 We'll begin in just a couple of minutes with marketing and selling the Drupal commerce ecosystem Is anybody already doing that? Somebody like to come present in my stead We do have Drupal commerce users. Yeah, I mean some people are Yeah, what company are you? What is it? Okay, okay, great We're in complete modules. Yeah We're project pages that say that they are not covered by the security policy anymore Anybody else with experience in selling Drupal commerce at your agency. Yeah, okay Great You too. Yeah, what's your what's your win rates against magenta? Yeah, yeah, I can't even win pitching Drupal commerce in front of magenta as a connector right now, so They're challenges Anybody else Sean and no acro media. That's kind of your role there Nice Yeah, yeah Be part of its positioning Maybe making people fight on your battlefield instead of trying to go to theirs Anybody else it's Chris tights on you. I Know he's won a great retail operation. I don't see him. Okay. We can probably get started then I think that's two minutes and Notice how I how I turned from Problems to asking the one person in the audience. I knew had a good track record to kind of get us around to some positivity But the reason we are hosting this session That is non-technical Is because there are non-technical challenges in marketing and selling Drupal commerce Drupal is not traditionally or historically a very commerce centric community Although we've had e-commerce solutions since at least 2007. I think is when I released uber cart 1.0 But trying to think about taking Drupal Upmarket or really even just like out of the Drupal community to compete where merchants are typically going to find their solutions So for example, we went to IRCE earlier this year, which is the internet retailer convention in expo 15,000 people come through and hundreds of Exhibitors exhibit and it's just the phenomenally huge and busy and expensive conference But Drupal has never really been represented there until this year thanks to acro media kind of taking the lead on I'm doing that But that's where we commerce magento Shopify big commerce Volusion hybris demand where etc. Etc. That's where everybody else is. So what will it take for us to get there? And I understand like we're early stages, but I don't think that we are without our Key selling points obviously So just to recap on commerce guys today I'm commerce guys was founded in 2009 at Drupal con DC. I merged with a French team from AF 83 In 2010 we had a few rounds of intercapital raised there in France to support Drupal commerce But instead we pivoted basically and developed platform.sh Which is now the magento enterprise cloud just throw that out there so there's some success and In 2016 so last year February we split the company So instead of trying to do both a Drupal commerce focused business that really was what commerce guys was founded as And platform.sh under one banner Platform.sh basically continued on Renamed the company and then I spun commerce guys out to recreate it solely focused around Drupal commerce and trying to think again from From the start what is it that will make Drupal commerce really be a success and help folks like yourselves? Actually do business with Drupal commerce So the team today is seven people we have as our core maintenance team boyon and Matt who are in the rear Then we have Jonathan and Andrash on the team who do a lot of our consulting and also contribute to commerce One of that x2.x and dozens of contributed modules that we maintain And then you have Steven and Milan who are also in the room who are more partner management account management Operational support for the team including Milan who's really good at documentation apparently we did not anticipate that bringing him on board so We also know that it's not just the bugs. It's also the sparsity or the sparse documentation That's a problem. So we're beginning to kind of hire people who can help us address some of these known issues And then finally myself actually handed off my last direct Drupal commerce consulting project to Jonathan in July And so now I'm just in a business development slash business management role within commerce guys and then I still maintain commerce 1.x for Drupal 7 Because that's not the you know that the hot new work to work on so I'll take that on as long as I can And ideally Jonathan will help me out more and more So when we think about Drupal commerce, we usually describe it in the context of the Drupal contributed module space. So if we're trying to convince somebody to use Drupal commerce We might convince them to use a Drupal and say oh, yes And then there's a module for adding e-commerce functionality to the site that I'm building you And I think that like that's fair enough like that is what it is at its core It's a set of modules that empower any Drupal site to do e-commerce and that's it's worked alright You know there's over 50,000 stores that report into Drupal.org that they're using Drupal commerce 1.x and Drupal 7 right now And we saw a tremendous adoption through commerce kickstart 2.x, which was the sort of demonstration starter profile that we made And then that also helped raise awareness outside of the Drupal community because it actually had a name Which was an underappreciated fact whenever we chose the name Drupal commerce We were trying to closely align with Drupal and avoid a situation around trademark issues like I had with uberkart And however, that's counterproductive when you're trying to actually make a name for yourself in the marketplace to sound so generic So commerce kickstart actually gave us a bit of that market-facing You know potential to reach out beyond the Drupal community borders We also have of course Drupal commerce 2.x which just had a full release last week on Wednesday And we were super excited to have like release parties all around the world We got pictures from Pakistan from India from Germany from Finland from France from US and Canada and elsewhere of people who were celebrating with us the release of Drupal commerce 2.0 Because it really took dozens of agencies and hundreds of people's time over the last I guess two and a half years to three years to make it happen. So we're really excited about that And we don't want to discount that and there's already 1500 sites reporting in the Drupal org You know caveat of course being these are development and production environments not just live sites So you have to be a little more creative to determine You know what else is there and there is more to what Drupal commerce is and I'll come back to stats at the end of this Little bullet list so there's more when we think about Drupal commerce We need to think not just about a set of modules that I throw in a Drupal site And so then I'm really just trying to sell Drupal and hope the people understand I can meet their needs with this commerce thing We also need to think about the fact that Drupal commerce Is an ecosystem that includes hundreds of contributed modules that? Will integrate to different payment gateways fulfillment vendors marketing tools They add features and functionality to the core software like the ability to have split shipments or an address book card on file that kind of stuff So that that is kind of under the Drupal commerce umbrella, but I think we probably all kind of knew that I mean every one of those modules starts with the word commerce So it's pretty clear that these are all kind of one of the same thing Obviously as a core team we maintain Drupal commerce itself differently than we do most of these modules Whereas these modules for us tend to be things that as a project acquires it or somebody invests in the module through us We will work on it. I'm so like one point one company. I can call out as a dapped as I don't know if they're here or not But they had the inter flora dot DK project, which is an amazing E-commerce store using commerce 2.0 and back around January They funded an entire month of boy on time to develop the shipping suite of modules for commerce 2.x And it's much more capable and feature-rich than we had in 1.x Of course, we made some mistakes along the way. So we're trying to improve upon our previous attempt And with you know that kind of investment has been phenomenal for us So it's not just them also paypal and brain tree invested in the payment API in the core of 2.x Which made stored payment methods and tokenized form building solutions a lot more effective within Drupal commerce And so on and so forth. I could I could give too many examples But Drupal commerce is also a sales channel if you want if you will It's a platform for companies like Amazon pay who were co-presenting with here Authorized net on their own sponsors Drupal events paypal, etc. It's a platform for them to find merchants And so when these companies go to an event like IRCE their strategy is an integration strategy They want to be everywhere And ideally you're good enough or big enough that you can also be on their website And we do have that kind of a relationship with some folks They'll put a little Drupal commerce logo in a link to Drupal org right alongside of Shopify and big commerce as People that they integrate with and recommend for different types of e-commerce Of course, we're a much more generic abstract tools It's harder for them to really fit us into their understanding of the e-commerce landscape in general But it's at least beginning and it's something that we're beginning to improve upon and really invite these people to influence more of Drupal And not just Drupal commerce and Drupal commerce is also a collaboration of Dozens of agencies who are selling Drupal commerce into their local markets who are helping their customers understand how it works Why they might want to consider it? They're obviously building those contributed modules and payment gateway integrations themselves and these pictures here are the ones from our booth They're just examples of different agencies like 1x internet MD systems adapt blue spark acro media and others Who are helping to not just create the software, but also give us this this External market-facing perception of a large and healthy ecosystem Because I can promise that if the only company that ever talked about Drupal commerce was commerce guys Nobody would pay attention and I wouldn't expect them to Because that's just not that's just not how you build Market presence and share and and actually convince people to give you money to run their whole business in your online sales platform So without all of these things coming together We wouldn't be nearly as successful as we are today. I guess so there's about 50,000 sites There's over 60k that report in the Drupal dot org but if you look at the holidays you can see when all the All the development environments stop hitting cron as you can see the dip around December that lets you know Yes, there are development environments staging environments that report in but it's still tens of thousands of online stores and over one and a half billion dollars in annual transaction volume Of course the one number comes from Drupal dot org the other number the transaction volume is my attempt to extrapolate out the numbers from payment gateway reports So if I know that authorized net or PayPal or whoever else has a certain level of success with their merchants running Drupal commerce You can look at the percentage of our stores that use their modules extrapolated out And it's well well over one and a half billion dollars in gross annual transactions, and you may have seen recently I think Keith is in the room a case study for zikong fu which is a Chinese company that alone Almost doubles that number because they use it for every franchise of this fast food chain around China so There is furious business going through Drupal commerce and and it's still so funny to me to encounter people who Will just throw it out as well that can't scale. It's not just not transaction You can't get transaction volume with Drupal commerce And I would say that like some of the clients that we directly support, you know do well over a thousand concurrent transactions in the checkout form And you know hit peaks of you know 14,000 orders an hour and so on and so forth that we can share that kind of information with you to help you make the case But of course before we know what kind of information to distribute We kind of will need to begin to collect feedback from you about you know What what part of this story is your local market not getting and how can we equip you to? Present it more holistically to your potential customers prospects leads or you're the top of your sales funnel if you're here in the last session So one one of the things that I think about when I go to a pitch because I still do you know pitch commerce services I participate with other agencies who are selling Drupal commerce to try to help them win deals And you know ideally see that then turn into investment in Drupal commerce And you know oftentimes when we think about Drupal projects or Drupal sites in general We communicate this sort of like jack-of-all-trades Swiss Army knife. There's a module for that. Yes, we can build it There's nothing we can't do you know if I can't configure it with rules I can hook into this that and the other and make exactly what you want But the problem is that there's no inherent value in flexibility Because if somebody just needs a particular solution And you show up at their office and say well look I can do whatever you want That doesn't communicate anything to them at all And you know we've seen this before where we're merchants that we pitched to we we literally spent two weeks creating like a proof-of-concept for an international nonprofit that wanted localized Product listings and donation campaigns and Kickstarter like features we did it all and we showed up and we said cool Like this is what we can do for you You just will work with you to spec it out and we'll build exactly what you want and it will cost You know half what Magento was pitching because we had an inset line And they chose Magento because they wanted rails they wanted a solution in a paradigm and and somebody who said Somebody didn't just sit there and say well We can build whatever you want because they felt maybe threatened by that unlimited potential They now had to become e-commerce experts to even know what they wanted or you know Yeah, so they basically turn us down that was unfortunate kind of said at least one of our developers got a nice trip to Seattle out of it And that the other thing is that we then if we do win the project we can under serve Our customers under serve our merchants by not giving them boundaries and by not giving them Patterns that we expect them to fit into because we actually many of us in this room at least are e-commerce experts And maybe just by show of hands like are the people that have e-commerce industry experience outside of Drupal? Like do you have experience at a merchant or consulting or however else a few hands? Yeah and so That expertise of course as we again heard in the last session Is what people are buying when they come to us? They're not asking us can you do what? I want you to do with Drupal commerce all right So we have to try to think about talking about our value differently I was at IRCE in June review these websites for these different Platforms before coming in here and just consider it. Okay. What's what's their one-line pitch? How do they communicate about their value Shopify? Of course is a software as a service solution It starts at like forty nine dollars a month and goes up to a thousand dollars a month that they're enterprise tier and you basically get Like a Squarespace, you know level of functionality. So you get some light content management Kind of an uber cart level product data model that you have to manually create all your attributes and Manually inter skews and manage them in text fields all that kind of stuff But they just communicate this for like peace of mind from small to large will take care of you look We have five hundred templates for you to choose from you just plug in what you need and you can start selling tomorrow So that's Shopify and also as long as you use their payment gateway You don't have to pay merchant fees per transaction Root commerce is the WordPress solution for e-commerce. It's kind of the most equivalent to Drupal commerce of the field perhaps And and their pitch was really just we're the most customizable Which actually would say that's that's probably kind of a weak pitch because I know that flexibility has no inherent value And if that's your tagline, you're not actually speaking to merchants unless they're misguided Because the only merchants that really want customizability just don't know what they need Magento of course kind of does it all I actually think it's kind of funny that right now on magento's home page above the fold All it says is like, you know leaders in B2B commerce just funny, right? Because we don't really think about magento as a B2B solution But Oro commerce is fastly catching quickly catching up to them and we'll eat their lunch because they took all the smart guys from Magento and recreated the Oro platform And so now they're on the defensive against that but magento of course was previously the platform for growth They communicated to the merchants pocketbook join us so that we can scale with you and help you scale And then finally big commerce them has a real interesting pitch because they're all they're the kind of like the worst of These are experienced. They're the worst to integrate with you know They're just kind of the ugliest two of the solutions on the screen But they actually hit a real interesting note by saying sell with us through any channel So they're just targeting this omni-channel idea, you know right front and center on their home page But at the very least they've found ways to distill and communicate their value to the market And and the challenge that thing isn't coming upon us is to figure out. What is our message? And it will vary from market to market and ideally it would vary even from agency to agency as you consider the kind of merchant You actually want to target and develop an effective campaign that that basically Productizes or creates a solution that is based around Drupal commerce that you are selling but in order for you to get there Well, and and just to just to not be all Debbie Downer here. We do have clear advantages in certain areas clear advantages in content marketing The all of the other platforms are underdeveloped and you know content management with maybe the exception of we've commerce since their WordPress native The the typical use case for Magento is to put a content management system in front of it So for example Wilson the sporting goods company I believe is an aquia case study where they run Drupal 7 in front of Magento and just use links to tie you from the Drupal domain to a shop subdomain for checkout It kind of degrades the experience a little bit if you go check it out you see what I mean It's kind of jarring to get jumped to another domain But they've more or less thrown up their hands and saying like we just aren't going to be able to improve our content management capabilities So instead they've partnered with aquia and adobe and other content management vendors to just say look We'll do the commerce somebody else will take care of the content And so when you think about positioning Drupal against a Magento there are advantages You know to be to be discovered and to be you know keyed in on here So unique content marketing product merchandising effective campaigns, etc. Etc. But we also You know lead the other platforms in digital commerce our license management tools File management tools etc within Drupal are more advanced than any other of the base platforms so In order for us to like figure out where we bring our value and communicate that to our markets We do need to at least ensure that we're more productive with Drupal commerce Then we would be if we adopted another platform because otherwise if we're trying to build a legitimate e-commerce practice within our companies We should probably adopt another platform if it can't be at least as productive with Drupal commerce as I am with Magento Then maybe as a business decision you ought to make a different decision So that's that's where I see like the core challenge of us as core maintainers and developers of the Drupal commerce like framework the core project is to ensure that we are at least as productive as our competitors and also Help you then to communicate that what what's probably bad optics? To your market which is that with other platforms you might be more productive at the start of a project But as you go on your velocity will begin to degrade Because if you take a more robust solution like Magento and begin to customize it like different features start to break down You actually don't have as great of an interoperability among systems and plugins in these other platforms as you do within Drupal So in Drupal you may have a slower start may look like Bartik for the first sprint or two And then you eventually become prettier and prettier and more functional But I do think the reality is that later in the life of a project We are much more productive than our competitors and I say that based on my experience working alongside teams using Magento and demandware and other e-commerce systems and then finally We will we will take by necessity. Yeah You know the question was that that observation may hold true for a higher-end market But how do we translate that down market a little bit to small and medium-sized businesses? And and I'll say I probably don't really have time to answer that question in full right now But I do know that 1x internet if you find them around and talk to them They have experienced one with Orlo watches, which is an amazing case study And that's a large site multi-domain multi-region et cetera et cetera and that took them You know some months to develop we actually told them they couldn't do it and they beat our they beat our pessimism But on the other hand, they've also developed sites from start to finish in a week At the at the low end now a week is still a week You know if somebody is going to be happy with $50 a month and Shopify a week for most agencies It's still going to be like a five to ten thousand dollar project So, you know, I kind of depends on your particular customer, but I'm happy to dialogue about that after the session So we also will we'll take by necessity more curated targeted Selective approach in building our technology partner program So one of the things that I love that I RCE was that if you walked anywhere on the exposition exhibition floor like every booth had a Shopify snowboard in it and then the Shopify booth was a giant ski lodge and they Literally made it snow at various points in time throughout the convention But what they were communicating was we're everywhere Everybody here wants to be in our you know in our house and our team They've got our snowboards standing in their booth, which doesn't fit their theme or design at all But they were able to do that and so we can't be with everybody because we don't we don't have this This influx of people just like writing their own integrations and using the Drupal API is one It's just harder to work with the Drupal APIs than theirs But also we're just smaller 50k versus a quarter million like that's a that's a big difference So we're having to be more curated more selective in choosing our partners and ideally that will cover just a few select recommendations in various market segments For example, we're only integrating right now as commerce guys anyway It's not to say that anybody else can't do something else But we're only focusing our efforts on Avalara for sales tax calculation management reporting and remittance There are other solutions out there But we just don't have time to push them forward and help multiple people gain market share or help our merchants Choose from amongst multiple options for them. So we're just trying to narrow our focus So that we can better communicate value by having a paradigm or a pattern for people to follow Versus trying again to just focus on flexibility, which has no inherent value So to build a competitive ecosystem against our competitors that I've been naming The the things that we're actively doing right now and actively pursuing are one formalizing the technology partner program And then filling in gaps related to marketing security and fulfillment. We're pretty good on payment options Obviously, those are amongst the first to be integrated in every iteration of uberkart in Drupal Commerce But you know, we've only just begun talking with Mailchimp about what really ensuring that Mailchimp's Ecommerce solutions are integrated into Drupal Commerce looks like and there are other examples like that We're also going to formalize our an agency partner network through which we can distribute project information So for example commerce 2.0 release was the first time we ever put a date on a release, right? Is that not frustrating? We've never had release dates and targets. It's just been when it's ready Which is cool if you're just building a hobby, you know e-commerce project that you maybe will one day get serious about But it's not helpful for people who are depending on Release dates and roadmaps and key information and market insight to actually go and win projects Which then results in investment in the platform. So we're doing this We have just a mailing list right now called the Drupal Commerce back channel And if you'd like to be a part of that, I just invite you to find me afterwards It's both for agencies and for end-user teams as a company. We actually have more success ourselves Working with either, you know dedicated teams for a merchant within another agency or directly with a dedicated team Within a larger company. So we become the e-commerce expert the senior consultant And you know, we want to be pushing roadmap information market analysis gap analysis To any stakeholder within those organizations and you know, my focus will be on equipping sales and marketing And of course boy on focus will be on equipping technical. So we want to be a better resource for Folks like you in this room and then finally we will recreate the homepage of Drupal Commerce to be less of a seven-year-old Kind of dated to kind of ugly developer oriented portal Because we don't do support there anymore. You don't we have an out-of-date extensions directory, etc We will recreate that to have a more market-facing like value proposition and presentation. So Definitely invite feedback on that. That's the one that we haven't started yet You know, so these are in order of how much progress we've made But expect to see some changes there as we finish up our current design project Which is a default theme for Commerce 2 that will be releasing on Drupal.org soon. It's called Belgrade So in honor of boy on the lead developer for Commerce 2 So these are the things that we are doing to Both ourselves market and sell Drupal Commerce and the Drupal Commerce ecosystem and that we want to use to invite you into That you know that goal with us So feel free to find me after this session. I'm over at my booth, which is just cat a corner across the way If you'd like to know more you can also follow us on Twitter subscribe to our newsletter Or like I mentioned, you know come hit me up to be a part of the back channel and If I just miss something or really scoot something up horribly you can leave feedback in the Session review form for me, and I'll do better next time. Thanks for your time Yeah