On this 82nd episode of The E-Comm Show, our host, and BlueTuskr CEO Andrew Maff is with Robin H. Smith - Co-Founder and CEO at VL OMNI. This iPaaS-managed service platform is both expandable and scalable to fit the needs of eCommerce merchants who are scaling their businesses up quickly. Boasting an impressive thirty years in supply chain & data integration, Robin has a BA from the University of Toronto as well as an MA in International Relations from Webster University Vienna Austria!
LIsten to Andrew and Robin discuss how to leverage the power of VL OMNI's iPaaS technology to simplify data integration and optimize your e-commerce operations.
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Andrew Maff and Robin H. Smith
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Robin H. Smith
With 30 years of experience in supply chain and data integration, Robin H. Smith is Co-Founder and CEO of VL OMNI, an iPaaS-managed service platform that is both elastic and scalable to the demands of scaling eCommerce and multichannel merchants. Robin has a BA from the University of Toronto and an MA in International Relations from Webster University, Vienna, Austria.
Transcript:
00:03
If you're not prepared in your integration to handle change, it's going to cost you big bucks. So that's your ROI right there.
00:13
Hey everyone, this is Nezar Akeel from MaxPro. Hi, I'm Linda and I'm Paul and we're the Love and Pebble. Hi, this is Lopa Van Der Merch from RASA you're listening to, and you're listening, and you are listening to The E-Comm Show.
Andrew Maff 00:13
everyone. Welcome to another episode of the E comm. Show. I'm your host, Andrew MAFF, as usual, and today I'm joined by the amazing Robin Smith of VL. Robin, how're you doing today ready for a good show.
random guest 00:13
Welcome to The E-Comm Show, presented by BlueTuskr, the number one place to hear the inside scoop from other e-commerce experts. They share their secrets on how they scaled their business and are now living the dream. Now, here's your host,
Robin Smith 01:01
I'm good. Andrew, I'm really pumped. So let's, let's get at it. Yeah, absolutely beautiful.
Andrew Maff 01:06
Let's dive in. I love timeout, this kind of stuff. Because it's like kind of like needing out about how you can get like one thing to do another. But obviously today, I'm sure based on your background, we're going to be talking about integrations and getting pretty deep into it. But I want to obviously do the usual and give you an opportunity to let everyone know a little bit more about yourself. And of course, more about the alarm name, we'll take it from there.
01:28
Perfect. Well, we've, we've been doing integration for and I'm going to date myself here for 30 years. So we come out of bricks and mortar retail. So you know it. So we've been doing bricks and mortar retail integration on the back end for a long time with complex supply chains, we launched our own platform in 2018, based on Amazon's microservices technology. And today, what we bring to the market is a managed integration platform as a service. And there is there's a real gap in the market between the DIY solutions, the platforms that are designed for IT shops and techies who want to do their own stuff, and the plug-and-play stuff. And as merchants evolve and scale, what happens is that they outgrow those plug-and-play solutions. And there's a knowledge gap internally. And they reach a point where they've got to have much more complex stuff. And either they hire people to do it themselves in-house using some of these DIY tools or the final shot for the agency to build the integration. But what we found was that there's a real need to bring professional expertise to the table to help them scope design. Deal with the gotchas as my partner says the devils in the details with this stuff. And architecting and putting in place solutions that allow merchants not to worry about integration, but to allow them to scale. So do we generate more money for companies? we potentially can but what we do is we make them way more efficient.
Andrew Maff 03:13
Yeah. So your specialty here, you know, picking the integrations, there's, I mean, I don't even I couldn't even guess how many platforms are out there that you could use that are, as you said, like plug and play the DIY stuff. So what would be a very kind of standard use case of leveraging you know, you guys versus just someone trying to wing it?
03:39
Ya know, for sure. So let's let's go back pre pandemic. Pre-pandemic, if you think about the customer journey in E-commerce, it was fairly simple. placed an order, and the order went through a Shopify has got a great admin panel, I can go and look at all my orders. And a lot of sites did a lot of stuff manually, if they went to scale, they went to an order management solution that plugged in pull the orders, maybe they had ShipStation, they pull the orders and did all their fulfillment. And then at a certain point, as you start to scale and as you get volume, you start to look at your tech stock, and the more pieces you have in your tech stock now, your data becomes increasingly disconnected. And at that point, you really need to start thinking about centralizing on a central point of truth. And that central point of truth can be depending on the type of data in organizations that need to do proper financials. financial analysis that you do costing you need to procure some maybe doing like manufacturing, you really need an ERP of some form and at that point, now it becomes I have the back end stack to allow for a much more complex customer journey on the front because I have data to be able to engender that. And that's where the plug-and-play solution which is designed for the lowest common denominator fits in a box, install it fast, you know, like something in the Shopify app store, it's cheap. And it does ABC and it doesn't do X Y Zed, it doesn't talk to returns, it doesn't do anything else. That's great if you're small, but you reach that point where you need to now start to think about how to use scale. There's also two data points that are really critical. One is the basket size. And this stuff has been researched through universities in the UK and North America so that the two data points are 20 to 25 orders a day. Anything beyond that a merchant doing things manually or semi-semi-integrated will start to make mistakes. And we all know what mistakes cost, it can be things like transposing a zip code, and the numbers in a zip code. And then FedEx kicks out an error, and you pay a fee to FedEx to correct it. They don't tell you they're correcting it, but they charge you a fee to correct it. And, all the carriers are exactly the same. The other, another piece, where a lot of companies that are starting to scale and starting to get order volume, don't realize is that any, any basket size, it's under $100, that you're doing manual or semi-manual, you're losing money on every single order. Because of the cost of the infrastructure and the labor and all of the manual intervention that is required. And you see that in the customer journey when somebody places an online order. I mean, we do this experiment every year here, where I get my employees to buy online, and we collect the feedback. And they can tell exactly where integration is not being done in a manual process is happening because he's either there's errors on shipping labels, or there's, there's there are time gaps between when they get things and when the notifications go out. So it's usually those kinds of things that start to trigger that discussion around well. Should I integrate? First of all, do I need to evolve to an ERP? And in most cases, the answer is yes. If you're running a business a sound business, then it's okay. How do I look at integrating that? And then it's what are the workflows that I want to integrate? So the typical ones, if you're doing direct-to-consumer, its orders fulfillments, inventory, price, promotions, products, product updates. Again, depending there are a lot of caveats around some of these products depending on your product catalog, the size of the catalog, how complex it is, and the new variants you've got. But the foundational workflows like orders, fulfillment, and inventory price promos, are all pretty straightforward to put in place, and they enhance that customer journey in the customer experience. On the b2b side, I mean, there's no reason why you can't do b2b on Shopify, Shopify is talking about it. And we have lots of b2b sites, the workflows are slightly different, you would do a customer create coming out of your ERP because that customer has gone through all the credit checks and so on, and so forth. So but the same workflows would apply to orders, fulfillment, inventory price, and so on and so forth. So, that's sort of in a nutshell, but it's really what do you want to do on the front end? And how do you enhance that customer experience with the data that's in your central point of
Andrew Maff 08:55
truth? So you're mostly focused on I guess, two different things one would be improving the overall customer experience just from making that customer journey a lot smoother than it was if you were to take some kind of out-of-the-box thing. And then it's also being able to leverage that additional data on the back end for the seller themselves to be able to kind of diversify like diversify them to decipher what's actually going on what's working, what's not working. All
09:25
right. Yep. Yeah, you have velocity in the business now, which means you can do more things. You have the ability to interact with your customer faster and more often. You can handle multiple shipments I mean, you know the list is endless in terms of the things that you want to do. Well, we always tell customer potential customers, okay let's build the house by building the foundation first, as build your foundational workflows. And then look at how do we integrate returns how do we integrate payouts how do we integrate some of this other functionality? sites have tried to do it all at once they end up delaying their launches and their go-lives. And yeah, it just becomes way too complicated. Yeah.
Andrew Maff 10:14
What would be like? I don't know, if you have like, more like a recent use case, or like, what would be a good specific example of okay, this seller did this, they had this setup, and you came in and automated the whole thing?
10:28
Well, I can give you an example of a site we did. Oh, we're actually during the pandemic, this was a site. They sell nutraceuticals. And they had, they had contracted with an agency, they were typically a company that's sold to spas and things like that. And of course, during the pandemic, all the SPAS shut down, and people couldn't order, but the customers of the SPAS wanted to continue ordering the products. So they rolled up there, they went to an agency rolled up a Shopify store, these guys were using NetSuite. And the agency put together this completely botched integration. And half of it, you know, they were losing orders stuff wasn't fulfillments were not coming out in time. I mean, they could see in Shopify, they were getting orders, but they wouldn't hit NetSuite. And, you know, it was things like shipping methods weren't aligned properly taxation in the US, where you've got so many jurisdictional structures, they weren't set up properly in the ERP. So it's stuff like that, that if you do it properly, and now I'm not managing the integration, I'm managing the business. Yeah. And so we ended up ripping out the integration that they had the agency built, and we redid it, and we sat down with them. And we analyzed exactly what they wanted to do. told them this is how we're going to set it up. Does that meet your business expectations? And I mean, they're, they've seen an expansion just because they don't have to worry about that stuff. They've got an individual who was worrying about that stuff. Previously, now that's focused on doing SEO and you know, things, the things that will generate more revenue generally. Yeah.
Andrew Maff 12:21
Yeah. So has it become more and more complicated as time went on? Basically, because like my thought is like, so you mentioned pre-pandemic. And now let's say post-pandemic, you've got six different sales channels between, let's say, a Shopify site, and your Amazon and Walmart and eBay. And then you've got Facebook and Instagram, which takes sales now, and like, there's Google's got there. So there are all these different sales channels. Now you've got the Shopify sellers that, rightfully so want to be able to customize and personalize their site as much as possible, which can sometimes require 15 to 20 different apps that don't really talk to each other. So what, how complicated has it gotten over time to get all of those things to talk together in one centralized place?
13:09
I think it's, you know, it's interesting, I was at the Magento conference in 2013, and Vegas, where Magento came out, and they were waving this banner about how everything should come and go through your Magento site. And I listened to that, and I thought, Oh, my God, this is really dumb. Because what happens if you want to change your site, is now you got to go through and redesign, re-pick apart all these channels that come through, your, your Magento site, and you've got to now re-engineer every single one of these channels. So I was a little bit disappointed to see Shopify do some of that. But I know why they did it. Because the barrier to entry for the small merchants is too high to be selling on the channel. So there's a cost-benefit there, I get it. But at a certain point, you need to look at creating a hub and spoke model. So your hub is your central point of truth where your data resides. And you can have multiple hubs of truth, central points of truth, I should say. But look at each channel as a spoke, that's a discreet connection, because you may turn a channel on and find out it's kind of useless. And to Shopify as a benefit, there's actually some benefit in the way that they've set it up is that if you if you want to test a channel, doing it through Shopify to see if you get any traction is a great way of doing it. But at a certain point, don't rely 100% on that, take it out and set it up as a spoke because that hub and spoke model now allows you to turn things on and off. Does it cost more in integration? Yes. But it allows you to have a much more refined multi-channel strategy and I don't We see brands that are much, much larger taking that approach. I don't see it as much in the mid-market where a lot of people are faced with that complexity and they look for band-aids. And the band-aid is that quick fix low cost low entry, someone's over. The problem is that people get hooked on it. Yeah. And when you go to migrate, or reply form, now it becomes really complicated.
Andrew Maff 15:28
How, obviously, that kind of answers the backend issue, but like, so the front end side of it, what would be a good example of being able to kind of do this more hub and spoke model and improving the customer journey on the front end.
15:44
So let's actually I was just on a call with a merchant just before jumping on and we were talking about kitting and bundling. And, I mean, there are two aspects to that. kitting and bundling. It's what you show to the customer on the front end, and you want to have this, you know, this nice customer vision or image and, you know, simple, easy to convert on that product. But you have constituent products that make up that bundle. And what you want to do under the hood, is have each one of those products as a discrete line item, so that you're now able to do a one-to-one on the integration. So that if one piece when you're feeding your inventory, if one piece of that bundle is out of stock, I can now turn that bundle off. As opposed to having a scenario where I keep selling that and now I have a customer service issue where a part of that bundle, I can't ship because it's out of stock. So just you know, that's a really simple example. But that's the kind of thing that you need to think about strategically about how you structure that stuff, where you align the back end to be able to engender a much slicker customer experience on the front end, but you don't want to be creating downstream customer service. Yeah, problem.
Andrew Maff 17:10
Interesting. Have you done any, like, I don't even know if a business would share this information with you. But like how much you've been able to help save and or bring in for a business just because you came in? And we're like, we're gonna clean house and integrate everything for you?
17:30
Actually, it that's an interesting question that you asked that we just, we just finished doing an ROI analysis, and the correlation between the return on investment, and GMV is high. I don't remember the exact figure off the top of my head. But generally, we see about a 110% return on the investment. And obviously, if you have volume, and people have Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and you know, seasonal ups and down the volume, the more of those you have, the higher the ROI. So the cost savings. Yeah, I know they're fairly high, it depends on the structure and the size of the business. Generally, we see just manpower savings on in the range of 150 to $250,000. Wow, just by doing that kind of work. But yeah, there.
Andrew Maff 18:31
Sorry. Go ahead.
18:32
It's really the level of automation that you want to invest in REITs, the ROI?
Andrew Maff 18:41
Is there a certain size store that tends to do better than others? Like if someone comes in, you know, they're starting off their sub, let's say, seven figures a year, probably no need to over automate, they'll just typically use any of the DIY stuff or any of the plug and play things as you mentioned. But what about, like, at what point are you like, Okay, once your business gets to that size, you kind of need to look at how you're going to scale your technology.
19:06
Yeah, it's, you know, it depends on the business we've had. We've got sites where that are merchants of 5 million, there's totally automated. Yeah. And then we have sites that are doing 50 million of GMV. And it's partial automation. A lot of it has got to do with the culture of the business and the value they place on that. And that's one of the reasons we did the ROI study actually, and I'll throw out some numbers for you. So 110% ROI per connector. So that's the average return on investment per implemented connector. And that's across all of our Merchant tiers. So we we have various tiers based on usage.
19:56
We've got much faster implementation In time, than a lot of the DIY or the custom-coded solutions. Yeah. Because it's our business. So the cost savings there are huge. So, I mean, I think the, if you want to if you want to use the best quote that we've ever come across as the only constant in commerce is change, and that's Shopify Plus it said that. And if you're not prepared in your integration to handle change, that's gonna cost you big bucks. So that's your ROI right there. So
Andrew Maff 20:39
it's very good point. Very good point. Robin, I really appreciate you having on the show. I don't want to take up too much of your time. I know you're obviously a super busy guy, but I'd love to give the opportunity here. Let everyone know where they can find out more about you and of course more about Villani.
20:55
Perfect. Well, thanks very much, Andrew for having me on. It was great chatting with you. You people can find out about us at vlomni.com we we've just released an updated website with lots of new content and lots of podcasts out there, including this one of course. And lots of videos I've spoken to many many conferences on this subject and evolution of e com businesses and things people should be thinking about. We're not sure we're going to be much longer on Twitter. But we are ya Twitter's become just totally useless for business. I find it's just
Andrew Maff 21:38
it's just you just have Twitter to go see what Elon is complaining about. And then you
21:44
shot who today or the crane is going or whatever. I mean, it's yeah, it's completely useless. We're on Facebook, but that's more informational. And we're happy to chat with people if people want to. People want to chat. We work with lots of agencies, lots of tech platform partners, and we're lots of events. So certainly look us up.
Andrew Maff 22:09
So yeah, beautiful. Appreciate your time. Robin, obviously everyone that tuned in. Thank you as well please do make sure to do the usual rate review, subscribe, and all that fun stuff or go head over to theecommshow.com Check out all of our other podcast episodes but per usual, we will see you all next time.
Narrator 22:30
Thank you for tuning in to The E-Comm Show head over to ecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTuskr YouTube channel. The E-Comm show is brought to you by BlueTuskr, full-service digital marketing company specifically for E-commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to bluetuskr.com Now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of The E-Comm Show.