad ingredient. And you could have Schmutz. Now Schmutz is different than Drek. Robert, am I wrong? No, you're absolutely right.
Schmutz.
Brent Peterson (11:40.287)
It feels custom. Yeah, and not to sell Robert's solution, it takes some of the custom out of it because you only have to do that one little channel. And oftentimes they will have built in connectors for something that exists already. So you don't have to reinvent it. And I think the biggest thing, and your previous guest was on Magento, Magento is very well known for being able to do whatever you want to do. And so you can custom write whatever you want to whatever.
and oftentimes that's what the developer chooses, right? So what Robert was saying, I don't want to take words out of your mouth, But you will. But I'm going to anyways. Is there a good word for this one? It's not schmutz, right? No, it's not schmutz. It's... gonna give me a word? You're quelling right now. You're quelling a little bit. Quelling is like you're just happy, just joy is coming out of you. Overwhelmed with joy. It's just oozing out. I'm so happy about iPads.
You know, but...
You know, in all seriousness, you've got a marketplace with these integrations to start from. It's only going to get bigger. We just keep growing it more. So seriously connect to everything and everybody? We're on the path to that. We connect with a lot of different systems and we're always adding more and we've got an open SDK. So if somebody's using something unusual, something bespoke, they can add it and it can then talk to all the other systems all at once with all the error handling and all the good features. And when you look at
how we're operating it. So marketplace, you have integrations, there's these data maps to start from. if you think product data, you're thinking usually the product skew, the price, the inventory, the product description, what everybody has. And then you can come in and add your unique fields. So if you're selling cell phones and you've got fields that talk about the screen size and how many gigabytes and how long the battery life is and what carriers it's good for, you can add those in and map those. And so that can then flow everywhere. And so you're just dealing with the last month.
Brent Peterson (13:42.871)
of it you're not trying to deal with all the API's by yourself and all the craziness. Kvellts? Kvelling? You're Kvelling. I feel good right now. Don't you? feel like I'm Kvelling. This just hit my brain and I'm I'm gonna ask you if I pass is this maybe this is on the product line architecture on the roadmap right?
How do you feel about taking all the streaming services and just put them freaking together and I pass that shit into one goddamn thing? Basically recreate cable except for streamers. What do you think? I like the idea. I hate having to pivot between different apps to figure out which show is on which I'm always Googling, what's on what for my kids. And yeah, I like this idea. not be on your Netflix? How old is I kicked their ass out. They're out.
kicked him out. then they came to... adopted him. We talked about this. talked about this in the show. They came to dinner. They lived near us. Two daughters, 27, 25. They lived together. They come up and they had a whole... because they had kicked out of Netflix. So they had a whole pitch on a Sunday dinner. So you can add, you know, a new member for $7 .99 a month. And, you know, Annabelle and I are thinking about we'll split that $7 .99 and we'll give that to you. And I'm like, no! You did to me!
Wow, over Netflix it was Hulu for us. Well, I was projecting. had some other feelings. God, there's so many bangs, it's like a herd of buffalo in here, in your headphones.
Listener, hope that is enjoyable. We have to ask Robert, what is his outlook for this quarter four? What do you see as What's the big deal, Robert? Besides shopware. Besides shopware. Yeah. Well, we hosted a brunch this morning with Pymcor and shopware and where we were really focusing on the product data as the star because often that's still living in spreadsheets and it's a mess and not really, it impacts the bottom line that it's
Brent Peterson (15:48.595)
It's an operational nightmare and everybody's always a few steps behind. It's interesting in Europe where there's so many countries with so many languages, so many currencies and they're more advanced with having to...
already have some kind of software to manage all that stuff where the US is catching up in a lot of ways. And so we see that as an interesting arena. We're still seeing a ton of B2B organizations, manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers that still haven't really gotten where they need to be in e -comm that they're still years behind. And so that's still a major frontier. And so we're seeing a lot of different.
Areas all at once that they'll kind of tie in together now just between you and me
Who's your competitor? Is there somebody else that has this little magic wand? just fly and they just connect everything. We're not going to publish this part. mean, just, just, just, just, you know, we're talking amongst friends here. Robert, I feel like you and I. There are a lot of legacy integration platforms that cost a lot more money and that are a lot less user friendly and that are really most of the time they give you a framework to create an integration. And then you have to write it all as a blob of code and good luck with the next guy figuring that out. Good luck figuring out the errors. But you know, traditionally,
other players in the market are companies like Zaligo, Jitterbit, Boomi, MuleSoft, Patchworks. There's all kinds of companies in this space. There's the basic, like a Zapier, huge company and great when you need to get a couple of fields flowing around. But to find a hub and spoke platform like us that's really going to make it more sustainable, more proactive, I don't really run into direct competition that we've created.
Brent Peterson (17:34.029)
new segment in the category. Wow, hold on, I got a sound effect for that. That was easy. Did you hear it? That was easy. Did you hear it? I heard it. Yeah, that was easy. Before Robert goes, because we have to let Robert go now. Yeah, we do. We have to let him go. We have to do a selfie. We missed a selfie in the last person. I know. Hold on one second.
Brent Peterson (17:58.157)
That's fantastic. Prost. Prost. Robert, it's nice to meet you, Robert Rand from iPass. Very good to see you. I like, you know We're here at Shocktoberfest, sponsored by ShopWare. You know what? I'm gonna iPass that shit. Anytime I need an easy button, I just like, I wanna put some stuff in and out or whatever, I'm just gonna iPass it. I'm gonna iPass that shit. I'm that shit. All right, thanks for coming in. We'll talk to you next time here from Shoptoberfest. Brent Petersen's got on from, bye -bye.