Mastering B2B Ecommerce | Jason Greenwood

Matt Edmundson [0:05 - 2:15]: Okay. Welcome to the eCommerce Podcast with me, your host, Matt Edmundson. Now, this is a show all about ecommerce. Funnily enough, clues in the title. That's why we call it the eCommerce Podcast But wherever you're from, wherever you're listening from, it's great to have you with us. Thank you for joining us today as we chat about how to get our businesses to grow and thrive on online and deliver that all important e commerce web. If you're new to the show, very warm welcome to you. Do that usual stuff like and subscribe and all that crazy good stuff that keeps you connected with what's going on. And of course, if you're a regular, it's great to have you back. You know what? One of the things I love getting is messages on LinkedIn. Get a lot of messages on LinkedIn. Got one today from, well, I got two today, actually, from guys that listen to this show saying, hey, Matt, listen to the podcast. It's great. So just drop me a message. We'd love to connect with you. Love to hear what's going on. Tell me your website. I'd love to see what's going on online for you as well. Really genuinely do that. So if you're up for it, go find me on LinkedIn. Write me a message, hook me up, and tell me what you're doing. I'd love to connect with you. So, yes. Now, should we get into it? I think we probably should. Let's talk to Jason. Jason Greenwood, ecommerce commerce maestro behind Greenwood consulting, where he turns b to b businesses. Check it out. Right? He B2B two b dreams and businesses into something insane, beautiful, and wonderful. Oh, yes. With over two decades of experience, Jason's your go to guru. Are you listening to this? Jason, the go to guru for crafting captivating online shopping experiences. I love this. This is great. He's the host of ecommerce commerce Edge podcast Linked, and he's also very popular on LinkedIn. With 33,000 followers and an industry mentor who lives and ecommerce commerce, Jason is all about giving back and staying ahead of the game. Jason, I can't believe we've not connected sooner than this. But it's great to have you on the show, man. Thanks for coming on.

Jason Greenwood [2:15 - 2:29]: My pleasure. It's an equal surprise. And I told you before we started recording, I'm going to have to use that intro myself. I'm going to have to update my bio page with the incredible intro that your assistant wrote for me. I hope I can live up to that hype.

Matt Edmundson [2:30 - 2:36]: Well, no doubt, no doubt you will be able to. And Sadaf is very, very good at writing the intro.

Jason Greenwood [2:36 - 2:38]: I'll certainly do my best.

Matt Edmundson [2:38 - 2:52]: Yeah, we should sell it as a service. Listen, if you're listening, you need a really good podcast intro. Sadaff. We'll happily create you on for $150. Just drop a line at Sadaff at $150. Dot or something out of there.

Jason Greenwood [2:52 - 2:53]: Love it.

Matt Edmundson [2:55 - 3:02]: Little side hustle for Sadaff going on here, creating profiles or alternatively just onto the show.

Jason Greenwood [3:02 - 3:02]: Exactly.

Matt Edmundson [3:02 - 3:04]: He does it for free, right?

Jason Greenwood [3:04 - 3:04]: Exactly.

Matt Edmundson [3:04 - 3:07]: But yeah, yeah, great. So whereabouts in the world are you?

Jason Greenwood [3:08 - 3:34]: I'm located in Puebla city, Mexico, which is about 2 hours southeast of Mexico city. My wife and I have lived here since January and we just last week. So we're now one week into living in our brand new townhouse in a colonia called Lomas de and Helopolis. And yeah, we're loving it. We just bought this townhouse here. Three story, three bedroom, four bath rooftop terrace overlooking the city. Just fantastic. We absolutely love living here.

Matt Edmundson [3:35 - 3:38]: No doubt, no doubt. Mexico. Why Mexico?

Jason Greenwood [3:39 - 4:55]: Lots of reasons. One of the biggies is how New Zealand. So I'm originally born and raised in southern California, moved to New Zealand in my early twenties with my family and lived there for almost 30 years now living in Mexico. And for those of you listeners that don't know, New Zealand was one of the most locked down countries in the world during COVID Oh, yes. And my wife and I swore we don't jab and we never will. And we were treated like second class citizens for three years and we had a significantly curtailed level of freedom. And that was the final straw that tipped us over the edge to get the hell out of New Zealand. New Zealand's a beautiful country, don't get me wrong, but when it comes to freedom, they like to run the show there. So, you know, there was lots of reasons, you know, the food, the weather, the culture here is amazing in Mexico. Easy access to the United States and the north american market where I've got a lot of clients, you know, so there was lots of, lots of benefits, lots of amazing opportunities here in Mexico. Fast growing dynamic country, fast growing ecommerce sector here in Mexico, much lower cost of living. You know, it's about one 6th our cost of living is about one 6th of what it was in Auckland. So lots of benefits of being here. But the final straw that kind of tipped us over the edge was how New Zealand handled Covid. And we were, my wife and I were big travelers and we weren't able to travel for three years, and so we feel like we needed to make up for lost time. So here we are.

Matt Edmundson [4:55 - 5:37]: Yeah, I remember being in New Zealand when the whole Covid thing hit off, and I ended up leaving the country two days early. I'm like, I smart. My friend Simon. I'm like, I think I need to get out of here, dude. Very smart flights. We got out. We went through Hong Kong and got home pretty sharpish. And I remember at the start of COVID I mean, it's not podcast about COVID but I do remember at the start of it, certainly in Britain, we were looking at Jacinda going, oh, this is an interesting way to do, you know, lockdown. We had Boris, you had Jacinda. And we were all like, can we just have Jacinda? I mean, she seems a little bit more sensible than Boris. And then after a while, we were all like, no, no, we don't want that.

Jason Greenwood [5:37 - 5:38]: That was a bad situation.

Matt Edmundson [5:39 - 5:55]: No, thank you, sir. So, yeah, I can see what you mean. And Mexico, I am slightly envious, because I imagine the favorite food in the world is mexican food, obviously. And it's going to. Yeah, I'm coming next week. Hope you've got a spare room.

Jason Greenwood [5:56 - 6:13]: That's why we got a three bedroom townhouse. It's just me, my wife, and the dog. One bedroom's the office, which is where I'm recording from here. The spare bedroom is for guests, which we always wanted to have. A place where people could come and hang out and chill out and have margaritas. And then we've got the master bedroom for my wife and I. So. Absolutely. There's a room for you whenever you want to come.

Matt Edmundson [6:13 - 6:54]: Fantastic. Well, I should let you know. Definitely. Well, I mean, you're in New Zealand for a good old time. You definitely don't have the old kiwi accent going on there. And if you're. If you're watching or listening to the show and you're. You know, you're. You just want a bit of fun, a bit of laughter. I really strongly suggest going to. Not while the kids are in the room, I have to be honest. But go to YouTube and Google the New Zealand deck company or whatever it was called. And there is this YouTube video about a kiwi talking about his deck and how he's getting it all restored, his outside deck. It's just hysterical. But it does. Have you heard this, Jason?

Jason Greenwood [6:54 - 7:32]: I have seen it, yeah, it was. It was a very popular ad. If it's the one you think that I'm thinking of, it was a very popular ad but it, Kiwis say deck and it sounds a little bit like dick. And so it's, you know, Kiwis have a very interesting, interesting accent and my accent's an absolute diabolical mess because I, you know, I spent, you know, so long in New Zealand and Australia living, you know, I've got family, extensive amounts of family living in Brisbane, in Australia. So I spent a lot of time in Australia, a lot of time in New Zealand and then now back in, back in North America. So my accent is, I feel like my accent's at war with itself sometimes.

Matt Edmundson [7:33 - 7:56]: Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. I have the same issue, I think, but that's another story. But yeah, watch the video on YouTube. Just don't do it with the kids in the room. That's my only advice. It is a little bit close to, close to the mark. But what's your, what's your journey then in ecommerce? You've obviously, you've got the podcast, you told me you've got over 400 odd episodes going on. You've got your business working in ecommerce. How did you get started?

Jason Greenwood [7:57 - 16:35]: Look, I actually fell into ecommerce oddly enough, and funnily enough, most people of our ilk, I think of our generation, of our vintage feel like they fell into it. And I actually had a mutual friend, a friend of a friend who owned an agency in Christchurch where I was living at that time. When I first moved to New Zealand, I moved to the South island and lived in Christchurch for a decade. And there was an american guy who had married a kiwi woman and they were living in Christchurch too. And he had started an agency, an ecommerce agency developing websites in Christchurch. And through a friend of a friend he was looking for a BDM and somebody who could take over not only business development but also delivering marketing services, etcetera. And so I knew that this ecommerce thing was going to become a thing even then. This was 24 years ago now and I saw the writing on the wall. I could see where the industry was going. I didn't know exactly how big the Internet was going to ultimately become because my vintage, I turned 50 this year. And so I was born in a time when there was no Internet, watched the coming of the Internet and then watched the Internet take over absolutely everything and every aspect of our lives to where now it's like the remote control of our lives. I saw that whole thing happening. And even before I started to work in the industry with ICQ and just all email and net to phone when I first moved to New Zealand. We were using net to phone to call to the United States for pennies, pennies a minute and all that sort of stuff. And I could just see this is a game changing technology. I could see that, I could feel it, I could sense it. I just didn't know exactly how thecommerce element, it was going to evolve. And I didn't, you know, I didn't necessarily think it was going to happen quickly, but I knew it would eventually happen and it would. My thinking at the time was, doing commerce internationally in particular is a real pain in the arse. And I had a front row seat to that because, of course I was living in New Zealand. I grew up in Southern California, New Zealand. At that time, it didn't have a lot of the international brands available in country. So you kind of wanted to buy from overseas lots of the time, and you wanted to import stuff into the country. And that was hard. It was expensive, it took a long time. And so I kind of thought to myself, geez, there's got to be a better way. There's got to be a better way in particular to do intecommerce commerce than this whole physical ringing somebody up or sending them an email or whatever it is. And so I kind of knew where this thing was going. And so when I got on board, I had about six months after starting working with this agency and I started to really wrap my head around what was involved in setting up ecommerce websites. And everything was bespoke at this stage. And we are the company that, the umbrella company that our agency sat under, they didn't call it SaaS at the time, but it was SaaS. It was a web based ecommerce platform. It was a really lightweight one. And then we got a lot of people on this platform. It was working well for a lot of companies, but it wasn't very flexible and it couldn't do lots of things and we couldn't customize it easily because it was SaaS. Everybody was on the same version of the platform. And then OS commerce became a really big thing during this time. And so we started building on OS commerce. And that was an eye opener because it was like, oh my God, we can do, we can do all sorts of crazy things. And it wasn't built in frames, which a lot of websites at that time were built in frames. And so, yeah, it was terrible. These websites built in frames because you couldn't send links to your friends and they all led to the homepage. And so it was horrible. And, and so, you know, I went through that whole very early struggle of understanding what Google wanted, gaming SEO was a big thing at that time. You know, getting listed, link exchanges, all that sort of stuff was a big deal at that time to even get found on the Internet. And so I thought, man, this is going to be a massive thing, but you've got to be very technical in order to be found online. It's more of a technical exercise than it is a creative exercise. And so I had a really good friend of mine at that point, and we had talked about for a while, look, he was working in sourcing and electronic sourcing for a huge company based out of New Zealand. He was doing global sourcing for them, for electronic components. We put our heads together, we said, I'm working in e.com, you're working in sourcing. Why don't we put our heads together and start our own ecommerce business together? At some point we decided to do that. I was doing that as a side hustle. He was doing that as a side hustle. I continued working agencies, he continued working in electronic sourcing. And within about six months of us setting up this business, we were importing and direct selling. So we're parallel importing and direct selling. Memory cards for at that point was for digital cameras, exclusive. And so I went through that whole journey of setting up my own ecommerce website. We did it on Os commerce, we did that whole thing. I hired a developer, an independent developer, to work with us. And within six months it got so big that one of us needed to quit our job to help run it. And I was making less than him at my full time job. So I quit first. And then six months later, it grew again, it doubled again in size. And within a year we were doing nearly a million dollars a year in sales online, which for that time was pretty insane. Thus grew my love of ecommerce, ran that business for nearly seven years, exited that business, sold it off, and then I went back into agency land and he went back into the whole electronics world. But I knew that this was going to be my career from very early on. I knew this is going to become my life. And it was prophetic in the sense that now, 24 years later, it's still my life. I've built and run agencies, I've worked brand side for some of the biggest brands in ANZ. You know, the last role that I had before I went independent was building and running and scaling an agency, an ecommerce agency operating in the ANZ region called Mustache Republic. And I got the taste more recently in my work. I've really honed down and nailed B2B ecommerce, and I've specialized in that for a considerable amount of time now. And the reason I did that was, there was a few reasons. But one is all of the B2B projects that I was involved in when I worked agency side were the most interesting, the most challenging projects of all the projects that I was ever involved in, because I was, you know, early in my career, it was all d to c and B2C. There was no B2B stuff. And then laterally in my career, I started taking on more and more, very complex, very highly integrated, full stack B2B ecommerce projects. And those were the ones that were most interesting to me. I was never a hardcore marketing guy and I didn't enter ecommerce through the marketing angle. I entered it through more the tech and ops side of things. And so that was always my passion, that was always my bent. And in the B2B side of ecommerce that is very heavily focused on tech and ops, and it's less driven by marketing, it's driven by sales, it's driven by it, it's driven by operational people, it's driven by operators. And so they're not necessarily worried about the pixel perfect design and exactly how our brand makes you feel when you look at it, when you navigate the site. Whereas in the B2C and d c world, marketers kind of run the world of BTC and D to see. And so they're really, really worried about branding, they're really, really worried about pixel perfect design. They're really worried about cross sells, upsells, remarketing, post purchase, all that stuff. They're really, really worried about the touchy feely side of ecommercecommerce, which is important, don't get me wrong. But in B2B, I found a place where I could really express my technical and operational chops at a high level. And so that's kind of where we are today. And I don't just consult now at this point in my career, I don't just consult to merchants. I now get the privilege to consult to agencies trying to build a B2B practice. I get to consult to investors investing in the ecommerce space, and I get to consult to platform vendors working in the space as well. And so I added those additional strings to my bow a couple years ago when people started asking me, will you consult to merchants? Merchants. But can you consult to us? We're an agency. Or can you consult to us? We're looking at investing in the ecommerce space and it was like, well, sure, let me put a framework together to be able to do this. And so I started putting frameworks together to consult to those different types of customer cohorts. And it's been a wild ride over the last 24 years, I can tell you that much.

Matt Edmundson [16:35 - 17:17]: Why, no doubt. And listening to you talk, we have quite a similar journey. Start at very similar times. Different, very different parts of the world, obviously. But it's fascinating listening to, listening to you talk about it all. And I'm kind of, as I'm hearing your story, I'm sort of replaying my own in my head like people do, which is quite fascinating. So you said that. I mean, let's talk about B2B commerce, because, you know, obviously we have a lot of people on the show talking about d to c. And let's, in fact, let's not assume people know what D2C and B2B means because ecommerce is just full of all these weird acronyms and no one has a clue usually when you keep a mouth shut. So let's just clarify a few terms.

Jason Greenwood [17:17 - 22:39]: D2C means direct to consumer. So in my world, D2C is manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors selling their products to end consumers. So they're selling products directly to end consumers of their product. B2C in my world, and in my way of thinking, is retailers selling other people's stuff to end to consumers. So they don't make it, they don't distribute it, they're buying. It's like athlete's foot selling Nike shoes to consumers of those products. B2B is manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors selling to businesses. And so D2C has more in common with B2B than B2C, I think because the same customer cohort and I do work a little bit with D2C brands, particularly DDC brands. Again, manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors that want to establish a strategic wholesale channel, I will work with those brands too, or wholesale brands that want to establish a strategic direct to consumer channel. I can help them with that too, because, because nowadays channel risk is a real thing. And I think a lot of brands are realizing that when they only sell to end consumers without a strategic wholesale channel, with rising cat costs, regardless of how much they spend to try to get in front of every potential customer, there are other vendors and other suppliers selling into other markets that they would never have access to. That's where I've come at this and that in B2B, in my experience now B2B is about. So this is brand selling to businesses as opposed to individual buyers. It's about ten years to 15 years behind where B2C and D2C retail is today, particularly from an ecommerce perspective. And Covid lit a fire under these B2B brands when they no longer could have their field sales reps going and visiting customers on site anymore. And they went, oh, dear, we don't really have any digital routes to market. This is scary. And we're trying to take orders now via Zoom and gmeet and teams and fax and carrier Pigeon and all these other things, and we are not ready to scale our business digitally. And so that's what created, frankly, the opportunity. And when I went consulting, and I very intentionally went consulting so that I could become a digital nomad and become location independent. And I always wanted to be independent. And what I found was, is that Covid did two great things. It created massive opportunity for me as a consultant to work in the B2B space, because now all of a sudden, people realize, geez, we actually do need an ecommerce website. Fancy that. But secondarily, Covid removed any lingering expectation that my customers would ever meet me in person. And everybody from every walk of life and every business and every vertical started to do business online, meaning that they got real comfortable having meetings like this in their underwear and on Zoom, right? And so I now had inquiries coming in to me from every point in the globe, from Europe, from North America, from Anz, etcetera. And so those two real events and experiences conspired together to create an opportunity wherever, instead of going into the very red ocean space of B2C and d to c consulting, which everybody and their dog does consulting for that. There were very few B2B specialists in the consulting world at that time. There's more now, but at that time, and we're going back four plus years ago now, there was really no one specializing in that space. And that's really why I decided to go into that space, because I'm a full stack consultant. So I consult across ERP, CRM, CDP, PIM, system integration, OMS, IMS, WMSO. And so when I get called in, oftentimes on projects that initially look like they're going to be ecommerce projects, when we start digging under the bonnet, we oftentimes realize that a lot of these B2B businesses, they aren't ready to do ecommerce yet. They're not ready from a data perspective, they're not ready from a back office systems perspective, they're not ready from a system integration perspective, they're just not ready. And so oftentimes what starts out, as they say, we want to do ecommerce, come in and tell us what we need to do and help us select a platform and help us select a partner and all this sort of stuff to get us up and running so we can do ecommerce because we realize our customers want that. We oftentimes have to take two steps back to take one step forward in the B2B world. And a lot of times the product data is wrapped up in salespeople's heads. It's on network drives, it's in print catalogs, it's spread all across the business. And their customer data oftentimes isn't in a place where it's ready to be exposed through digital channels yet either. And so that's where I come in and I help them really at the very earliest parts of their journey or when they're ready for a significant replatform project, they might have had an ecommerce platform that's a decade old that nobody really uses and the salespeople never recommend. This is where I come in and I help them right from ground zero. I do deep dive discovery in their business and I help them figure out and even identify what their requirements are because oftentimes they don't even know where to begin. And that's where I really start to help these BB brands.

Matt Edmundson [22:39 - 23:44]: So where do you begin then? I mean, I can imagine, you know, there's people listening to the show, there'll be some who are the B2C. You know, they buy products, they sell direct to consumers. So they're not necessarily going to go and try and retail wholesale somebody else's product that they're wholesale buying. I'm intrigued also, Jason, on your thoughts on this, because understanding where to stop, but also maybe just taking a step back, I noticed a big trend, probably 2012, maybe 2013. Certainly 2012 was when I experienced, it was when one of the, we were buying a well known beauty brand, we had a beauty site, we were selling their product on our website. And to be fair, we, probably 80% of my sales came from that one brand. It was a super popular brand. They sent me a letter, I think it was the start of 2012, where they said, right, we're changing the pricing policy to one, which is the more you buy, the more you pay.

Jason Greenwood [23:45 - 23:47]: More you buy, more you pay. Not the opposite.

Matt Edmundson [23:48 - 23:49]: Yeah, yeah. Through me as well.

Jason Greenwood [23:49 - 23:49]: Right.

Matt Edmundson [23:49 - 25:22]: And I've talked about this before on the show and the only thing that made sense to me at the time was probably is a slightly gray area where price fixing is concerned because they had no control over pricing, but by putting my prices up, it meant they could go on and sell at retail, direct to consumer and they did and they offered an awful lot more. So like gifts with purchase and stuff like that. So I then became very scared and very twitchy of working with Bren from buying other people's products to then, you know, what you would call B2C doing that. Again, I got very nervous about that because I saw a lot of brands using people like me to build their brand name and then just go and direct to consumer themselves and some kind of very kind it is. And I'm, you know, I've got thoughts on this and, you know, I've been the little guy and I can see why they do it from a, you know, business point of view. But I guess where do you start with this whole thing if you're involved in ecommerce in some way, you mentioned a minute ago, where do you begin with the whole thing? Where do you start? Because you've got all these different things going on, right? Like all these existential threats, which sounds very deep for an eCommerce Podcast I get. So where do you start?

Jason Greenwood [25:23 - 27:01]: So first let me address the concerns about D2C. I think D2C has been treated as a business model when it's just a channel. And that is the longer I'm in this industry, the more it gets reinforced to me that D2C is not a standalone business model. And we actually have some of the biggest D2C brands in the world backtracking on their D2C only model. So we've seen Nike famously recently say, look, our D2C play has not been as successful as maybe we even been portrayed it to be. We're walking that back. We're now taking back on some of the wholesale accounts we killed off in favor of D2C. We see all birds. They've almost gone bankrupt. They were the DT darling of COVID They've almost gone bankrupt. In fact, it's looking dicey whether they're actually even going to be able to survive the next six months. They, in a last ditch effort to survive, they've decided to go and adopt wholesale channels, especially outside of the United States, extensively across Europe, and take on massive distribution partners in areas where they're not strong, where historically they have said even on their own website, we don't do wholesale, we do not sell wholesale. And I could list a laundry list of about 15 major DTC players off the top of my head who have had to capitulate and take on wholesale partners over the last two years because DTC is so expensive. And, and even if you have the money, you can't be in all markets, in all channels all the time.

Matt Edmundson [27:01 - 27:01]: Yeah.

Jason Greenwood [27:01 - 27:51]: And even somebody like a black and dinner, I've, black and decker, I've had, you know, I've had Dean McKellee on my podcast before. And when they, even as a wholesaler, when they went into, when they go into new markets, right, they pick up distribution partners, because when they go into a new market, say, like India, for example, there is no way that they would be able to take on a new market of that scale and that size without distribution partners. It's literally impossible. D2C as a channel, I think, is going to be just fine. DTC for brands that have treated it as a standalone business model are going to have real problems. And if they cling to the d to c channel only model, I think they're going to really continue to struggle. Right?

Matt Edmundson [27:51 - 27:52]: Yeah.

Jason Greenwood [27:52 - 32:13]: So that is what has created. And even for D2C brands, I think that they have built up such capabilities and such chops around digital marketing that if they decide to establish and take on the digital routes to market for B2B, they are in a very good position to be able to do that because they are able to acquire customers digitally. They know how to do that, which means they can also acquire B2B customers digitally. And so historically, in the B2B world, most B2B brands that are, say 50, 7500 years old, that's probably the age of most of the brands I work with are at least 50 year old B2B brands, right. And so I'm dealing with either the child or the grandchild, oftentimes of the founders of the company who are going, we're not digitally savvy, but we bloody well need to be. I'm a digital native. I'm now taking over the company. And maybe I'm the CEO now, or I'm CEO or whatever it is. I know we've got to get our digital act together, but we don't even know where to start. And so what I'm finding is that these brands, when they, when they, especially if they start to hire people from the DTC and B two C world with deep digital chops, now all of a sudden they can come in and they can turn their guns onto the digital customer acquisition in the B2B world. But B2B has historically never been set up to acquire customers digitally. And that is shown by the fact that like 90 plus percent of B2B ecommerce websites, even if they have one, are gated, meaning you can't even see the catalog unless you log in. So if I can't see your catalog unless I log in, Google can't either. So Google can't even index your catalog. So therefore, if I'm looking as a buyer, so let's say I'm a. Let's say I'm a BTC seller and I want to sell a range of goods and I'm looking to sell Widget X, and now I'm looking for a supplier of Widget X. Over 61% of B2B buyers today are millennials. That's the stat, okay? And the reality is those millennial buyers are not going to go to the yellow Pages. They're not going to go to some services directory. They're not going to go to some slack channel to find out where do I get Widget X? If I want to sell Widget X, they're going to go to Google and they're going to go, manufacturer of Widget X, supplier of Widget X, wholesaler of Widget X, distributor of Widget X. They're going to start their supplier search online, and if you are not visible online to Google and to them, you are not going to be part of their consideration set as a supplier for Widget X, even if you sell Widget X. And so a lot of B2B brands are starting to realize that. And that's another reason why they realize, geez, in order for us to grow our business and acquire new wholesale customers or distribution customers, we have to be available and we have to be visible online. And so what most B2B brands today do, and this is the advice that I give brands that are really afraid of showing pricing and everything else is, look, ungate your catalog, at least you don't necessarily need to show inventory, you don't necessarily need to show pricing, you don't necessarily need to show your trade terms and all that sort of stuff. You don't even necessarily need to make the ability to create an account online possible without going through your formal sales team process. But you at least have to let people know you exist and what you sell and what you have available. And these are the conversations I'm having every day. So one of the first things I do is we have more sort of high level, strategic conversations. But when I first get into these B2B businesses, the very first step is to get them to give me a sample, a cross section of their product data and a cross section of their customer data and they show me what the state of that is and where it's come from in their business, whether it's from an ERP or from a PIM or wherever it comes from in the business. And then I can usually within about ten minutes tell them where most of the challenges sit within their business just by looking at the data that they have available and in what formats they have it available in. And we start from there and then I do a deep dive discovery. I have about 150 question discovery questionnaire that I give to them in advance. And then we, we have just follow up discovery workshops and we go through every single department and function in their business. And I deeply understand how that works and where that work is done and that's where we start.

Matt Edmundson [32:14 - 33:44]: So all very fascinating, Jason. So I'm going to give you an example. Right, I'm curious to know what you think. We have a supplement company. We manufacture the supplements here in the UK and we distribute here from the UK all over the world. Now I would say I pulling figures out the x shamedly, I don't know the exact numbers, but let's say 60% of our income comes from retail, 40% of it comes from wholesale. We have on our website a wholesale link which tells you a little bit what we do. It's kind of obvious the products that we have because we're flogging them on the website, right. So you can see and we have people who get in touch now what we have never done, and I'm, again, to my shame, listening to you talk, we've never actively tried to grow the wholesale aspect of it, the B2B. What we have done is just when people have come to the website, they've gone, yeah, I'll get in touch. Because, you know, it's the supplements, we have a vegan certified. So it's quite niche. So you get a lot of health shops and you know, who are looking for these niche things. So I think it's a really interesting thing listening to you talk. So wherever, where would I start? I'm not a big pharmaceutical business. I'm a sort of small manufacturer here based in the UK. We've sort of hobbled together. Our B2B focused very much on the D2C channels. Where do I start?

Jason Greenwood [33:45 - 33:55]: Yeah, very, very good question. And where most brands like you start is they create. So I'm guessing you, are you running like Shopify for your DTC website?

Matt Edmundson [33:56 - 33:59]: Similar. It's one that we've done. It's a bespoke site.

Jason Greenwood [34:00 - 39:38]: Okay, so you built it custom. Okay, so where, where most D2C brands start dabbling in the b to the B2B space, rather with their D2C brand, where they start dabbling is they'll set up just simple tiered pricing. You know, units one through ten get this price. Units ten through 50 get this price. Units 50 through 100 and get this price. That's kind of where most of these brands start to figure out how much of a real serious B2B demand there is. Now, the challenge is that usually in the D2C world, your customers are going to be paying via credit card and most of your B2B buyers want to pay on account and they want to pay 20th a month following or something like that. They want to have a credit limit, they want to have trade terms, they want to have custom pricing, they want all these things. They maybe even want a custom catalog, and maybe they want you to manufacture some products that are exclusive and unique to them. Right. And so the reality is that you'll pretty quickly figure out what the market looks like, particularly if you start working with, say, Amazon business and you start selling wholesale through Amazon, who then they have punch out connections and EDI connections to, most of the majority are buyers, wholesale buyers out there. And you can test markets just like you could test markets in the D2C world. By testing out via marketplaces. You can do the exact same thing in B2B. So oftentimes it's a form of testing the market without going whole hog and doing a 200, 5300 thousand dollars B2B ecommerce project. Right. But the other thing is typically, if you are a D2C seller today, you are unlikely from a back office, a data and a fulfillment perspective ready to be fulfilling wholesale at scale. And what I mean by that is you've gone from selling ones and twos and threes to now, if you really want to service the wholesale market at scale, you're going to now you're going to be selling cartons, pallets and containers. So it usually means operationally, in the backend, you might be running quickbooks. In the backend you might be running something simple like Xero. In the backend end you. Now, when you get into the wholesale space at scale, you're going to need something more heavy duty. In the back end you're going to need a proper oms, you're going to need a proper WMA's, going to be proper ERP, probably going to need a proper CRM. So there's some back office systems and processes that when you're really to go really ready to go whole hog. And you've proven there's demand out there for wholesale. You need to upscale your back office systems, probably even before you upscale your front end systems. Right. And then within the B2B world, there are three primary digital routes to market. What they consider digital commerce in the B2B world is very different to what the B2C and D C world considers ecommerce. Your whales, your biggest buyers, they're going to want to integrate with you via EDI almost exclusively. They want their ERp talking to your Erp place and orders. They don't want to have to log into your website to place an order. Then there's a second major cohort of your buyers, especially distribution partners, that will want to order off of you via what's called punch out, which is, which is kind of another form of EDI, but it's basically an e procurement system on the distributor's side of the business where they can pull down your catalog into their e procurement system, generate the order, and then that order goes back via punch out directly into your ecommerce platform, or ERP, for fulfillment. Right. And there's about 20 or 30 major e procurement platforms that sit on the distribution side. So major distributors, even small distributors all around the world, they do most of their procurement via e procurement, also known as punch out. And so you need to be able to service that type of customer as well. Then finally, you've got your mid market customers. So they're not the whales and they're not your professional distributors. You've kind of got that mid market B2B buyer, or they will either sell those products directly to other businesses or they'll sell them directly to end consumers, but they're buying wholesale off of you. It's that customer cohort that usually wants an ecommerce experience where they can log in, they can see their pricing, they can see moqs, and they can buy at scale on account. Now, the great thing about delivering that to that cohort is that all the other digital services go along with that, along for the ride that you then can extend to even your Edi and your punch out customers. So in other words, I want a portal. I want a buyer's portal, where even if I order via Edi and punch out, I want to be able to log in. I want to be able to track my orders till they hit my door. I want to be able to lodge RMA requests. I want to be able to see what moqs are. I want to be able to view your catalog at scale. I want to be able to request quotes which you can't do via punch out and you can't do via EDi. I want to request quotes for specific quantities, or maybe I want you to source a new product for me or make a new product for me or whatever it is. I need to be able to do that via some sort of CPQ engine which is usually surfaced through your ecommerce platform. And so there's a whole layer of digital services that if you only offer EDI and punch out today, you're not offering to your customers. And this is something that is a big part of the educational piece of that. When I go in and I start consulting and they go, well, we do ecommerce, we do EDi. Well, no, you don't do ecommerce because you only do EDi. In fact, you most definitely don't do ecommerce if you think EDi is ecommerce, because that's a digital commerce channel. But it's not the traditional expectation of your customers around ecommerce. It's an educational process as much as it is a consulting engagement, usually for me.

Matt Edmundson [39:39 - 39:55]: Yeah, that's fair. And do you do, do you advise customers simple things like do regular mailings, you know, like you would direct to consumer, do your emails, do your, you know, all those educational pieces that you do? And are we still doing things like that?

Jason Greenwood [39:56 - 41:08]: Yes, but I'm not specifically a B2B marketing consultant. I'm a B2B ecommerce consultant. So there are absolutely specialists out there. The challenge is, is that most of your modern marketing automation and even CDP platforms, they are not B2B C and marketing automation platforms, meaning that they treat every customer as an individual. They do not market to an account. And then buyers within that account, they market to a customer, an individual customer, and they personalize the experience to an individual customer level, not to an account level. And so it really does take a specialist B2B digital marketer to understand what it takes to market to an account versus an individual customer. And so certainly if you've got a deep background in digital marketing, then you will most likely be able to, with some tweaks and with some education, with some upskilling, be able to tweak that capability and say, okay, now we can do performance marketing for B2B, we can do SEO for B2B, we can do, we can do all the other things that we traditionally do in the DC and B2C world with some slight adjustments to the way in which we do that. Now we can do that for the B2B world.

Matt Edmundson [41:08 - 41:17]: Yeah, very good. Which kind of. You've preempted my next question, although I don't think I'm going to ask it now. It's like, how do I grow my B2B client list?

Jason Greenwood [41:18 - 44:25]: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, the great thing is just by opening up your, you know, opening up your catalog as you've done, you're going to start getting inquiries. And then particularly if you set up a dedicated B2B storefront and a dedicated B2B experience that now all of a sudden you are going to be able to digitally market that in much the same way as you do your D2C side of your business. But you just. Your target is a different target, target customer. And so. But the challenge is that when you only have like a single page, like an info page on your D2C website, it kind of signals and it messages to the world that I don't really take wholesale seriously. It's not a major part of my business. Just like if you have a really crappy, let's say, a legacy WordPress website, or you got something really shabby from a DDC website perspective, it signals a lack of professionalism and a lack of trust. If you don't have a really cutting edge, beautiful, fully functional, you know, with all the trust symbols, easy forms of contact, a physical address, all that sort of stuff, all the normal stuff that you would expect to have in the D2C and B2C world. If you don't have those things on your website, those core foundational elements, you will not succeed as a B2C or a d to C brand. And it's exactly the same in the B2B world. If you don't actually treat it seriously and treat it with the same amount of care, attention and love that you would your D2C or BTC channel, you won't succeed in the B2B side of the business either. It really does actually have to be a focus for the business once you've proved out the business case. And what I find is that many of the D2C brands that come to me with trepidation and they say, jason, we know we have to do B2B because the cost of distribution and the CAC is so high in the D2C world that we cannot be responsible for 100% of our product sales. We need partners to get this into new markets, into new regions, new customer cohorts. But they go. But we're afraid that the wholesale margins will not be sustainable for us. And I'm going, hang on a second. You just told me that you got rising cat costs, you got huge distribution costs, you have remarketing costs, you've got marketplace costs, you've got all these costs to your business. In my experience, once we actually do the business case analysis for B2B and wholesale, we find that the net retained margin can oftentimes be identical or even slightly better in the wholesale channel than the DDC channel, because we're now not responsible for the customer acquisition. The distributor and the resellers are instead of us. Although we take on some additional costs, particularly from a logistics perspective, we shed a whole bunch of other costs that we have to bear on our own in the B2C and D C world. These are the conversations I'm having every day. And what we find when we do the analysis is the net margin oftentimes is very similar.

Matt Edmundson [44:25 - 44:42]: Yeah, I can see that. That's super powerful. Who do you see doing this? Well, like, if I was going to go look at three or four different companies doing this, at the moment, where you go, these guys are killing it. These are the people to watch out for. They kind of lead in the way. They're doing some interesting things.

Jason Greenwood [44:42 - 46:33]: Yeah, look, they are really, they are the biggest distributors in the world, mostly in the massive wholesale distribution space, and none of these brands you will have heard of. And so it's like in the electrical distribution space, it's in the industrial distribution space, the master cars of the world, etcetera. These major global brands that do wholesale distribution at scale, they have absolutely nailed this. And oftentimes even they still have a gated login experience because they're so big, they don't need to open up their catalog. Everybody knows what they carry. But most of the brands, they're not household names. And that's the point, is that they like to be under the radar because they are multi billion. In some cases, they're doing 1020, $50 billion a quarter in wholesale sales. And so most of these brands you won't have ever heard of. And you've got accent group in ANZ, for example. They are both D2C and wholesale, and they are in the street wear and apparel business. They're absolutely killing it. But most people haven't heard of the accent group, but they've heard of vans and they've heard of DC shoes, and they've heard of the retail brands, but they don't know what kind of wholesale ecommerce and digital firepower. The parent company, the wholesale distribution company, has behind the scenes. They don't, they don't, they're not aware of these brands. And so you're really not going to have that many wholesale, that many wholesale, super strong wholesale brands that you would have heard of. That's, that's the challenge. And, but there, there are a lot of them out there doing very good things and very big things, but they're very happy to stay under the radar, no doubt.

Matt Edmundson [46:33 - 46:53]: No doubt. I'm just going to go on every website that I come across now to see if they do wholesale. I'm kind of curious to see how they do it. Makes notes. Listen, Jason, this is the time of the show where I ask you for a question. For me, as I have been doing, I ask you a question, I take your question and I answer it over on the old social media platform. So what's your question?

Jason Greenwood [46:54 - 47:10]: My question for you is how do you think AI is going to impact ecommerce the most? How and where do you think AI is going to impact ecommerce the most in the next six months?

Matt Edmundson [47:11 - 48:00]: Okay. Very short term, I love that. So if you want to know my answer to that question, do come follow me on social media. Just look out for atmedmoney. You'll find me. You know where I just don't get me confused with the radio two dj, no radio one dj, I think, here in the UK. But yeah, come find me and I will try and answer that question for you. Jason, listen, genuinely loved the conversation. You've got the old gray matter turning, which is a wonderful thing. You won't know this, dear listener, but recording this on the 2 September here in the UK, I have just got back from a month sabbatical, took the whole of August off, which was a beautiful thing. And this is my first recording. So already my brain is just worrying with. I've taken lots of notes, Jason, which is a wonderful thing. So if people want to reach out, if they want to connect with you, listen to your podcast, maybe even talk to you a little bit about the old B2B stuff. What's the best way to do that?

Jason Greenwood [48:01 - 48:34]: Three major places podcast the ecommerce edge. It's on every podcast channel and YouTube and rumble. And I've just started releasing my podcast, also in Spanish simulcast using hey gen, the, the AI translation service and lip sync service. So that's awesome. Go and check me out on LinkedIn. Jason Greenwood, on LinkedIn I produce content almost every single day on LinkedIn. And then finally my website, greenwoodconsulting.net, if you want to reach out to me there, feel free. Would love to have a conversation with you.

Matt Edmundson [48:34 - 49:20]: Fantastic. We will of course, put all of that information in the show notes. Well, but Jason, which you can get, I should probably plug. You can [email protected] for free. Or if you're like me, just scroll down on your podcast app because they're all there anyway. But I mean, I'm not that I'm talking you out of going to anybody's website, but you'll find all of Jason's links wherever on the old show. But Jason, listen, man, thanks for coming on. Genuinely appreciate the conversation. It's been, it's been eye opening, actually. And like I say, took a lot of notes, got a lot of things to sort of think about, which is always a beautiful thing when you have guests on. So thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing your story and really appreciate it.

Jason Greenwood [49:20 - 49:24]: My pleasure. It was fantastic chatting with you, Matt. Can't wait to do it again soon.

Matt Edmundson [49:24 - 50:28]: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So there you have it. What a great conversation. Huge thanks again to Jason for joining me. Now, be sure to follow the eCommerce Podcast wherever you get your podcast from because, of course, we've got yet more great conversations lined up, and I don't want you to miss any of them. And in case no one has told you yet today, let me be the first. You are awesome. Yes, you are created awesome. It's just a burden you have to bear. Jason's got to bear it. I've got to bear it. You've got to bear it as well. Now, the eCommerce Podcast is produced by Pod Junction. You can find our entire archive of episodes on your favorite podcast app. And a big shout out to the wonderful team that makes this show possible, including the beautiful and talented Seraph Bainon. And our theme music was written by Josh Edmundson. And as I mentioned, if you'd like to read the transcript or show notes, you can scroll down, or you can, of course, go to ecommercepodcast.net, where, incidentally, you can sign up for the newsletter as well. But that's it from me. That's it from Jason. Thank you so much for joining us. Wherever you are in the world, have a fantastic week. I'll be with you next week. Bye for now.