 So it is Thursday of DrupalCon, the last day of the conference. Energy's probably run a little bit low, so we'll do our best to make this session energetic and entertaining. We'll be talking about Drupal's big B2B commerce opportunity. We'll also be doing some story selling with some hopefully recognizable New Orleans imagery to make the conversation a little bit more fun and entertaining. Quick show of hands before we get started. Folks that are currently have experience using Drupal and Drupal commerce. Okay, so about half the room there. Folks that are interested and potentially have a project that may involve some commerce requirements. Sound like that's about everybody else. So you're sort of in the right place then. We're here to talk about Drupal and Drupal commerce. Again, I'm Chris Rooney. My colleague Madison major over here. And this is a site building track session. So we'll talk about how to use components, modules, kind of widgets available in Drupal to help build the commerce sites. We're also going to do some business oriented content myself. My background, I'm not a developer, so I kind of understand these things at a conceptual level. So we'll understand how Drupal and Drupal commerce helps solve some B2B challenges from a conceptual level. Now one thing to be aware of, think through if you are in the right place. So there is another session going on right now at this very same time with the commerce guys talking about Drupal commerce 2.0, which will be released later on this year and will line up with Drupal 8. And that will be more of a development oriented discussion. So if you're really into the bits and bytes of Drupal commerce and want to understand how to write hooks and nooks and crannies and things like that, that might be a better place for you. But here we're going to talk about Drupal and Drupal commerce from more of a business perspective and how some of the features and modules line up really well with some of the requirements that we've seen with B2B manufacturers. But it is fairly unique because all the commerce guys are actually in one room at the same time over there. So if you want to see that, you can go over there and make that happen. So who that? Who's digital bridge solutions first? Give you a little bit of context on our company. We're a full life cycle Drupal development agency. We started in 2009. This is our fifth Drupalcon and our first time speaking at Drupalcon. So be gentle, be nice. We're excited to do it. We are awkward partners. We're supporting members of the Drupal association and some of our example Drupal commerce clients are across the bottom. You'll see these are mid-size enterprises or manufacturers who we've helped to use Drupal to start selling their goods and services online to other businesses. So a bit about us and a bit about myself and Madison. Contact information is up here, our Drupal.org information is up here, Twitter address is up here and we will flash up our survey review link at the end of the presentation so you can review our session as well. So a bit about us and our background and context for being in front of you today. Agenda today. So we're going to talk about just some e-commerce basics to make sure we all have kind of a level set on what we're talking about when we talk about e-commerce. We'll talk about B2B e-commerce trends and what's happening in that space and there's literally an explosion of opportunity happening there. We'll talk about some challenges with B2B transactions and why those are more difficult than your typical B2C e-commerce transaction. We'll finally wrap up with Drupal's value proposition in that space as a B2B e-commerce platform and then opportunities and challenges for Drupal going forward with Drupal e-commerce. Sound all right? And away we go. So as I mentioned we're going to try to use some New Orleans imagery to kind of tell the story a little better and tie things in for us. We talk about e-commerce, people oftentimes think about e-commerce as just facilitating transactions, right? Just collecting money for stuff online. When we think about e-commerce we think about it's a little bit more difficult than that. It's more than just the bling-bling, right? So as our friends Lowain and Baby would say, yes, there's opportunity to make money here. Yes, there's bling-bling available but e-commerce is much more complex and nuanced thing than just taking money online, right? So when we talk about e-commerce we talk about a number of different components. So it's the display, right? Everything from how you're displaying your goods and services online, from a laptop, tablet, mobile phone and making sure that feels simple and intuitive to the user. It's the product catalog. So many of our clients have thousands, sometimes millions of products that need to be stored in their product catalog and information about those products need to be stored in a database and served up to user online in an easy fashion. It's merchandising. So we've got here a little picture of a little convenient store in an in-cap in a convenient store. So merchandising means basically displaying your products and services in a way that's going to be attractive to user and make them want to buy it. Yes, it's the transaction. Yes, there's taking money that's a big part of it as well but it's also things like warehousing and fulfillment, right? So once you take an order online how do you tell your warehouse to put something in a box, ship it to someone, how do you handle returns and then finally it's integration. It's integrating all those different pieces together and integrating them in with your back end system of records. So when we think about e-commerce we really try to think about and touch on all those six different areas and when you're doing that it gets pretty complex. So e-commerce is hard. E-commerce is challenging. Juvenile would say you know how to handle your business, you can't be crying and suffering, right? Your aim is New Orleans hip-hop artists. You should all add them to your collection when you get home. So why is it hard? There's functional complexity, right? There's a lot more to handle in e-commerce because it just needs to do more. There are UX challenges especially when it's sponsored design. Let's imagine you have a product catalog that has 300,000 products in it. How do you help someone parse that catalog on a phone and still make that user experience intuitive? Security and compliance. If you're protecting or if you're taking any credit card data from a buyer and storing that information on your systems there's lots of regulations, compliance guidelines that you need to abide by to be PCI compliant to make sure that you're protecting your credit card information and personally identify all the information as you should be. Integration challenges we talked about before and then performance and availability really matter. So when we're working for like a non-profit client and the site is slow or the site goes down, they get bombed, it's an issue, right? But if you're working for a client, one of our clients does 80% of their revenue in the last two months of the year during the holiday season and so if the site's slow during that time or the site goes down, people get really, really upset, right? And sometimes people get fired so the stakes are high in this space. Not only is it difficult for B to C commerce but B to B is even harder. So let's spend a minute talking about what we mean by business to business commerce. So we're talking about basically online transactions between organizations. Everybody knows Dunder Mifflin from the office, right? So let's take them as an example of an organization that may look to sell their goods and services online. So what does it mean when they do that? And what are the characteristics of a typical B to B commerce transaction? Number one is that the transaction dollar amounts are typically higher, right? So we're not just buying a pair of sweatpants for 50 bucks. Oftentimes we're buying things in the thousands or tens of thousands for each individual transaction, right? So the dollar amounts are a lot higher in B to B commerce. Two is that oftentimes organizations buy from another frequently and they expect a level of personalization or they expect a level of repeat purchase where they wanna know the last thing that they order and they wanna be able to buy those things quickly and easily in very facilitated fashion. So there's less kind of anonymous checkout in the B to B space. Organizations are buying from each other over and over and over again. There's a distinction between buyers and users. So a lot of times in a B to B environment, the person that's actually buying that item could be a purchasing agent and they have no idea what they're buying. They don't really know what the value proposition of it is. They just know they were told to buy it and they were told to buy it in this amount. And somebody else is actually gonna be the user of it. So that poses some unique challenges to the user experience and experience design. And a lot of this is happening, it's because there's channel shift happening. So traditionally commerce transactions have happened via fax, phone, email, talking to a direct sales rep. And all that is gradually shifting over to online channel. And a lot of what's happening in that is just a newer generation of users and owners of B to B organizations who are trying to take advantage of the internet to help change their business. So it's more complex, B to B commerce is more complex than even your typical already challenging B to C commerce initiative. All right, so let's talk about trends, what's happening in the B to B space. So there's a huge storm coming in B to B and it's gonna drastically change the landscape of organizations that sell to each other now and the landscape will be forever changed after that, right? And some of the organizations that are not selling online may not make it, frankly, after that fact. So let's talk about a little bit about what's happening in that B to B space and how that storm is gonna affect us. So first of all, the internet is already being used in business business transactions as a research tool, right? So over 80% of business to business buyers use the internet already before they make a purchase, so that means for people who are selling B to B goods and services, boy, you better have your product catalog online and better have all your information about that product available so somebody can help make an informed decision. Even if you're not gonna allow the purchase, at least allow that person to be able to research online. And B to B buyers are also using Google as a starting point, right? And collecting a lot of information before they even call up a salesperson. The other thing to be aware of is just the enormity of transaction volume in the B to B space. So there's real buying already happening in B to B and the amount of transaction volume from one organization to the other, buying from each other in the e-commerce space is more than twice what's happening in the B to C space. So it's really the big dog looking down at the little dog, right? We always pay a lot of attention to what's happening in the B to C commerce trends. But already there's way more volume happening in B to B. So it's really a huge, huge opportunity. A lot of big companies are already there making a lot of money. And we may be at a point where on the B to C side, we may be at peak B to C e-commerce, right? Each of the successive years, the rate of change, the rate of growth in the B to C commerce space has decreased by over 30% in the last, last three years. So the B to C opportunity is not growing as much. So organizations that are in the business of servicing e-commerce are all seeing the same opportunity and all trying to shift their sights on, on the business to business commerce opportunity. So let's talk through a couple more statistics about how big this area is. So 57% of B to B buyers say that they made most of the decision online researching before they even called the sales rep, right? So just enforces the importance of having your information available, accurate information that allows someone to make a buying decision, because they're doing all that stuff first before they're calling the sales rep. Now, we get started getting a little bit of the gap and opportunity. There's only 40% of B to B companies that say they sell anything online, any of their stuff. And of that 40%, if you ask them how many of them are actually proud of their e-commerce site or actually driving your real volume through it, it's probably less than half of them. So there's a disconnect between what the B to B buyer wants and what the B to B supplier or company is actually able to provide right now. And over 50% of B to B buyers anticipate they're gonna buy even more online. And when they do buy online, the statistics around conversion rate are pretty amazing, right? So B to B buyers are typically very goal oriented when they come to a site. And they're not just at a window shop, they're usually to buy. So conversion rates typically are around 16% in the B to B space, which is like five times as much as you would see on a typical B to C site. So all this emphasizes this kind of growing opportunity where buyers are wanting to buy more online and sellers, people who are selling goods are not always able to sell their goods and service online. They recognize the opportunity and they realize they need to get their catalog online and be able to facilitate online sales in the next couple of years. So let's talk through challenges. Are reasons why B to B commerce is especially hard. So we've talked about this very appetizing meal that's available in the B to B commerce space, but boy, there's some pincers you gotta be aware of. If you're gonna eat one of those crawfish and it's not, it's still alive. Boy, you better watch out for the nasty end of one of those before you put it in your mouth. So we'll talk about that opportunity and how to avoid some of those challenges and how Drupal commerce can mitigate some of those challenges. So with that, I'm gonna talk through, we're gonna talk through five areas, right? Five things that are kind of very unique to B to B commerce that actually Drupal and Drupal commerce handles these things pretty well. So the five things we'll talk through are customer specific pricing, volume pricing, payment methods, customer versus user accounts, and customer portal. We'll talk through each of those things in detail and to help me with that, my lovely assistant Madison is gonna help me do a little bit of a role playing here. So the first area we wanna talk about is customer specific pricing. And I use the imagery of a nice big pot of jambalaya because that's a good example of what the typical B to B pricing scenario looks like. It's a mixture of a whole bunch of stuff, right? And typically no customer pays the same amount for the same thing, right? Some customers pay twice as much of another one sometimes. And a lot of times the way typical e-commerce platforms will try to solve that is through a price list. A listing of all your SKUs on the site and how much each of them cost. And you may have a preferred price list, and you may have a discounted price list. And you may have another price list and another currency. But the idea with most commerce platforms is that any time you're gonna charge a different cost or different price for something, you create a new price list. That model starts to break down when you have a customer specific pricing. Everybody's paying something different. The other unique challenge oftentimes with B to B commerce is figure out what's the system of record for price. Does that price exist in a back end ERP system? Does it exist in somebody's spreadsheet? Most commerce platforms kinda want the pricing to exist in the commerce platform and have that be the system of record. But that can also pose some challenges. So what we're gonna do here is a little bit of role playing here. And we'll talk through some unique pricing scenarios. And I'm gonna be the client, and Madison's gonna be the consultant, trying to sell me a particular piece of technology. We'll talk through a couple things in this scenario. The other thing we'll talk about is volume pricing that you often see in a B to B scenario. I'm using the example of beignets here. Because if you go up to cafe demand and wanna order one beignets, they're gonna charge you $2. But if you go up there and order a dozen, maybe it'll charge you $20. And so you have a different unit cost, right, if you buy more. If you buy 60, maybe it'll charge you an even lower unit cost, right? So the more you buy, you pay a lower unit cost. Sometimes that can be challenging in the B to B space if your breakpoints for the different products you sell are different. So some of the items you may say, all right, I want to give a customer a price bake if they buy more than 10. But another product you may say, I want to give that customer a break point if they buy more than 25 or 50. And that may differ from product to product. So the things you want to watch out for in this role play is how quickly after I give Madison my requirements, he uses the word customization. And he's gonna be trying to sell me a typical unnamed off-the-shelf commerce solution. And how often, how much he tries to get me to bend my requirements to meet his platform's capabilities. So let's- Before we get started, how many of those people in the audience? And is anyone here actually a retailer or a distributor who might actually sell goods and services online? Okay, so we've got a couple as well. So, yeah, as Chris said, I'm gonna play two roles. So I should have brought my two different hats to get consulting hats. That's to wear for the next time we do this. But in the first scenario, I'm gonna be the guy selling a kind of your typical off-the-shelf commerce platform. So we won't mention any of those by name at this point. But you guys probably know who those are during the e-commerce space at all. So these are packaged platforms that have very specific commerce architectures. And then the second scenario that we do with each of these, I'm gonna play more of the consultant that we play every day who works with Drupal and is used to kind of a flexible commerce system. All right, so scenario one, I am a company and I make plumbing tools. And I have a catalog of 100,000 products. And I've got 3,000 customers that I sell them to. And it's my grandfather's company and it's been running for 100 years. So, Mr. e-commerce consultant. Yes, sir. I need you to build me an e-commerce site. But I need you to be aware, boy, I've got customer specific pricing. Can you do that? Oh yeah, customer specific pricing. Yeah, our e-commerce system totally handles that. Let's see. So that means it's probably broken down into groups. You have two or three different groups of customers maybe and they each get their own custom price. No, no, I'm not sure you're understanding me. I have customer specific pricing. My customers pay different amounts for the products that I buy. Can you do that? Oh yeah, sure. You guys have, I mean, I know you've been around a long time. You guys probably have, what, 15, 20, 30 customers? We can probably create custom price list for each one of those. Listen, I have customer specific pricing. I have 3,000 customers. My grandfather built this company with his own sweat and blood. I know all of those 3,000 customers by name and they negotiate their pricing with me directly. Can you handle that? Oh yeah, totally, totally. 3,000 customers, they each get a flat percentage off. That's probably broken down into a few tiers, right? A few 10% off? Yeah, not so much. We could probably do that. A lot of customization. There's going to be some, you know, maybe 3,000 extra tables in that database. There's going to be some performance concerns. We'll figure that out. Customization sounds pricey. Well, it depends. I mean, how much money do you have? And scene. OK, now let's try that again with Drupal Commerce. So again, I am the client with my plumbing company and Madison is a different system integrator coming in to talk to me about Drupal Commerce. So Mr. E-commerce consultant, boy, I need you to build me an e-commerce site for my company. We need to get online, man. There's a whole opportunity out there for us. But you need to know, man, I've got customer specific pricing. Can you do that? Customer specific pricing. So let's define that. Are you saying that each customer that you work with, each customer that you deal with, has specific pricing that's unique to them? That's what I'm saying. OK, OK. How many customers do you have today? We have 3,000 customers. 3,000 customers and they each have negotiated pricing across your entire account. I have negotiated pricing. Me or my father or my grandfather negotiated pricing with every single one of those. We know them by name. I understand. I understand. So do you have that information centralized somewhere? Is this only in your head or do we have that potentially in a system of record? Well, we have it in our home-built ERP. Your home-built ERP. OK. OK, well, is that home-built ERP? Is it up-to-date and current with all the information for these customers and their pricing? For the most part. OK, perfect. So the great thing about Drupal Commerce is it has a really open API and multiple ways to get data in and out. So I know your home-grown ERP may not have an API that we can connect to, but there's multiple ways using their feeds or migrate, which we can get access to that database, pull that information in and record that within Drupal. There's also multiple Drupal Commerce modules that handle pricing. And it's very easy to build a pricing model or the pricing per product or per SKU is unique to each one of your individual 3,000 customers. Well, that sounds great. But you know what? I just remembered I do have this new line of products that we don't have that stuff in my ERP database yet. Matter of fact, my cousin Trudy, who runs our purchasing department, she's got a couple of spreadsheets where those products live and the pricing information is with Trudy. Oh, I see. OK, well, as long as we have that information and spreadsheets, there's ways to get that data out as well. My recommendation is we could take that data from the spreadsheets and get it to your ERP, keep it centralized, and potentially use the same integration that we built earlier. If not, we can design a feed to pull that in from your spreadsheets and sit next to the information that we're pulling in from your ERP. Sounds good. It is good. All right. Cool. All right, so the next thing we want to talk about is payment methods. So another unique thing in the commerce space is a lot of times transaction will occur without any actual money changing hands. I like to use the metaphor from Mardi Gras beads here. So a lot of times you can give someone Mardi Gras beads and they will perform some service for you from what I hear. And those Mardi Gras beads don't have any actual commercial value. They don't have no currency, but somehow this exchange of services happens, and all you do is give them this thing that doesn't have any monetary value and you get something in return. That's very common to what happens in the B2B space. So a lot of times in a B2B organization they will sell something to a customer on payment terms with the net 30 receivables. And that's the way their business works offline, and they want to maintain that same thing online and want people to buy a service, put in their shopping cart, pay for it, and have nothing get charged and have them send an invoice in the mail. And that's pretty painful for a lot of traditional off the shelf e-commerce platforms where they're built from the ground up to not let somebody check out unless payment has been captured or something has been authorized. So we'll talk through a quick role play here on payment methods with the typical e-commerce platform and then one with triple commerce. So Mr. E-commerce consultant, I need you to build me an e-commerce site, but the way we are, we sell to our customers now, most of them have payment terms, credit terms with us, net 30, net 45 sometime, but I still want to be able to allow them to buy their stuff online and I'll send an invoice and they're good for it. Oh yeah, credit, yeah, our e-commerce solution handles credit perfectly, we got Visa, MasterCard, American Express, any of those options? No, no, I don't think you understand, no, no, no, no. No, none of my customers are gonna check out the credit card, they don't have personal credit cards. They buy from me on account, they have payment terms with me as a company. I see, so ACH payments, all right, so they can write a check, personal, business checking account, go through the checkout process. I don't think you're listening to me, listening to me, young man. My grandfather built this company and my customer is a buy from us on account and credit terms, they don't have to pay me anything for another 30 days. Can you handle that or not? You said your grandfather built this company, ah, I should have thought, so he's probably using PayPal, right, yeah, we could totally integrate with PayPal, perfect, we'll be up and running in a matter of months. Get out of my office. Let's try that again with Troop of Commerce. All right, Mr. E-commerce consultant, I need you to build me a website from my plumbing company, but boy, you gotta understand, my customers have payment terms, they don't always pay me right away, I just send them an invoice and they pay me a little bit after the fact, can you guys handle that? Okay, I understand, so you don't necessarily need to take payment from the customer at the time of checkout, is that correct? That oddly sounds like you're listening to me, yes, that's correct. Well, the great thing about Troop of Commerce is that it's flexible and it doesn't actually require payment to be complete to actually create an ordered record, so I think we can work with that. Now, you said they're using payment terms, right, so my guess is you're, maybe per customer, you're tracking what their terms are, 30, 45 days, 90 days, something like that. That's one thing our accounting package does real well, it tracks our payment terms, yes. Okay, okay, and also do these customers have maybe a specific credit limit, maybe they can purchase up to a certain amount per month? Well, it depends, some of them do, and some of them don't. Okay, okay, so and if they hit that credit limit or maybe they're not in good standing, would you still want these customers to be able to purchase from you? Well, no, not unless they call me and maybe you could overwrite for it, just do them a favor, but no. And you mentioned that this information was in your accounting package, is that also getting pulled into your ERP today? Yes. Okay, great, well, we talked earlier about, either through a potentially a feeds or a migration or a direct query into your current ERP database, so we've already built an integration there. So yeah, we can work on that data mapping to pull that information across and reference that in Drupal, either real time or perhaps we store a series of records there. And you know, come to think about it at checkout, we can use a rule system which will allow us to determine at the time of checkout whether that customer is able to purchase, potentially which payment methods are available to them, if they have credit terms, and if they're in good standing with your company, we can make that decision real time at the point of checkout. Does that sound like something that would fit your needs? Boy, that sounds great to me, but the last guy that is in here, he was thrown on this customization word. How much customization is gonna be required to do that? Well, there will be a little bit of customization because what we find is that each manufacturer, each business has maybe a slightly different setup on their ERP or a slightly different setup on their system of record. So initially, perhaps through our discovery process, we'll wanna get that model mapped out and what that's gonna do is allow you to connect many features of the site back to your ERP system. So, the customization is light, it's there, but we can define that up front and get you moving rather quickly. All right, sounds good. And same. All right, so the last couple of things we wanna talk about here, the reason why B2B Commerce can be particularly challenging, one of the things we referenced earlier is this concept of customer versus user. And I'm using the metaphor of a Mardi Gras float here, because in this instance, like your actual customer, the client, might be the actual float, the Mardi Gras float, but then there's people in that float that you're actually interacting with. There's people in that float that are throwing out beads and interacting with the people on the street, but your commerce system needs to account for both of those, right? That those people actually work for a company and may inherit some of the rules associated to that company. Probably they inherit payment methods, shipping addresses, things like that that are gonna be inherited from the company. Also important to think through though, the people in that float, the users, may not all be the same. Some of them may have different levels of authority or purchasing permissions. Some of them may be able to purchase up to $1,000. Some of them may not be able to purchase anything without an approval from their supervisor. So those sorts of things can make a pretty challenging, highly customized situation with the typical B2C-oriented commerce platform. The other thing I wanna talk about here is the need for a customer portal, right? So a lot of times in the B2B environment, as we talked about, a lot of these organizations have been transacting with each other for years and years and years, and they wanna see the totality of their relationship when they log online into a customer's B2B commerce site. So it's more than just the transaction. They wanna see things like their order history, whether or not that order was placed online, right? They wanna see the order history of things they did over the phone, things that they emailed in. They also wanna be able to pay invoices for outstanding balances. Again, whether or not that was something they bought online. They wanna be able to pull up those invoices and pay them via ACH, via credit card, but actually settle up for the things that they bought in the past regardless of channel. They also want things like being able to see their sales reps contact information if they happen to forgot it, right? Or get information about upcoming new product releases. So there's a lot of content around the commerce transaction that really makes it more valuable. And I use the imagery of Bourbon Street here to give you the idea that it's not just one of these components that makes the Bourbon Street valuable, but it's the music, it's the food, it's the drinking, it's the dancing altogether that make the Bourbon Street valuable and make it memorable. If you had just one of those things, it wouldn't quite do it for you, right? If you just had the music, it wouldn't be the same experience. If you just had the commerce transaction for B2B, it wouldn't really meet all your needs of the client. So we'll do another role play here, talking through how a typical B2C-oriented commerce platform would try to meet some of these needs around tiered customer accounts between users and companies and then how they would address the customer portal need. And again, what you wanna listen for is how quickly it takes Madison to say the word customization when he's representing the typical e-commerce platform salesperson and also how quickly he tries to, again, try to get me to conform my business requirements into the package's capabilities. So first role play, we'll do tiered accounts and customer portal with a typical e-commerce platform. All right, here we go. So Mr. E-commerce Consultant, I need you to build me an e-commerce site for my grandfather's plumbing company. We've been around for 150 years and boy, we've got customers, we've got some real big customers and some of those customers have purchasing agents that need to be able to buy from us, but they're still all kind of fit in with that same client. And boy, I need them to be able to see a lot more than just the product catalog. They need to kind of pull up their total order history and see their outstanding voices and pay that stuff online. Can you do that? Oh yeah, totally, let's see, we can set up an e-commerce system and it's gonna, what's this gonna do for you and your customers? It's gonna display every order that customer has ever purchased on the web. So yeah, we can definitely do that. No, no, hold on, I'm not sure you're understanding me. I need them to be able to see all their orders, the web ones, but also the ones they phoned in. Can you guys do that? Okay, yeah, as long as your sales people are picking up the phone and then placing that order through your website, we could potentially show that customer their web order. No, that's not gonna happen. My sales people, they key their stuff into the ERP system now. Well yeah, what we could do is, yeah, we could have two web experiences. We could have one that's gonna show all the orders that were placed online, that's fine. Then we'll build maybe like a custom experience of a subdomain, right? And that subdomain will say, hey, here's all your historical invoices and everything that you placed offline. For the last, you know. Boy, that word custom sounds expensive. Well, I don't know, I mean, it depends. I mean, how much money do you have? And scene, all right. Let's try that again with Drupal Commerce. So, Mystery Commerce Consultant. Boy, I need you to build me a commerce site, but you gotta understand, I've got tiered customer accounts. I've got customers, but then I've got users within those customers that need to be able to buy stuff from me. Sometimes at different permission levels. And to make it even more complex, I've got a real big customer. I sell some of my plumbing supplies to Ford Motor Company, but I sell it to their division out in Tuscaloosa where I live. But sometimes I get orders from corporate, too. So they have different purchasing rights as well. But they're both Ford, so I need to represent them both in my system and be able to have them both inherit some level of purchasing power from Ford. Can you guys handle that? Did you say tiered customer accounts? Yes, sir, I did. We may not know this, but I have a twin brother that works for this terrible e-commerce company, and they can't handle that at all. But let me tell you what Drupal Commerce can do. So, Drupal Commerce is built with a very flexible user model. And using tools like groups or organic groups and using tiered roles and permissions, we can model that to exactly how your business works. My guess is that potentially a person might work in an organization, but maybe an organization also rolls up to a parent organization, and there's different attributes and permission levels that need to be inherited. That's right. Correct. And potentially that person, whether they're a purchaser or not, maybe they need to shift to multiple addresses. So I'm guessing some of your customers have multiple business locations. That's right. Okay. So within the, by mixing groups and address book, we can create a combination and a system of inheritance where that address record can be set up on multiple locations or on multiple businesses and inherit down to the user. We can also design a series of roles and permissions so that user gets the right information to them so they know whether they can place the order, whether they have to submit it for approval. My guess is also your customers have been ordering from you for a long time. Is this your first time selling direct on the web? This is my first time selling direct to customers online, yes. But boy, I tell you, we've had customers, my grandfather built this company 100 years ago and one of our customer relationships have been around for 30 years and I gotta maintain that high level of service. Everything they can get from me offline has to be maintained online for them to continue to do business with us. I see. So even for your order history for the last 10 or 15 years, you mentioned having an ERP, the guys implemented back in the 80s. We have a pretty good record of invoice and transaction history in that ERP. Yes, sir. Perfect. So what we can do is with the integration that we mentioned earlier, potentially a direct query into that database, we can pull information for invoices, for order records, even allow them to pay online by integrating directly to that ERP. And guess what, we handled that a few requirements ago so we can leverage that technology that we built for a number of requirements throughout this process. Well, that sounds great. Your twin brother, he's fired though. All right, so let's talk about Drupal's value proposition in the B2B commerce space and Madison can talk us through some of these slides. So B2B commerce value proposition. So we've got imagery of Drew Brees from the win of the Super Bowl. So as you guys know, Drew's persona is very positive and good. Drupal's kind of at a point right now, especially with Drupal and Drupal commerce and a point in the industry with this B2B opportunity. Well, there's a lot of promise out there and there's a lot of people interested in this technology. There's also a lot of manufacturers and distributors that need to take action. So let's talk through, let's talk through a few of the considerations for B2B. Why Drupal commerce for B2B? So the first imagery that we have here, this kind of represents the two personas that I was playing earlier. So one is that of a, think of it as a prefabricated house. So something that you buy that's built to spec. Quite honestly, that's what you're getting with a lot of the big enterprise B-commerce platforms that are out there. They're rigid. They've been designed for a certain type of experience. That experience is businesses selling to consumers and not businesses selling to other businesses. However, with Drupal and Drupal commerce, think of that as more of a foundation. So when you download Drupal, when you get access to Drupal, you're getting a platform on which you can build. And that build isn't necessarily always customization. That build, you could think of it more as legos, right? So Drupal has roughly 10,000 modules that are available. It's got hundreds of modules that are useful for B2B commerce and creating some of these data models that we talked about earlier. So very quickly, by assembling your data model and working with your customer, you can start to assemble a solution that is specific to their business. And this is really a key point. Because when you're working in B2B, you are working with a lot of organizations that have been around for a long time, and each one does do their business a little bit differently. And if you try to walk in there with a very rigid commerce infrastructure, it's just not gonna fit their business. It's not gonna work for them. So you can spend all of your time customizing something rigid, it's out of the box, or you can work with Drupal and like your Lego blocks, you can assemble something that's to the specification of that customer's business. Lastly, so why Drupal commerce for B2B? So Drupal plays well with others, Drupal's very open. It's easy to get data in and out of Drupal. It's also easy to create either custom content types or custom entity types, to which you can model your customer's business and bring that information into Drupal. Plays well with others, plays well with other systems. So we've got multiple examples of customers that came with to us with back ends or ERPs that have been around for 20 or 30 years. Literally, there were no integrations too. But through Drupal queries, we can pull that information in, we can reference it real time, and we can create a modern web experience for a business whose infrastructure may not be as modern as a web. So as Drupal commerce, for me, could you be a cash-money millionaire? So one of my favorite groups from the 90s, early 2000s there, also in New Orleans band group. Anywho, so a few questions to ask. What have you done? We've come up with five qualifying questions in terms of is Drupal commerce right for you and for your project and for your client? Or should you look to go with more of an off-the-shelf kind of commerce solution? So first question I would ask is on the catalog side, in terms of your products, are your products complex? Are they configurable? If you're just selling mugs and t-shirts, if you're just selling kind of regular old consumer-based products, maybe your commerce isn't the right fit. But if there is some type of complexity or some type of personalization or configuration when it comes to actually selecting or building your product online, it's really easy to build those experiences within Drupal. Secondly, do you have complex business rules around the pricing of your product? So we touched on that a lot earlier. So do you have volume-based pricing or maybe the pricing is the breaks in quantity are unique per customer or the breaks in quantity are unique per product? Off-the-shelf commerce platforms you're gonna try to wedge them into a very specific setup of how those things can be structured that likely your client who's selling the other businesses has very specific rules. Is your checkout process non-standard? Does it not follow the, hey, enter your billing, shipping, payment information and hit checkout. If there's anything more to it than that, you need to engage with the customer in a certain way or do custom checks back to the ERP. Drupal commerce might be right for you. Number four, multi-step buying processes. So if you have a need for actual guided selling, so maybe there's more to it than just a customer coming to your site and adding a cart and checking out and you actually need to customize that experience for them, Drupal's a great fit for that. And last but not least is do you have anything custom on the back, when I say on the back end, really mean like within the pre-existing business side, the back office of the customer's organization that you might need to integrate with in a unique way. So think of this as accounting packages, ERPs, any old systems of record that need that information referenced on the web. You're gonna be doing custom integrations or pooling or migrating data into your system. A lot of flexibility with Drupal, but quite frankly the other commerce platforms just can offer. So we'll tile this up with a kind of forward-looking look at opportunities and challenges for Drupal in this space. So what we've essentially got here is this widely changed landscape for B2B commerce and what Drupal commerce allows you to do is kind of do what this guy did, right? Build yourself a life raft to help you get around in this new environment that's completely unique to your needs, right? But using the tools available to help you navigate this new space, which is great, right? And if you're a B2B organization, you can do this fairly cheaply compared to other off the shelf or proprietary platforms to allow you to transact and meet your specific needs by kind of pulling together these modules and get you around in your environment. The thing to think about though is in this new environment sooner or later, right? One of these other proprietary companies is gonna offer you a brand spanking new branded rowboat to help you get around in that environment too that has all those things kind of prebuilt in it. So that's one of the things we wanna think about when it comes to Drupal commerce. So how do we build on the advantages that we have to continue to make Drupal potential go-to in the new B2B commerce opportunity? So the things that are open are available to us really there's no one really doing all of those things well at a reasonable cost, right? There's companies out there, you know, the oracles and hybrids of the world will meet all of those business requirements for you for tens of millions of dollars sometimes, right? So if you wanna do those without that type of budget, no one really enables you to do that except for Drupal commerce. The number of new prospective clients or customers out there, organizations that are looking to transact online is huge, right? As we talked about only 44% of current companies are now selling online and there are probably a lot of those 44% are selling online very poorly. So there's a big like pent up demand for new e-commerce sites in the B2B space. And B2B organizations are waking up to this opportunity so they need to transform their business and start selling online. And the reason why or one of the reasons why they're waking up is that Amazon business is already there in taking business away from them, right? Amazon businesses was the largest, both in terms of total volume and growth percentage, largest B2B commerce provider transaction last year, right? And they're selling all the stuff that these plumbing companies used to be able to sell through their kind of traditional channels of fax and phone and Amazon business is going in there. So a lot of people are waking up to that. But there's challenges there too, right? So all those guys, those logos across the top, those are all the licensing platform, the current kind of licensee commerce platforms that are even as we speak, retooling their systems to go after this market opportunity, right? And a lot of them are already out there marketing saying that they can service B2B commerce requirements, even those five we talked about. Some of them have some truth to them. Some of them were kind of selling smoke and mirrors, but all of them are going after that opportunity and investing a lot of money to try to be the preferred platform there. And frankly, Drupal does not have great brand recognition already in that B2B space. So there's a bit of a awareness and familiarity obstacle to get over. And then as we talked about the value of extensibility and the flexibility to build your own life raft using the materials that are available to you, that value can diminish as more off the shelf, configurable B2B option appear. Organizations that say, yep, this is absolutely specific to your B2B needs and you just need to move this knob here and there to change your price breaks, to change your volume pricing rules, to set up your customer portal. Once you have that, then the value of building your own life draft diminishes. So that's kind of the commerce and the opportunity we have available to us. So let's wrap all this up and talk about key points that you should walk out of this room with. So first key point, again, B2B commerce requirements pose unique challenges for typical commerce platforms. They can't do it or you got to customize the hack out of it to get it to do what you wanna do in a B2B environment and you got to build a net new customized platform that no longer looks like the proprietary system you bought. Drupal and the data model and the concepts and the Drupal commerce modules, all those things help currently to address some of those unique B2B needs. But there's this limited window for Drupal commerce and us in this room to take advantage of that opportunity and really try to cement Drupal and Drupal commerce as a preferred platform to solve that B2B commerce need. So those are things you should walk away with and we have a couple of minutes for questions and our contact information's up there if you didn't get it earlier. You can step up to the mic, please, sir. Yeah, just because it's being recorded, they asked us to make sure people come up to the mic for questions. You run into a problem with a lot of our smaller clients that don't have maybe a big fancy ERP or any other kind of system that really can integrate with the website. And oftentimes they have to duplicate their business practices on a website. Any sort of strategies to help mitigate that or reduce that redundant or dull effort? Yeah, so it sounds like they got clients that may not have any system of record or ERP system for their products or their pricing and they don't wanna have to build it for the first time maybe in the website. They don't wanna, if they're gonna build it, they don't wanna put all that knowledge into a package. They just kinda wanna keep what they've got but still be able to sell online. Fair enough. Yeah, got it. I'm gonna take that one. Yeah, so I guess a couple things. One is on the Drupal side, if they have a need, say they're doing all that stuff manually today and there is absolutely no system of record and it's just purely manual processes and things being done over email and paperwork and things like that. We have had some customers like that, especially early on and we actually use Drupal to help kind of model some of those scenarios so then you can, you could take the platform that's running their website and kind of extend that and allow that to be a tool for some of their back office administration. So definitely not making the case for Drupal to become an ERP or become a PIM system. But it is flexible and you could potentially put some of those models in that system. At least until they have the opportunity to find a proper platform. I will also say just from our experience in the e-commerce world, some of these big, heavy ERP solutions that you think of that are hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, there are a number of players out there that are making smaller software as a service versions of those. You can integrate to be a cloud via connectors through their services. So there could be something out there that you guys evaluate for them that could serve that ERP need, but maybe it's a kind of a monthly subscription base or something that's not a big, kind of heavy JDM words type of tool that you have to implement for them. Other thoughts or discussion points? Couple things to remind you of while you're thinking of questions. Sprints tomorrow. We've got some guys that will be sprinting. Hope you guys to see you as well. So certainly make time to continue to contribute to the community here tomorrow. And our evaluation link is up here as well. You can just find our session in the Drupalcon schedule. Feel free to tell us what we think. This is again, our first time presenting at Drupalcon. And we wanna continue to refine our craft as presenters. So look forward to getting your feedback. Other questions or thoughts? All right, thanks guys. Oh, maybe we got one more. I cut it off too early. Sorry, yeah, one question. So you said that you'll integrate with an ERP system. Have you ever talked to people about trying to move more and more in the direction of using Drupal? I know this is a little similar, I guess to the other question, but... Instead of an ERP system? Yeah. You might just have to speak into it a little bit more. So you've talked about integrating with ERP systems. Have you talked about moving key pieces of that more into Drupal as a part of a transition to a Drupal thing, so inventory to start out with? Or I mean, obviously, to get offline orders into a Drupal system, they need to be in the Drupal database anyways. So you could integrate all of that or you could build a new interface, kind of wrap it around, does that make sense? Yeah, if I can maybe restate that. So the question is yes, we can integrate into ERP systems. That's great, but what if there's pieces of information and boy, you gotta wonder if they even should be in the ERP system and they may be more belong in Drupal or in the commerce platform and are we able to kind of coach clients through that process? Yeah, I mean, so from like a project side or a system implementation side, I would actually kind of lean away from that. The things that you really want in Drupal are gonna be your product displays. In some cases, you're full like record of SKU, sometimes you might be pulling that out of the ERP or your product information management system. But I would kind of caution, especially if they have another system in place making Drupal do all the things and all the things that it might not should do. And a couple of considerations for that, one is they might have other channels, obviously they likely do if they're B2B that are outside of the web, they're already reliant on this ERP system. And ERPs do a lot of things well with managing those channels. So to get that and kind of pull it in the Drupal, you know, I don't think it would offer necessarily like a lot of advantages. So yeah, I mean, what I would recommend is like letting the key systems of the client has in place do the things that they're designed to do and they're good at and focus more on how to share that data with Drupal, whether that's representing real time or whether that's copying it in and storing it. Make sure that it has a method to play nicely with those other systems, more so than kind of trying to take Drupal and make it replace one of those systems. That question has definitely come up in terms of product information management systems. I think that's probably the most common. People don't have a PIM system which helps them manage their product data. And they're just using spreadsheets today. Sometimes that does kind of Drupal can kind of turn it into a PIM system to help them manage that and get their information more centralized. Definitely with an ERP, I would say, keep them separate about the ERP, do what it's. I can add on that a little bit though. I think there's certainly instances where the client's ERP systems, as you talked about, like it's ancient and it may not be all that sturdy. So there's times when we're actually pulling information out of the ERP system but that thing can fall over if you breathe on it heavily. Maybe it's running on a server under somebody's desk. So there's still need to disconnect your dependence upon that ERP package. You don't want to certainly make a connection, the ability to take a transaction dependent upon your ability to connect to the ERP package. So you want all the data in Drupal even if it's coming from the ERP package. And if the ERP thing falls over you can still continue to run online, take transactions, present product data. So that kind of limits your exposure to the risk of an ancient out-of-date ERP system. It allows you to kind of just keep going with all that knowledge sucked into ERP but still your system of record should probably be that backend system. Other thoughts, questions? Cool, I think we're out of time. Thanks everybody. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm on second time, man. So I was wondering, are there any places to go to find examples of where these solutions have been implemented so that every time I have a complex thing, I don't have to learn the whole rule system and try to figure out how to put all the pieces together. Are there things that people have done before that work really well and can be used as a template for repeating that in my own use case? Yeah, right. So is there a library of examples of how people saw these problems before beyond our website and the case studies we got up there? Yeah, I mean there are, in terms of just seeing examples of this live, you can definitely look at our client list. Commerce Guys maintains, I think still maintains a long list of example clients that are using Drupal Commerce. So that's handy to at least go and kind of see from a front end user perspective how something could potentially be set up or built. In terms of there being a guidebook for B2B commerce within Drupal, not that I'm aware of in particular, obviously we could be resources for that provide our contact information for any questions there. It's also not a bad idea to potentially that's a gap or a book that could be written with a guidebook that could be prepared. So definitely a good idea there. But in terms of it being all kind of condensed and assimilated, not that I'm aware of. It's all like a good need, yeah, sir. Good talk, so great talk actually. Basically when you guys start talking, I put up like 15 gaps that I see B2C to B2B and I ticked off most of them. Few questions, so how complicated these pricing rules can get? Like I'm looking at stuff like, I mean these contracts can get really complicated. You know, rate change, tied to inflation or tied to material pricing. Effectivity when that rate change can happen. Discounts based on volume, discount based on cumulative volume on and on and on. So how flexible that area is. Yeah, you can probably speak to that and talk to some of the stuff we've done with Hawak and a lot of times the question depends on where you want that pricing logic to live. Does it live in Drupal? Okay, we can build it in there or can we just read it from another system? Some system that may not be web enabled but has all that data in there even better, but we're gonna speak to that. Yeah, and it can get very complex and what we found is typically every customer you engage with on the B2B side has a variation of all of those rules and so what happens is you might not be able to use the same implementation approach that you used on a previous project for that. One great thing though, I mean if they are selling through other channels like Chris said they've had to solve that problem before. Now you just have to make it logical and get it to the web. Yeah, so they have modeled their data about how to price or how to account for all these somewhere, right? And in some cases it's not unusual where they don't have a model and they literally say we deal with 10,000 customers, every single customer for every single product has a negotiated price and we've defined that over the last 20 years and we're not willing to change that. And I'd say when Chris and I started kind of doing some BV commerce projects back in 2005 or so, we really did have to change their business if we wanted to put that information on the web because it was just prohibitive to have a structure like that. Triple commerce is actually the first platform that we've worked with that's allowed us to model some of those very complex, very unique situations and not have it be a cost-effective solution. As a follow on question, so when you're talking about pulling the data from the ERP system, I kind of heard two different things. Are you talking about continuously syncing or are you talking about maybe federating that data as needed? Yeah, and both actually. So both kind of depending on the scenario. So we've had examples where, I think what Chris was alluding to before, where you'll go to a customer site, you'll go to the warehouse and they literally have a server closet that is their closet or maybe their break room and they've got this old system that's been out and running, legacy system for 20 years. In those cases, what we've done is replicate the data, kind of get it out of their warehouse, maybe get it into the cloud in a replicated database. And then if the performance is good, we can query against that and basically have a kind of reach into that database and pull information out in real time as ages are loading on the web. So we don't necessarily have a record of that in Drupal per se, but we'll rely on the ERP to provide information. So one of our example clients has roughly 700,000 products online for sale and a lot of their product attribute information comes out of their ERP because what they have is other manufacturers who are sending them feeds of product data information and product attributes. So those feeds go into their ERP, they can change basically at any time. So every time we build a product page for display, we have to go full out of the latest attributes out of the ERP. So you wouldn't want to store that in Drupal necessarily because you'd have tons of sync jobs and you'd have 700,000 nodes that you'd have to keep up to date and constantly resave all the time. So... So they're getting a lot of this? What's that? So they're getting a lot of this? Yes. Yes, yeah. So being able to connect to that for a real time in that situation is very important. On smaller projects or on projects where maybe you want that information in Drupal for other reasons being maybe more compatible with rules or other models that are being used. In those cases, we've been setting up a migration. I'm scared to say it now. The doors of the church are open if you'd like to come down to the front and you can, any other questions? All right, awesome. Thank you guys for listening. Have a great day today. Thank you very much. Enjoy your Drupal content. With a whole set of, there's a lot of lives to protect at the moment. A whole set of, yes, not necessarily. And certainly, the real question was always how do you do the whole set of, how do you do the whole set of, how do you do the whole set of, how do you do the whole set of, how do you do the whole set of… Oops. ... without the stupid and in that spectrum we just spend Roard developer still半 a store a day all bookings through chats, to bring to the real depth… I was gonna say you guys I know you're asking some such questions, and I kinda want to know a little about you on the side, and what are your several fitting situations we work with. Can you spend a long process to complete all their upcoming… And we use some of our distributors, so we don't have to make any money. One thing is to check the amount of people who have lived in the city for over a year. This is a lot of times of attendance. So if you guys are actually living in the city, we have a lot of people who are living in the city. We have no... We have to check the amount of people who have lived in the city for over a year. That's what we're going to bring now. So the private amount and the peer-shedding amount is all that's worth. We're going to use that building for 28 years. Many jobs here have started adding their workability to be reasonable. So the building costs is a lot of stuff. It wasn't that bad. We just need to check the amount of people who have lived in the city. And then we'll develop a sold-in product with different prices. That's right. Yeah. We're going to use that. We're going to use that. We're going to use that. We're going to use that. We're going to use that. We're going to use that. We're going to use that. We're going to use that. We're going to use it. We're going to use that. We're going to use it.