[Music] [Lizeth Almaguer Cavazos] So welcome to this session. This is called Critical Ingredients for E-commerce Expansion and Revenue Growth. My name is Lizeth Almaguer. I am a Technical Solution Architect for the Professional Services Team, A.K.A. Adobe Consulting. I come from the Magento acquisition, and before that I was a merchant just like you. And I'm here with? [Matt Johnson] Hi, I'm Matt Johnson. I am a Senior Product Manager for Adobe Commerce. Specific fiefdom is cloud infrastructure. So I'm very familiar with scalability and the enterprise growth side of the house. I, similar to Liz, came over to Adobe from the Magento acquisition and I'm excited to be here with you today. You're welcome. All right. So let's start with a few key takeaways for this session. So we're going to start with some, talking about strategic growth with a few business models and hopefully find opportunities that you can find useful.

Absolutely. And then through that, we also want to talk about Adobe as a catalyst for scalability and really showcase how Adobe Commerce can support these diverse business models out of the box, whether you're looking at something like multi-region, multi-brand, unified B2B, B2C, GRA, or even extensibility to create your own first-party market place or subscription model. Commerce really is a very good platform to really just power through and allow you to take any of these challenges on.

And lastly, we want to stress that after looking at your business model, the importance of the Adobe approach, which is experience led, data-power and technology enabled approach. So prioritizing your customer experience and then leveraging data for informed decision making and then utilizing the technology instead of just using the technology as a starting point.

All right. So just so we are all in the same page, there's the word growth in the title of this session. So let's talk about what we mean by growth. So growth, we were going to talk about enhancing your revenue streams. Also, the addition or expansion of your revenue streams and we're also going to cover some reduction of costs.

So we are going to cover these five business models. We're going to start with experience and channel expansion. So this covers the customer relationship and loyalty, so enhancing your shopping experience. Then we're going to talk about multi-brand and acquisition. So multi-brand means, if you have a company that has an umbrella with different brands or if you recently acquired a brand and you're going to integrate that into your experience. Then we're going to talk about multi-region expansion. So this strategic approach is basically extending your business footprint into a new geographic area. And then we're going to talk about B2B and B2C, this is when you merge and when you have this type of growth, when you want to leverage both within your same business. So if you're currently B2B and you want to extend to B2C, or the other way around, or if you're both already. And then we're just going to mention just a few examples of additional revenue streams that we've seen in the market lately that, we're utilizing Adobe Commerce as well. So maybe it can spark some ideas for you.

Okay. So first, let's talk about digital transformation. So as you can see, there's a lot of opportunity for the digital market. We are in the Adobe Conference. So you've heard the word digital so many times by now, but we want to remind you that the drive towards technology is not about adopting new technologies. It is about fundamentally reimagining the operations of your business and understanding the value that you give to the customers in a very digital world. So-- And I'm saying this in a technology conference, and I know you're seeing a lot of technology, you're getting excited, but it's not about adopting technology, it's about leveraging that technology for your business.

And digital transformation is not easy. So we see a lot of, over 70% of the initiatives about digital transformation missing their goals.

So the question is, what's going on? What can we do to prevent this? And these are some and you probably have your own challenges but let's talk about these four. So consumers expect more. And they expect a good experience, not only just a transactional experience, they expect a good experience and they expect consistency. And now in the B2B world as well, they expect everything to be digital and self-service.

Data... Data is really important. There's a lot of our customers that just acquired tools and technology to gather and gather data. But how reliable is your data? That's what's important. Like, are you getting insights for your decision-making process? Are you using data for your experience? Are you using data for your personalization? So if you don't prioritize data and having clean data, this is going to be a challenge for you, especially on expansion and globalization.

Teams are expected to do more with less, especially on expansion. If you are acquiring a brand, now you're bringing a lot of systems, and you just expect your team to know all of the systems or you just want the faster time to market. Like, everyone expects faster time to market. And just teams are expected to do everything with what they get. So that's a huge challenge. And then tech debt is also blocking their business. There's a lot of companies that say, we are not ready for what Adobe is showing me at the moment. I'm just in tech debt. I can't. And obviously, in expansion, you're introducing new, other systems and things like that. So tech debt is a huge blocker in digital transformation.

Okay. So this is the Adobe approach. So we are saying that we have to look at your business first, but your business model first. But Adobe empowers, so you always prioritize your experience and then after that, you understand your experience and you keep learning from your experience through data. So data power insights. And then after that, you just use your technology to enable that. - So-- - Yep. And I actually had a discussion with a customer just yesterday that this was very apropos to where they are an Adobe commerce customer, but not familiar with the rest of the Adobe stacks. So they're listening to the keynote and seeing all of these cool things from the AI enhancements to just everything across the stack. And then you say, we don't know about AM though, or sites, or any of these things. And we want to know how to utilize all of that. And it's great. But they were still having some issues optimizing commerce and needed some help there. And it's-- Let's make sure that you're optimizing the tool for your initial customer experience now, and then layer on additionally, additional technology components, so you can actually enhance that experience instead of saying, here's all the cool technology. How do we use it and then develop an experience behind it.

All right. So let's start with Experience and Channel Expansion.

So I was chatting with our commerce strategist recently and he was saying that the biggest gap on the customer experience-- Sorry, on revenue growth is a lot of customers miss the bridge between their customer journeys and their, actually, revenue generation. So you can see this little image that I got. Thank you, Adobe Stock.

You're supposed to help the customer make that decision, that decision making point. So you have a search, you have a great navigation, and you have a catalog. That's one-on-one experience. But what is the differentiator between your, for the experience of your customer? What is the differentiator that the customer is like, okay, this is my decision point? And a lot of customers also focus on just the creation of content. Right now we're here in every word, content supply chains and now I can generate 500 images and now I can do GenAI. Now I have a lot of content. But I don't know about you, but I would prefer three clicks in one order than 150 clicks in no order. So unless you're here to entertain your customers with content, right? And there is a balance. You do need content to engage them because at the end of the day, you want higher order value, right? So you want them to keep shopping, not only one and go. But you have to understand that what is the hesitation of actually putting something in the cart? So, yes, obviously, focus on customer experience. But always remember, you are here for revenue growth, and you are helping with the experience getting to that decision point. So, yes, focus on content. You want the content to be personalized and things like that, but the personalization has to drive them towards the decision point.

So if I tell you, for example, like Amazon has uses 30% of their purchases come from product recommendations and the rest come from search, that doesn't mean that you have to create that because the mentality of an Amazon shopper is, I open the app because I need something and I'm going to search for it. And then it happens that they have product recommendations and then that's why it's useful. But just you have to understand the customer journey, the value of your own company, and how are you going to get them to the decision point. So it can be very different. In Professional Services, we have something called the customer journey assessment and it's to find that specific gap. So for some of you it could be a visual story, so maybe the content is very important for you. So the customers are proud of wearing your shoes or proud of buying your brand. So maybe a visual story is useful. For others, it could be just messagings throughout the way. So we have a customer that sells cars. So it's a huge decision. So having the messaging of getting information for them, to get them to the decision point and what gets them excited. So understanding their behavior, they need more information. In the B2B world, there's also obviously the importance of education as well. So your customer journey will vary, right? So don't follow just that, whatever someone else is doing and is working for them. Understand your customer journey and, again, your customer journey to the decision point and the revenue generation.

And then we have engagement through personalization. We have a lot of tools for personalization in this conference. A lot of-- In my personal experience, a lot of Adobe Commerce customers are a little intimidated by personalization. And I think it's because they think there's a lot of-- They need to read the minds of their customers and things like that. But it could-- You can start small. You can just target with a few promotions. And it's just about understanding the behavior of your customer. We have a case study of the-- Because we have other tools for data and personalization. There was a 430% of ROI using our data tools. So just getting the data inside is kind of the key of that.

Then we have a unified customer experience. So for this, you have a lot of chat, a lot of channels and the customers nowadays expect that consistency through all of the channels. So if you got them from Instagram because they were traveling and you understood there that they needed a traveling bag and then they come to your site and then you offer them something completely different, then you break that customer experience. So it's really important to have that unified customer experience. And for that, you can leverage a lot of things that you can currently have on Adobe Commerce. So we actually have the data of what converted, right? So it's not about only the content, but if you know already that they like the color pink and you happen to have a product that is pink, then they already purchase it. So you utilize the data of, that already converted in the past. And it depends on what you sell. So if you sell sandwiches or cakes, you know the flavor that they like but if you sell tools and things that are not a repetition product, then you can show them something that goes alone or, like, again, education how to use their tools, maybe get accessories and things like that. So that is some of the things that you can do for, in terms of the experience. Just, again, just a reminder that you are pushing them towards a decision point. And then we also have a reduction of cost. Now we've seen a lot of...

The content supply chain. Like I said, now you can generate more and more images. And this is more on the preference of the customer. So if they want a little alteration of the image that convinces them for the decision point, again, stressing that. We also have you-- You've heard probably recently edge delivery service. That is just a way to automate how your marketing team works and having more experiences faster. The fundamental thing on acceleration is that you need to separate your marketing than your commerce. So you want your commerce to be super consistent. You don't want-- You're not going to change your payment methods every week. You're going to change your marketing strategy probably every week. So you have to have that solid consistent foundation on the commerce side and decouple that from the marketing experience. So edge delivery service helps a lot on that. And also headless architecture will help you having that consistency across all channels. So not only on your website, but everything that you're learning from on your site can be expanded to other channels as well.

So I do want to harp a bit on the customer journey because it is very important. And I think one of the keys that Liz here mentioned is that journey is the entire flow to purchase. That's what you're ultimately trying to do.

And one of the reasons I want to harp on this is we consistently see companies struggle through this. As a matter of fact, we see about 15% of companies actually managing contextualized, orchestrated journeys effectively.

So while we've talked a lot about the personalization piece, this is really key. Is personalization is part of this? But what we can see here is that you have typically a 250% increase in your purchase rate for all customers who are actually shopping or interacting with your brand with three or more channels. You also have 15% revenue lifts through these contextualized journeys. And then given this, we have 41% of customers report that consistency is the critical thing to keep them loyal to a brand. So what this means is that you need to create and deploy personalized and timely communications across all of your channels, devices, that could be SMS, email, mobile push notification, in app messages, and web channels. Now what we're offering here is a single canvas and toolset to design and deploy those contextualized journeys, which is dynamic and event-based so you can actually make real-time decisions based off of real-time signals that are coming in.

This could all include reengagement campaigns, welcome campaigns, drip campaigns for reengagement. And one of the other critical pieces here goes into the optimized advertising aspect. So as you have this journey and you utilize this data, you can then optimize your advertising to be part of that journey as well. Adobe through an API integration, we can actually share conversion data to Meta and Google to optimize ads and actually look at that ad performance.

So next, I want to talk about what you need to look for in a platform to make this a reality, and that's composability and extensibility.

For those of you that might remember the legacy Magento days of the monolithic application, we have through Adobe Commerce, really breaking down and decomposing the monolith into a way that is much more composable and extensible.

Now, there are a lot of things to consider here. Liz previously had mentioned headless. And I think that's important because when you have multi-channels, you run the risk of duplicating content. And you are basically doing the same thing on different systems and just across all of your channels. So without a headless CMS, you really just continue to duplicate across all of these platforms. But with a headless architecture, what you can do is really take the content from the CMS and deliver it to any frontend and any framework that you're looking for. And the long and short of it is that it means you can create content once and continuously reuse it.

Next, we want to look at integration complexities. I'm sure we know with any new business model or channel, you have to integrate into new systems or your business systems. You have your CRM, your ERP, your identity, all of those pieces. And so you want to have an architecture that can facilitate a seamless integration here. Now from an Adobe Commerce standpoint, we focus on really breaking down those walls. So we want to make sure that we unlock the ability to deliver immediate value instead of lengthy and complex implementations. So the extensibility capabilities really reduce the time to deploy new features and really bring that market value as quickly as possible. So we offer via API mesh. Are you all familiar with API mesh, app builder, those different pieces? I won't belabor it given this isn't a technical piece, and I'm sure you have. But those really do allow you to integrate Adobe with different third-party systems in a quick and efficient manner, as well as maybe build out some of your own extensions, some of your own capabilities in a quick and efficient manner as well. But, yeah. So I/O Events basically take these real time triggers and then allow developers to do a soup-to-nuts buyer journey as well, just in very short order.

You want to focus on scalability issues. This is a lot of where I live and breathe from the cloud standpoint. And from there, you want to make sure that, that you are hosting in a way that is highly resilient, highly reliable, and very performant.

You want to make sure that you are managing your multichannel sales effectively. So that's really coordinating sales and inventory across multiple channels. And you want to allow for efficient multichannel management, inventory management, and make sure that that is syncing online, offline, going back to the unified customer experience. And all of that really goes to making sure that you're finding a platform that is adaptable, extensible, and flexible to do this. We find that about one-third of companies really talk about legacy technology being one of their biggest hurdles to advance and grow. And that can be very, very painful. So that goes back to-- Okay, what do we want our experience to be? Then let's backtrack in and look at the technology that goes behind that.

So moving forward, now that we've kind of gone through the fundamentals of these things, I'm going to hand it back over to Liz. We're going to talk a little bit about multi-region, multi-site expansion, and go from there.

All right. So multi-brand and multi-region. So we currently have a customer. But do you remember the five models that I presented at the beginning? There's one customer that wants to do them all at once. So they started with-- We want the best experience, we want all the channels, we have five different brands and I want them in multiple regions and let's go. Let's do it. And we are doing that project with them and there's, this is, a lot of things that we've learned from that. The thing is, yes, we have the technology. Like Matt said, the technology will support what you have. But there's a lot of considerations to get there. And this is where faster time to market is really important for your revenue, absolutely. But multi-brand and multi-region is a very complex thing and strategy, and planning is so underrated. So be ready. So in this scenario what we have to look out is cost. So I understand that you go, and we need the revenue as soon as possible, but also take into consideration the cost, right? So there's a lot of things in the journey from the strategy alignment. Is this going to be helpful for our goals of the company, of the brands? In the case of multi-brand where you have different business strategies, then you have to really have a strategy per brand instead of, okay, you have a tool that you can have everything centralized and I want to put all of my brands together in one. First, think about, do you really need to have all of the brands with the same strategy behind it? So this is one of the things that you need to consider before selecting your technology. So I put technology at the end. So first, look at your business model. If the brands are going to be different and the strategy and planning towards that. So also you have to consider if you're going to have a centralized management, who is going to manage your brands? Is it okay that they use the same systems and things like that? Then data and experience. So in terms of having multiple brands, most likely you have different catalogs. If you have the same catalog, sometimes on B2B and B2C also you have the same catalog, then it makes it easier. But you have to-- If you acquire a brand, we've seen customers that come to us and just want to start using the technology before actually merging their catalogs, and that is something that is going to extend your implementation and then is going to be very costly. So take a breath, prep your data, prep your teams, and then start in solid ground before going to technology. So customer data, same thing. You are acquiring a new brand. Maybe you have two different systems. And maybe some of you have two different systems for customers as well because sometimes you collect data from different channels and they're siloed, so you want to merge them. Data is super important for your experience. Insight and personalization, consistency, like I said in different channels and devices. It's really important to have that strategy as well before deciding on your technology.

People and process, we've seen with this customer specifically. They have five different brands in five different ERMs, five different OMS and they want them in one commerce. Absolutely. We can do that. And we will do it and it will work. But they're taxing on their teams. So there's something to consider, right? Like their teams are going to have to manage so much behind the scenes and the leadership is just, they just want faster time to market. But consider that your teams are going to have a hard time, when you create that decision. So, yeah, training and enablement, they have to be ready when we go live. Everyone has to understand the processes and things like that. And if you don't look at that before the technology, so say you did decide you're going to use one platform for all your brands, but then it's not going to work on the process? So consider the process as well before, on the technology. And then once you decide on the technology, if you're going to use one single platform, again, we are building a platform that will support you. It will support your business model. It will support multiple business models. But does that work for your team? Does that work for your data? Does that work for your experience, for your customers? If it doesn't and you decide that you need multiple platforms, we also have a methodology called the Global Reference Architecture and I'll expand on that in a few slides. But it's just to help you having that technology together, so you don't miss the opportunity of leveraging your development.

And there's also other considerations on regulatory compliance, integrations, and things like that. We also had a customer that wanted to extend on the same instance for another region and they have certain regulatory things that they are not approved in Canada and so then we had to go through a different flow. And so that delayed a lot of things. So before starting the implementation, understand all of your components. So these are just a few, obviously, depending on your industry, depending on your system, depending on your customer experience, there will be different things to consider. But these are some of the things just to consider that hopefully sparks the opportunities to avoid an implementation that is super costly. And I had a meeting yesterday with a customer and they said, yes, I am seeing a lot of good things on the road map, and I want to implement them. Like, how do I convince my business team? And my answer was, you shouldn't convince your business team to use the technology, however, sometimes it is necessary. So I am a technical solution architect. The process for that is, listen to the business requirements and they will want the world and they will want a lot of things. And that might cause 10 customizations with what they want. And maybe the platform has already something that can help in a different way to the business, right? So I think the process should be a negotiation if the value for the customer is the same or better. So never bargain on the customer value but also listen to the business first. What are you trying to achieve? Because the business will always come with, I need all of this, and I need it like this. So in the-- I need it like this, that's where the negotiation comes. So, yes, I know we've been saying, look at your business first and then your technology but now I'm saying understand the technology as well and create that negotiation of technology. So, yes, there will be a lot of features because at the end of the day, the product team, Matt, and the product team, are creating a platform that will evolve to help and having new features that will help the experience. So sometimes they will come with something that might be not exactly what they needed and then, if you're in the IT team or if you're in the marketing team, you think that that's not going to work so we are going to have to customize. And then you're going to come to us and say, we over customized the tool. And then it's going to cost you more to upgrade and I know everyone's going to be like, upgrade to Adobe Commerce and things like that. So do consider that you need a balance between what is, what the business is trying to accomplish, what do we have on the technology that we picked and review the value that you're giving to the customer. So that's kind of like the conclusion of that. Yeah. Right. I completely agree with everything she just said.

From the product standpoint, I'd just like to provide a little bit of insight into the type of considerations that we really look at for something like a global architecture, whether it be multi-site or GRA. So rather than going straight into the GRA, I want to focus on multi-site, given the fact that we actually see a bunch of success on multi-site running from a single platform, not only from the cost standpoint, but frankly, just from the development time as well.

And as we know, just growing into any new regions is extremely complex. You're going to have the global regulations. You're going to have the language change. You are going to have multi-currency considerations. As Liz mentioned, you're going to have compliance and security considerations throughout that. So what we really take into consideration is providing a flexible multi-site architecture that really allows you to create these authentic localized experiences in whatever region you are expanding to.

We have a global cloud infrastructure that supports in region hosting with high availability SLAs, high redundancy, and as I had mentioned previously, great performance across all of those.

We want to really focus on customer segmentation and the tooling to allow you to target different buyers with different product recommendations, promotions, and catalogs.

I want to encourage higher sales through merchandising, basically providing a full set of merchandising and content management capabilities to create compelling sites.

You want inventory support. So we need to support multiple inventory locations across the world in these different regions.

And then there's the other hurdles that I mentioned. You want something that can handle multi-currency, multi-language, out of the box, with commerce can certainly facilitate for you.

And then there's the security concerns. This is something I'm sure many of you are familiar with some of these, whether it be GDPR, HIPAA, any of these pieces. You want to make sure that you have a platform that can actually handle these concerns in an effective manner. One of the benefits of looking for a technology that can actually be flexible with you goes back to all of the business strategy that that Liz was mentioning. It really opens up the possibilities for you to focus on what the business needs and then let the technology come to you through that.

Now as Liz had mentioned, for companies that do not, whether-- Again, whether it's just company policy, different contracts, things like that, but can't support multi-site and would rather go to multi-instances, we do have the GRA option, which we'll talk about previously or in just a moment. But I do want to share some of just like the numbers here. We have customers that we have running 25 sites on a single instance that are seeing 30% revenue increases all just through those global instances or those global sites on a single instance. So really, really consider, is it worth multiple instances to do what you need? Or can you really just harness the power of one instance, the lower cost and the lower development to get you there? So, Liz, would you like to talk a little bit about GRA if that is not an option? Of course, yes. So, yeah, so we know we have a platform that can support all of your business models. But in the case that, you do need to separate your instances, we have something called the Global Reference Architecture. So the Global Reference Architecture is a technology methodology. We-- It's to leverage the foundation of what you have created, and you can expand to either different brands or different regions. So in this case, you have one centralized code base, what you created with, in case some customizations that you needed for your brand, some integrations that you needed, and then you can utilize that and extend to other brands. So it will be easier to scale, so it's faster to scale. Then you also maintain that independence that I said, sometimes your business needs to be separated or it happens a lot on regional, right? You have a different business unit working on another region and they don't want to manage the same ITs they have. Sometimes the marketing team has different requests, they have a different road map, so they want to separate them. But at the same time, we recommend this because you are using the same catalog, the same experience, the same features. You will need the same feature-- And if one development team is working on something really cool, then you can just transfer it as well.

And then that makes, obviously, a reduction of total cost of ownership. This is also-- I have a warning, obviously, on the total cost of ownership it is, if it's managed correctly and if it's managed in a centralized way. So it is another instance that you need to maintain because it's obviously something kind of like your foundation. So we've seen in cases where there's a regional team that doesn't want to deal with the other IT teams and things like that. But we also recommend that we have a customer that has a brand. This is the same brand, but they have a business unit in APAC and then they are in the US, and they are opening their digital store in APAC, and they said we don't want the GRA. It's going to be completely differently team. And IT doesn't want to deal with that. So what we did is-- We can actually turn the America site into a GRA. We can launch your site and leverage the commonality that you have and then you can manage separately. So you can also consider that. You don't know-- You don't have to commit to have always the IT teams in sync. We also have another customer that has very similar brands, but they're a little bit different. They had jeans and then they have backpacks. But at the end of the day, they had a lot of commonalities in their audience. So they did leverage the GRA.

Around 80% of the code was similar. They had five different brands and they saved 50% of development. And they launched the brands very quickly. They had different catalogs. They have different experience in some cases, but they were able to launch the five sites within one year. We also have an example here.

So this is the example of our customer in the Middle East. They are a franchise operator. They have 4500 stores. In the Middle East, it wasn't very popular to have a digital store. They had massive malls and they wanted to be more into the experience of come to the mall and I have my 40 brands in here. So whatever you spend the money in the mall, it's going to come to my pocket because it was a franchise. But COVID came and so they were very desperate to go digital. And the backend was very similar because it was, at the end of the day, the same operator. It's a franchise operator. So the experience on the frontend were the difference. So we leveraged the GRA. They launched 30 sites in 12 months. I traveled to the Middle East for almost the entire year.

It's, yeah, a good story for another time. And, so, yeah, it was very successful. They had a lot of brands. We gather all of the requirements from everyone. What do you need? We saw the commonalities. We negotiated sometimes with some of them. Like, they asked for something a little bit better, so would you want that? And we created a feature matrix and then we went. And every six weeks, you will see a different brand. And it was very different brands. You will see from selling ice cream, selling underwear, and selling underwear in the Middle East is a whole process as well. We had to have images, moderation, and things like that for the models. That was me. And so it was a very interesting experience. The frontend was different and we still able to launch the sites very quickly.

And...

We just had a POC last week with a brand that was hesitating. So Matt was saying, for the IT people in the room that knew Magento from the past, there's hesitations of, can you still do it in one instance? We had a POC last week or, well, this past few months, I guess, with a brand that wanted to test the tool with 500 million SKUs. And we made it happen. It's out. So the technical architect that worked on it is at the booth, so you can go and ask. So, yes. So you can do it in a single platform if you do it correctly, if your implementation is done correctly. But you also consider the, also consider the global reference architecture if the business requires it.

Anything else to add? No? - No. - All right. So let let's move into B2B and B2C.

Okay. So...

There you go. So for B2B and B2C, so we've had actually a few companies lately that want to merge the B2B and B2C into one instance. That saves them cost of the license and the instances and things like that. It was interesting on the data side just because their customers were different. There's a lot of considerations to do when you merge two different frameworks in one. And so I created this, kind of like the considerations also on the experience side. So when, on the B2B, your channels might focus on bulk transaction, more experience in self-service, and the channels on B2C is more about customer experience. So how-- A little bit more like one-to-one. And then the B2B, you focus more on the logistics and management. And on the B2C, you focus on personalization. On the B2B, you focus on relationship and trust. So sometimes you might have someone behind the scenes talking to the customers where-- On the B2C, you are creating an experience online that is more on the emotional side to the brand.

The B2B transactions are typically with a longer sales cycle, whereas in the B2C, you want them to take a fast decision, just, to check out really fast. So you don't want any friction on that. And, like I said, on B2B usually you will have a dedicated account management on the customer support side. Whereas in the B2C, the customer support strategy is more on a scale to support most of your customers on your experience. So those are some things that, when a customer comes and says, I'm going to either open the opposite, so my B2B experience or merge the B2B with B2C. You still have to consider that there will be some differences. We do support in the same instance and the same platform. But these are some of the consideration that you can expect, especially when you start. There was a customer that we have that sell...

Ingredients. They sell ingredients for B2B. So they sell ingredients for just farmers and, like, farmer markets and things like that. And they just thought, we're just going to open the B2C experience because why not? If we have a website already, your technology supports it. Let's just open it up and let's see what happens. And it's not going to be the same, right? So the bulk experience of an ingredient, your customers for B2B, they already know what they want, and they understand what their experience is. So it's more about the education of what you're selling versus on the B2C, you kind of have to be convinced a little bit more. So the B2C experience wasn't as fast as they wanted, even though like they opened the store. So there's a lot of considerations...

To push when you open the different framework. But, yeah, Matt, if you want to talk about the actual platform. Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting because when we think B2B, B2C, sometimes you think of just a binary delineation right there. That's not always the case. As a matter of fact, we see about 79% of our customers have some form of mixture of B2B and B2C models that they are going from the single platform as well.

Now at the center of all of this is really the self-service model. So you want to think of a self-service customer model. And that allows you to give self-service B2B, your channel, the customers. So they can view pricing, product inventory, and just go through the experience as quickly as possible with little friction. You want to give also personalization with customized catalogs for your customers and for these different B2B accounts and targeted content promotions. And what you're really trying to do is make everything as quick and painless and remove as many barriers as possible.

And with this, we talk consistently about customers, customer experience, all of those pieces. But particularly for B2B, you also really want to put the power into your sales reps' hands. So you want to be able to give your sales reps the power to do these things. You want them to be able to show product comparisons, customer specific pricing. And you want to be able to have them be able to put that into any type of channel, whether it be a customer visit, a trade show, online meeting, or what have you. You want to be able to allow your reps to place orders on behalf of your customers. You want to streamline the ordering process. You want to decrease fulfillment times, and you want to increase customer satisfaction throughout that. And with that, you also want to be able to have the tooling in place to allow your sales reps to negotiate large purchases using some robust quoting capabilities that are very unique to the B2B market.

Now with that being said, I'm seeing that we are at about 11 minutes, and we do want to cover a couple of other revenue stream options for you. And then we do want to allow some time for Q and A as well, just to make sure that we're covering everything that you'd like, see if there are any other revenue streams.

But that being said...

I would like to talk about two other pieces. And this is really marketplace and subscriptions. As you can see, we've already talked about selling direct to consumers. We've talked about B2B, B2C on one platform. But we really also want to look at some other areas there. And so first off, let's talk a little bit about a subscription model.

And what that really means for the customers is that they can have frequently used products at a better price, save time when they only need to fill their cart once, and at the genesis of their history with the company. And for merchants, it allows you to actually be able to sell more and to grow the revenue more predictably. And what that revenue predictability really does is it makes that, sure that financial management is under your control, and you know exactly how many products are sold and when they are sold.

Also allows you to really predict your income more accurately. And that stability can really help with any type of financial planning, investment decisions, and just overall business growth there. Now the subscription model here also allows for opportunities to up-sell or cross-sell at a simpler, greater pace.

And then that really just also increases your average order value, hence the growth there.

We also want to think really about the cost of the customer acquisition. We are really lowering that customer acquisition cost because you are focusing not necessarily on constantly getting new customers but maintaining your existing customers. And this really forces a means of continuous engagement, where you're encouraging ongoing engagement through regular product updates, new features, exclusive content, or just personalized recommendations.

And then next, the expansion into marketplaces. And you might be wondering since a lot of this really sounds like, okay, there's a lot of dev work, or we need to get new things in order to do some of these pieces, or unlock new features. But how can I make more with what I have? And that can often be simpler than you might think, as you can really look at incorporating a first-party marketplace onto your site.

And what that really does is it gathers more shopper traffic into a single source site. You can really look at it as an online mall of sorts. And I know, Liz, you were working with a customer recently trying to talk through the possibility of one of these things, right? Yes. So we have-- Like, we've seen now a lot of customers that are trying to get creative with additional revenue streams. So we have a customer that, actually, commerce is not their core business, and they are trying to expand with the marketplace. So just in terms of point redemption, think about airlines or banks, they accumulate like points. A lot of businesses do. Now, we are also trying to convince a customer that has the sales tools. You can also do points there. So yes, so a marketplace, they never think about a marketplace because, obviously, that has nothing to do with their business. But it is very easy for us to just launch this because, like Matt said, it's part of an extension, as an example. So it is pretty easy to expand to new marketplaces.

Awesome. And that really leads us to any of these types of functionalities that we're talking about, subscriptions, marketplaces. We do also have a very robust marketplace. And you can find a number of these types of functionalities available to plug and play right out of the box with minimal development. And anything you're going to find on this marketplace, whether it be from the subscription aspect, creating your own marketplace aspect, goes through a rigorous quality program. Our extension quality program, make sure that it's compatible, not going to break anything, and is just going to give you the best experience possible. So feel free, once you have your business strategy taken into account and you're really considering your technology, if you ever see any gap, feel free to go to the Marketplace, and they'll probably have you cover as well.

Well, thanks for joining us. I know it's, again, last day after bash, early morning. Thank you for being bright eyed and bushy tailed. - It's great to have you. - Thank you.

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