A Decade in B2B eCommerce: Lessons Learned and What’s Ahead

EPISODE 7

A Decade in B2B eCommerce: Lessons Learned and What’s Ahead

Full Transcript

Jary Carter: Hello, everyone. Welcome to B2B UnCut. Today’s not just another episode. We have three big things for you.

One, we’re going to wrap up the 2022 season. Two, we’re celebrating Oro’s 10th anniversary, I have a couple of really exciting guests here for the 10th anniversary. Congratulations. I’m excited to talk about this. 

And three, we have a surprise guest for you who will join us a little later.

But I want to talk to these two very important, very interesting people on this podcast: Yoav Kutner, who is the CEO and co-founder of Oro and Dima Soroka, who’s the CTO and co-founder of Oro. Gentlemen welcome to the podcast today. It’s really an honor to have you both. Thank you for joining.

Yoav Kutner: Thank you, Jary.

Dima Soroka: Thank you.

Jary Carter: Now the Three Amigos back out again. So I would love to have you to just briefly introduce yourselves. A lot of people in Oro ecosystem hear your names. Some people who are new to the Oro ecosystem may not know your background. Yoav, let’s start with you. And then we’ll head over to Dima.

Yoav Kutner: I got into the eCommerce world in 2004. We then created a product – Magento – and we thought we were going to use it for ourself and our customers. But surprisingly, it took off. I was the Co-Founder and CTO there, leading the product and technologies. 

After we sold Magento out to eBay, I left in 2012. I was bored to work, but I loved what I was doing. So when a few of us here on the call that decided to work together again on what we love: building products. We started Oro and what we learned at Magento was that the B2B industry is underserved when it comes to digital commerce. And that’s where we set our sights for and what we’ve been passionate about for the last 10 years now.

Jary Carter: Great. Thank you. I can’t believe it’s been 10 years! Dima, I’d love to have you introduce yourself.

Dima Soroka: My eCommerce journey started in 2006, at a company called Varian. I was working with Yoav at that time and was part of the Magento journey. In 2012, I was happy to found Oro, which have become a very fulfilling journey for the last 10 years. I love technology. I love to new challenges. I love working with customers. I love working with my team. That’s all about me.

Yoav Kutner: I do want to say that’s the most I’ve ever heard Dima talk :)

Jary Carter: I know it’s very hard to get Dima to talk much about himself. The way we’re going to structure this call is we’re going to talk about the business elements of Oro, and the early days, and then we’ll look forward into the future, because I think you have such a rich perspective in that. 

And then I think we’re going to talk about some of the fun things. Towards the end of the call, we’ll share some of the early stories that may be lesser known to folks within the ecosystem. So, let’s go back though to 2012. From a business perspective, what was the digital eCommerce and specifically the B2B digital commerce landscape back there? 

Yoav Kutner: When we left Magento, we really felt the B2C space was very saturated with so many platforms in the game. But what we noticed at that time was that more and more companies that were actually not necessarily focused on selling direct to consumer started coming online or trying to go online.

As we ran a B2C platform, we really thought what’s the big difference? We can just do it for B2B and everything will be okay. We saw this misconception across the board, all the platforms were “yeah, it’s the same thing as the shopping cart, the Add to Cart Checkout, no problem.” 

These were all technologies that were not really extendable and flexible. They didn’t really meet the the user experience demanded by some of the buyers. So it was very stagnant in terms of what was offered to B2B, unless you were in a specific vertical to have this specific tool. Trying to use any other platforms that were built for B2C was very hard. We saw this gap and we decided to bridge it with Oro. 

Jary Carter: Dima, any additional perspective?

Dima Soroka: One important aspect of B2B at that time was that B2B sales teams needed proper tools to do the job. That was one of the driving factor, why we started our journey with the CRM product. It’s where sales team seats, and that’s from where online conversation with the customer starts.

Jary Carter: Yeah, it’s such an interesting point you make because we did start with a CRM product, because there was such little connection in traditional B2C technologies and the multiple touches in a sales experience.

Yoav I’d love for you to weigh in on that single dimensional. You were the part of creating this amazing B2C platform that at the time had a ridiculous amount of market share, but almost no B2B capabilities, or thought process to it. So talk about that a little bit, if you wouldn’t mind just weighing in on that.

Yoav Kutner: Just reminding everybody this was about 15 years ago, so we were much younger, with a much bigger ego. With Magento, we thought we created the end all of all eCommerce platforms. We thought we can achieve anything with it. 

We were not as educated about what the needs and differences are for the B2B space.

In reality, we were doing a disservice to many of our potential customers because they didn’t get the feature set that was that needed to be created in the underlying technology to actually do this and support their actual needs. 

So just one example is pricing engine. We were coming from a platform that was all about the same price for everybody, we treat everybody the same. It has to be as intuitive as possible to check out for the highest average order the amount that we can gap. And that’s it. When we started working with B2B companies, we started learning that there’s a deep relationship between the customers and the buyers and the sellers in this case. You need to focus on the specific user experience that they need in order to actually be successful using this platform. 

So our first attempts were very basic in terms of what we were offering, and nobody was actually using it. So when we started building some B2B implementations on Magento, we were “Okay, use it as is, it’s basically B2C, but you can use it for B2B.” We saw that there was no use of the platforms that we were building. 

We even caused some of the customers to build 80% of the code that they needed on top of Magento. So we ended up with a very custom solution, and then they had to support it, etc. So the costs were really high for them.

I said, we had to change our mindset, we have to learn what’s the real differences, and build a product for that. 

We don’t usually just jump into building products. We looked at the landscape that existed, looked at the roadmaps of other platforms, we were big advocates of the existing eCommerce platforms to address the B2B needs. But none of them picked up the ball at the time. And that’s what caused us five years later to actually start working on our B2B eCommerce product and basically enhance our CRM product to support the front end part of it as well.

Jary Carter: Yeah, it’s really interesting. I’d love to fast forward to today, because Yoav has been right about a lot of things from a products technology perspective, and the way where the market is going. And now how do you envision the market going in the next three to five years? What should people be thinking about?

Dima Soroka: From technology perspective, we’re hearing about composable, commerce, headless getting traction. Of course, everybody is looking only in cloud based solutions at this point, I think these trends will continue growing. We are definitely part of it. So for next three to five years, we will add more capabilities to our product to support these trends.

More and more companies are looking how to optimize a sales cycle, so they need tools. B2B commerce tools not only about facilitating your online sales to end users, it’s also about optimizing internal processes. So I think that’s where we’re going in the next few years.

Jary Carter: How much of the idea of composable, headless commerce is analyst buzzwords versus what’s really getting traction with customers?

Yoav Kutner: I think when we started 10 years ago we came from the B2C world, everybody was trying to launch a unique eCommerce experience for B2C, everybody was coming up with different features, different user experiences. There weree so many technologies that were focused around the B2C user experience, and for the store managers or whatnot. 

But we honestly expected 10 years ago when we started the journey that the B2B world will catch u. Because when we started, we found out that the B2B world is maybe – I’m being nice here – five to ten years behind the curve on technology of the B2C world. That was something that we were really surprised about at the time. And I was hoping in these 10 years that they’ll catch up. 

I think we’re still playing a lot of catch up on the B2B side right now. With all respect to the analysts, I think we, as technologists and analysts are living in a different bubble than the B2B decision makers. When it comes to technology, we throw at them buzzwords and technologies such as headless and composable. I’m not saying we shouldn’t support them for the real use cases. But a lot of times we come in, and it’s much more basic.

To tell the story, because this happened more than once, where we met customers whose executive team doesn’t use email. They basically get the emails printed out on paper, they write their answers in hand, and then somebody types back the reply to the email. We have to adjust to the world we’re serving. Talking to them about AI, composable, stuff  like that, when they don’t even have a website up and running… We have to play catch up. 

We were a little bit underwhelmed by how fast this industry is moving compared to others in the world. But they’re still behind, they’re still trying to figure it out, even though it took off already. I’ll be honest, my expectation was that this is going to catch on fire and start jumping like it happened with B2C. 

It’s not the case. I think we’re still early on. And I think it shouldn’t be surprising to anybody who knows the B2B state. The established companies usually move much slower, their production cycles are longer, they have products that run sometimes for 50 years, and they don’t change anything.

So when it comes to their mentality, culture, I think technology sometimes is too fast paced for them to catch up. And that’s where we have to put our consultant glasses on or hats or whatever, and say, “Okay, this is why it’s important for you. This is how we get you up to speed.” 

The good news is, once we do the first baby steps, we see that the there’s a demand for it. There’s hunger within these organizations, as they hire more technology people, when they start getting feedback from customers or demands from customers. When they start seeing features or experiences that their customers are getting at other companies, they start accelerating, too. Even though initially it’s very slow adoption within the company, once the ball starts rolling, it starts rolling very fast, and we start seeing a lot of demand. 

So it’s sometimes even surprising to us. The company that we were talking about digital, had no idea what we talking about. But then on their  yearly meeting with us, they started talking to us about AI and headless and composable. So they’re catching up. That’s the good news.

In the B2B space, it’s starting to accelerate. We are starting to see RFPs that are much more sophisticated in the B2B than we used to get.

But as companies that are serving this industry, we should be a bit more humble, not pushing necessarily the fastest and the best technology that’s here today and gone tomorrow. We need to invest in our customer for the long term. B2B companies think in five or event ten year terms, they don’t think in six months, like we used to be in the B2C world.

Dima Soroka: Yoav mentioned very important point. With technology trends, you always should put customer in context. In B2B world, unfortunately, they’re not always technically mature companies. They usually have very minimal technical teams. And to support these companies, we should come to the market with a solution that can be easily implemented for the customer.

Jary Carter: Approachability of the technology… I actually think that’s not an overused buzzword in the B2B commerce world.

Talking about your job, you’re seeing these companies go from these brochure websites that were built maybe 15 years ago, into this whole digital transformation. What does that feel to help a company put another engine on the plane of their growth and watch that just completely transform the company? 

Yoav Kutner: So for me, and I’m probably going to kill your reference for me as the Rock and Roll CEO. I love seeing business transform in a digital way. And I know this sounds corny but it’s such a difference to come to a company where everything is manual and some person that’s been there for 30-35 years has everything in his head. And when we start asking questions, they’ll always say, “Oh, let’s call a Bill or Jane.” And they will come here and give us the answer. Formalizing this in a way that actually is automated saves a lot of time and reduces errors for the business. 

 I love that after 6, 12, 18 months, when we touch base with the customers, we see how they started up, adapting into the new world, and adopting the actual technology to make them more efficient, more successful, more modern. It sounds not real, but every time I see that, I just leaned back in my chair, and I’m “Well, that’s one more company that we actually helped and that’s something we actually changed and we’ll know that this company is going to stay around longer, because the 100s or 1000s of people that work in there have a future with this company, and this company is going to stay around.”

In some B2B cases, we talk to companies that have been around for over 100 years, sometimes even more than you know. And a lot of them are family-started businesses from the late 1800s  that are still going on today. And working with the next generation and actually making them more modern and more applicable to what’s going on in today’s demanding world of technology – it’s something that I really love.

I love this feeling of coming to this very manual company and start automating and see how people’s faces change, when they see that the workload is lighter, and when they’re more efficient, and there are fewer errors and frustration. It’s still sometimes a cultural war within the company and we tried to walk a fine line between the old school of the company and the future of the company. 

So we’re in a very interesting place. I love being part of what technology can do for your company and people. I’ve been doing it for many, many years now. And that’s actually what drives me. When we come and make their lives easier and actually make them more successful, that’s what I love to see in the end.

Jary Carter: I love that. Thanks for sharing. I’ve been in probably hundreds of meetings with customers, and the conversation was never about shrinking. It’s never about staff reduction. It’s always about growth. It’s how we take a company and give them a competitive advantage. So it’s really cool to see you underscore that.

I have one more question for both of you. What advice would you give to a B2B company or a B2B leader to help them prepare for the future? 

Dima Soroka: Businesses are already selling on different channels. They will come online for an additional channel. Unfortunately, the decision-making process is slower, and exploring new opportunities is a bit slower process. So probably, advice that I would give is to be more opportunistic in this case, and accelerate digital transformation, accelerate online presence. That is important. Based on customers that we are working with and see one day going online, that’s a game changer for them.

Yoav Kutner: I think, for the short term, companies that didn’t figure it out have to start figuring it out. It’s time now to at least take the first steps into digital. This world is moving fast. We’ve seen how industries are changing within the B2B already. Marketplaces are coming on board that are taking away other distributors. Amazon is fighting a lot of B2B industries right now.

One thing that we see a lot is that a lot of these companies in the B2B space are afraid to make a decision and what impact that will have on the business. One thing we learned with these companies is that not trying doesn’t necessarily change much.

These companies need to understand that we’re not going to move all your business overnight to digital. We’ll take a phased approach, solve the biggest problems that you have, and treat the lowest-hanging fruit that we can actually do quickly for you. When they see the success of that, let’s start by moving maybe 10% of your sophisticated customers to this platform before we move everybody on. 

So a lot of times there’s this fear that technology will change the whole business overnight. Business leaders are not really sure how that’s going to take with their customers. What we introduced to them is a phased approach, where we’re shifting small chunks of their customers month by month or quarter by quarter to the digital platform keeping their other customers working as is.

I think this concept is a bit foreign to a lot of companies and manufacturers that we work with. If they build an assembly line, it’s a two-year investment in building the line and then until they get some feedback on whatever they manufactured. 

Here we talking about much faster feedback and much faster changes. So my first and most important recommendation is to start. Start, select something, even if it’s the wrong technology, even if it’s the wrong path. Learn quickly and then change based on what you’ve learned rather than sitting and trying to figure it out for five years. Five years is a lifetime in our industry and technology.

Jary Carter: Reducing the cost of failure as a learning experience to grow and fail forward into something that works for the business. Fascinating. Well, thank you so much. We’re going to hang on, as we’ve got our surprise guests already here, Daphna Andrews. Hi, Daphna. Welcome to the podcast. 

Daphna Andrews: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Jary Carter: Daphna, this is news for folks, is actually taking over as the host of B2B Commerce UnCut as we go into 2023. And Daphna is also new to the Oro team. So we’d love to have you.

This podcast has really grown throughout 2022. And you’re going to take this into the next phase of growth and excitement in 2023. So I would love to have you introduce yourself with that preamble of where we’re at today. 

Daphna Andrews: Thank you for passing the baton. I really hope that I can continue the excellent hosting that you have done, Jary. 

I’ll give you a quick background about who I am. But just hearing what Dima and Yoav have been talking about, it’s almost needless to say that I’m just so excited to join a team of talented and smart visionaries. It’s taking calculated risks; it’s making data-driven decisions – there’s so much to being a digital company.

I have 22 years of global B2B experience. I started at HP with the first iteration of the B2B eCommerce Web Store. So I’m really dating myself. 

We started as a startup really operating inside this giant company building, and it turned into a platform that was transacting $6 billion in revenue at its peak during my tenure. From there, I went to an agency helping to develop and lead B2B and digital transformation projects and programs for enterprise customers. No matter what I do, no matter where I am, my focus always is on the customer. The customer has to be at the center of everything I do, or the company does wherever I’m at. So it’s the big reason why I decided to join Oro.

Jary Carter: Awesome. Thank you for an inspiring introduction. It was amazing to me how much experience you have on the customer side of B2B commerce, and actually growing B2B eCommerce for 20 years is a lifetime. You were the pioneer in the industry. So while everyone else was talking about it, you were doing it. You’re going to add such a richness and depth of perspective that will be unique from anything that anybody else has brought to this podcast. So I’m really excited to see where you take it. And with that, I’m going to make you host, Daphna.

Daphna Andrews: Yeah, let’s do it. I do just want to say a quick thing about why I joined Oro and what my mission is.

I have been tracking this company since 2018. At that time, I was on the business side, and I was a senior product owner at HP, and had to depend on our IT team. We had this enterprise software where it would take so long to just get any changes. If you had a user-defined field, if you had some sort of payment change or any configuration, I was hamstrung and totally dependent on it. 

What is such a game changer about Oro is you can configure so much in that admin console. And Oro comes along as the native B2B solution. It’s a business user’s dream! So this admin console is giving power to the business. It enables practitioners to be responsive to their customers’ needs. A part of all of that is enabling the company that is using OroCommerce to be resilient in business operations, which is absolutely key today in this economy. And when you throw in very powerful sales enablement tools, that makes the merchants and their sales teams much more efficient.

When every second counts, and every penny counts, it’s absolutely critical to empower the business to make data-driven decisions, so that they can delight their customers in real-time. And I’ve never seen that before in any other platform, let alone B2B. So the company is overall very special. 

So instead of talking about myself – obviously, it’s not the Daphna podcast – I’d like to talk a little bit about how special this company is and how they’ve managed to focus on the people as well.

When I joined this company, I saw how through crises, this company gets stronger. For example, with the war in Ukraine, we have so many employees there that the company took it upon itself, and was transformative in supporting the team members, keeping the lights on, getting them to safety, and doing everything they could. It’s in your DNA to be very compassionate for our employees and customers. I’m curious how you develop that.

Yoav Kutner: I think, we don’t realize we do that until we have new people join us and tell us that we focus on our company and our team, That’s how I think a successful company operates.

If we would not address and take care of our employees, wherever they are around the world when a crisis happens, we wouldn’t have a company. Because if we fail them, we can’t count on them to be there for us later. I think that’s just the nature of how we operate. 

We spend hours on top of hours working with these people that we call our family or team, and when they need us, we are there for them. That’s how we were raised. That’s how we will operate. And that’s what we hope that we will get from other people when we need some help.

So just taking this not only in a business context, these are people that we care about. As a company, that’s how we prioritize. We always say internally that our customers come first, but right there, that number one position is our employees, because that’s the two things that make us successful – our customers and our employees. And without one of them, there’s no company. So thank you for noticing it, Daphna. 

Jary Carter: it’s so interesting that you have talked about this idea of family. I read this whole LinkedIn post about how your work isn’t your family. You don’t spend holidays with your work people etc. And I actually spent a lot of holidays with Oro people. Yoav and I and part of the Oro team celebrated his birthday a few months ago. We were all together. 

Yoav really talks about this idea that you spend every day with these people. You develop these bonds and these relationships. This personal care is the special thing about Oro.

I remember, there were so many times in our early days that it was stressful. We were going month to month, trying to build the business. And I remember everything was so fast-paced. And I still remember I would type in Skype or something to Yoav or Dima, and I just have a question “hey, this for this customer?” And Yoav’s response and Dima’s response back to me in the early days was, “Oh, hey, how are you doing? How was your weekend?” At moments like these, I understood that I needed to slow down a little bit and be a human. 

That’s just how the DNA of the company comes down from the top. I learned so much from Dima and Yoav about how to be caring leaders and how to care for people beyond the work day so that when Thanksgiving comes or New Year’s, or whatever it is, you actually want to spend time together.

I’ve done a lot of holidays in a lot of different locations with a lot of different world people. And it’s one of the things about my life that I treasure the most because companies come and go, but the relationships and the people are what matters the most. I’ll let Dima jump in on that.

Dima Soroka: It’s not a team, it’s a family, and that’s how we are approaching it. Just look at how much time you spend with your family at Oro. It’s our life.

The only way to establish a good team is to build transparency and friendship-based relationship. And that’s what we’re trying to do.

Daphna Andrews: Thank you, guys, for those very honest responses. I am the newcomer, and everybody listened to me. People were paying attention, nobody was sitting on their laptops. I’ve never experienced that before ever, in a company where everybody truly cares about what everyone else is saying and is respectful, and it was absolutely from the heart.

Yoav Kutner: Reminding you that when we were screaming, we were not fighting. We were arguing.

Jary Carter: That still happens. I remember in one of those meetings, my son Jack came out to LA and we were doing meetings in the office. We were in the conference room, and we were debating something, and it’s always passionate when we debate something because everybody cares. Everybody has an opinion. Everything feels consequential.

I remember Jack, at the end of the day, asked if everything was okay, and why we were mad at each other. But it was just because everyone cares about making it successful. We’re all passionate. And sometimes we disagree.

But that’s how you progress. That’s how you see eye to eye. That’s how you align and commit to stuff. 

Daphna Andrews: It’s a healthy tension. Absolutely. That actually leads to another question. You guys are all such visionaries. I mean, there’s so much vision happening at this company that it’s so unique. I really want to hear how that mind process works.

Yoav Kutner: When somebody has an idea here, we have a platform where anybody can voice anything they want. It doesn’t mean we all accept it. But we do look for a consensus. Anybody can talk, anybody can bring up an idea that they have, and then we start working on it and then processing it, then maybe we don’t even make a decision, necessarily. Some decisions can take longer to make everybody aligned, and I like to use the term we agree to disagree.

We listen to everybody. But once we agree to continue with one path, we all fall in line, and we all move as one. 

And I think that’s something that we have from 15-20 years of working together: it’s okay to disagree, and it’s okay to hear other people’s opinions. Everybody’s exposed in their set of the business. But when we bring it all together, it makes a whole picture of what we’re building. We’re not just listening to one side of the business.

We actually challenge our employees to voice concerns and things that they think are wrong. Because that’s what we want to listen to.

Once we build this culture, that’s what evolves the company and moves us forward.

We need to learn to change. And as new information comes to us, or feedback that we’re getting from the ground, we try to apply it and change our vision if necessary.

I think you said it best, Daphna, we have to check our egos out the door. It’s not about our ego, or our vision, or my vision or Dima’s vision, majority’s vision. It is about a company vision. And it’s about moving forward and adapting this vision to what’s going on in the market right now.

Dima Soroka: Also, letting people do what they like to do. When people do, what they like to do, the result will be totally different from the one when you force them to do that. And that’s also part of our culture. So we always talk to people, we ask them what they want to do, what they like to do, and help them find the right place in the company.

Jary Carter: It’s interesting. Google talks about this concept of psychological safety, when people feel very low risk, they feel very safe to express concerns and things that they want to improve. And I’ve never seen a place that has higher psychological safety, than Oro.

There’s a lot of safety and comfort in the debate. You all also talked about agreeing to disagree, and still committing. But you do feel heard and feel valued.

And just because you have an opinion that’s different than the CEO’s doesn’t mean that your job is on the line. You can still have a strong opinion and move forward with it. 

It’s one of those things that’s been in the DNA of Oro. Since the very beginning, we have hired really smart, interesting, successful, brilliant people. And so we want to hear what they have to say. We want to have our minds changed about what different direction we should go.

Yoav Kutner: Yeah, and I think people hear the warning to new employees “Don’t challenge the CEO, unless you are willing to become the new CEO.” Something we’re actually saying is we didn’t start where we ended. I started as a developer and ended up as the co-founder and CEO. Dima started as one of my developers and ended up as the chief architect and our CTO and co-founder here. We love to see how people grow. So the more they challenge us, the more they’re actually advancing the company. 

If you look back at our history, it’s not the other way around. Once people join us and see this person started the disposition but now he’s a manager, now he’s a different role. This is something that made us very successful because we allow people to grow by not making them afraid to voice their opinions.

The more you voice and the more you challenge us, the more we see that you understand us. As long as the ideas are in the right direction and aligned with the company, you’re just going to become more of an asset to the company.

We love people to come here and start figuring it out and learning and then starting to criticize or put points that we need to improve. As long as it’s constructive, as long as they’re willing to change. That’s what we try to encourage in people in our company, and people that are good in this environment just grow with us.

Daphna Andrews: Thank you for adding to your comment.

A lot of people may be listening to this thinking, “Well, why or how does this relate to my business? How does this relate to purchasing OroCommerce?”

It relates so much! From my experience as a practitioner, operating in a very fearless environment creates a model for removing the fear of transformation in our customers. As a customer and partner success, I’m trying to help our customers adopt and transform their companies and give them strategies.

So as we’re wrapping up here, what is the next big thing you’re seeing in our industry?

Yoav Kutner: As a company, our vision is to become the leading B2B eCommerce platform, but also as the visionaries for what B2B actually has to move into. If it’s payments or customer onboarding, or user experience, both for your sales team and for your customers, we want to be at the forefront of that. 

We want to continue to lead the pack and challenge the industry. I know it’s not an industry that necessarily needs to be challenged. We want to help B2B customers stay in business, we want them to be able to shift to the new culture and new digital reality.

We can’t ignore technology anymore.

But we also want B2B companies to start thinking for themselves and be more creative about what they need. I think that’s something that we’re trying to work out a lot of our customers.

I think we’re at this tipping point of technology and B2B marrying together and going to the next step. A lot of our customers are mentally changing and getting technology into their business and making sure that it works for them. That’s something that makes me excited.

Dima Soroka: Tomorrow could be another change, and everybody should adjust and but I think a big part of our vision is that we don’t want to be just a vendor. We would like to be a partner to our customers and keep our relationship on the level that everybody stays happy. And what’s more important is that the services and products that we provide to our customers deliver big value for them.

Jary Carter: The thing that I’ve been seeing in B2B eCommerce is there’s a new set of disruptors that are poised to come out of the next 5 to 10 years. 

There’s been so much of a toehold between distributors, wholesalers, their manufacturer relationships out to commercial and their distribution networks. And there’s been a lot of these embedded toeholds. In terms of how customer relationships are changing and shifting, this work that’s happening is going to create a whole new set of disruptors within the B2B world.

I think you see these companies. Steel manufacturer in Utah has the opportunity to be the next big company to take massive market share to go from 0.001% market share up to 3, 5, and 10% market share, because they’re creating a better customer experience. And they’re taking customers from their competitors.

You all have talked about this idea of fueling growth in B2B companies. That growth gets fueled by this disruption that’s happening through digital transformation and a better customer experience. The next 5 to 10 years are going to be really exciting. It’s a whole new world out there. I’m curious to see how the landscape gets shaped as companies create better customer experiences and start to take market share from the competition.

Daphna Andrews: Everyone’s input is spot on. One thing that is very important to mention here is digital transformation is not only something that you espouse to customers. Say you’re a B2B company, and you want to transform your customers’ work. But it’s also an internal transformation. Empowering business users is huge; removing that hierarchy or any bureaucratic stepping stones; providing things that make you more flexible and agile to respond to your customer needs is really what’s going to disrupt the marketplace.

OroCommerce and the whole suite with the CRM are going to be the game changer for this. And when a digital transformation initiative becomes a focal point for any enterprise, the sky’s the limit. You’re optimizing your internal processes, empowering your people, and delighting your customers – it’s touching on every point of transformation in order to make our customers successful.

Jary, I wanted to thank you again for doing such an amazing job. Not only in your work in Oro but also just as the leader of this podcast. I’m not sure if I can fill your shoes, but I’m going to try.

Jary Carter: You’re going to be amazing. So I’m excited to see you take over, and thanks for having me.