Manufacturing eCommerce Success – with Paul Dabrowski

Curt Anderson  00:01

Hey man, hey, we’re live Happy Friday everybody, man. What is today? November something right? It’s like we’re coming into Thanksgiving coming in and we’re past the halfway point of the month. So hey, welcome to manufacturing eCommerce success. I know you guys are wanting like Hey, where’s Damon? Well, Damon’s out, like conquering the world doing like he’s a superhero like slain villains doing great stuff. And so we have an amazing incredible guest today man and my fired up. This really this guest per persona faiz manufacturing ecommerce success. Paul Dabrowski Paul, how are you my friend?

Paul Dabrowski  00:34

I’m doing great. Thanks for having me, as well, man.

Curt Anderson  00:37

Welcome to the show. And so Hey, guys, everybody out there. drop us a note in the chat box. Let us know that you’re there. Give Paul a big Hello and a warm welcome. You definitely absolutely want to connect with Paul on LinkedIn. He’s with BigCommerce man. We’re going to be jam in about eCommerce. You know what, Paul, let me let me we’ll go we’ll go in that presentation a minute. Let’s come back here for a second. So, Paul, I love to start our program off with a little question power. Where did you grow up at? Where’d you grow up by any chance? Where’d you grow up? Man?

Paul Dabrowski  01:06

That’s a great question. I moved a lot as a kid you guys but I’m originally from San Diego, California cruising

Curt Anderson  01:13

from San Diego. So let’s let’s go here. Paul. moved around a lot when you were a little guy growing up question for you. Okay, pop quiz. When you were a little guy growing up. Who was your hero?

Paul Dabrowski  01:25

My hero is my mom. You guys. All right.

Curt Anderson  01:29

Yeah, hey, speaking a mom. I’ve got a boy mom right here, right? Hey, there’s Whitney Whitney Houston’s in house. Happy Friday. Hey, Happy Friday to you Whitney. So let’s hear about mom. Paul. Why was mom your hero?

Paul Dabrowski  01:42

She was an incredible, you know, mother to me. And she raised me along with my three sisters, you know, ourself. And she taught me to be the man who I am today. I owe everything to her. She was such an inspiration. I don’t know how she did it. You know, growing up. And essentially, you know, we didn’t have much didn’t need much the Samsung serve. And it was an incredible thing. Yeah, I grew up, you know, with an incredible mother who put me on the right path. And I owe everything to her.

Curt Anderson  02:24

Well, as for all of us, sons, we worship our mothers. But hey, let’s what’s mom’s name? Paul.

Paul Dabrowski  02:30

I’m honest name is Lynn. Then all right.

Curt Anderson  02:33

Big shout out to Lynn we’re sending lots of love to Lynn out there for raising this wonderful incredible just dynamic young man. So Paul, let’s slide in so I so mom’s your hero grew up San Diego moved all over the place. Son surf right? Is that what you said? Sand, sun and surf? I’d absolutely love it. So let’s go here. So you If man guys connect with Paul, on LinkedIn, when you look at your career, what I love, is you have some corporate experience, you look like a serial entrepreneur, founder and CEO a couple of times, walk us through your path. Let’s get to know who’s Paul through your career.

Paul Dabrowski  03:07

Yeah, so I’ve always had, you know, this entrepreneurial spirit. And in fact, in high school, I married my high school sweetheart, you guys. In high school, we actually my wife started a little dessert company. And that turned into a legitimate company that we had employees. And, you know, we distributed her products into whole whole foods and Wegmans. If anybody knows the Northeast a little bit, in a way wins. And yeah, it turned into like a cookbook. And at the time, this was like, you know, 2004, you know, right out of high school. And she needed to have a website presence, right? And you couldn’t just spin up an eCommerce shop back then, in fact, like the payments at the time, were like payment buttons, and they were being kind of like, scrutinized, like, people were in should I pay something online or not? That’s where we were. And so, you know, from there, I always had that passion, essentially, of entrepreneurship. But with that came a lot of challenges, too, you know? And so I’ve learned from those challenges and those failures over the time, but essentially, I’ve been in my entire career in like, the b2b, you know, space, whether it’s been startup, you know, to global enterprise. So the past 10 years, essentially, I’ve spent doing digital transformations for essentially, Atlas Copco $12 billion entity, industrial global leader, they had a number of failing eCommerce plays, they did an NPS scoring found out they were hard to do business with and see what to do well digitally transform the company and That turned into essentially a marketplace where we consolidated those ecommerce shops that were not doing well and successfully launched a marketplace that consolidated them, and digitally transformed the company and the customer experience. So yeah, we served essentially $3 billion revenue engine for Atlas Copco through the vacuum technique segment, they had four segments that serve a larger group and I serve the backend technique segment of that. But yeah, that led to my co founder going to co found swell commerce and raising their series B, you know, 25 million and scaling that company. So I’ve been in eCommerce and b2b specifically for my entire career with a focus in eCommerce and b2b over the last 10 years. Well,

Curt Anderson  05:55

I absolutely love it. Hey, we’ve got a couple of comments here. So hey, welcome everybody. Happy Friday to you and how welcome for to join us here. We’ve got to hate little shout out to Wegmans man I love Wegmans. I know my wife loves loves Wegmans. So, alright, Paul, let’s keep it rolling. So again, guys, we’re talking about big commerce. Okay. So, you know, lifetime career for you, Paul, b2b e commerce, like you just really geek out on that, that’s you’re totally singing our song. We’re just we always love speaking to manufacturers about their eCommerce strategies. So let’s take a dive in you are with big commerce and they are really a powerhouse. So guys, if you are considering eCommerce strongly encouraged you welcome you invite you go to big commerce, check out the website publicly traded company, they are a powerhouse for manufacturers getting into eCommerce. Paul, curious minds want to know, take a deep dive for folks that are not familiar with BigCommerce, how does big commerce make the world a better place?

Paul Dabrowski  06:55

Well, one, I mean, are amazing people here, amazing product, you know, we’re dedicated, you know, to innovating in the space, and keeping our merchants ahead, essentially, are what’s coming. And so that takes the form of agency and partnership in combination of this, you know, platform, this opens house kind of platform that allows the flexibility and scalability. And that leads to sustainability, you know, actually through this kind of like digital technology, like low carbon footprint, all that great stuff that comes with it. But essentially, we’ve just, you know, been able to, in my career to what I see is like, it’s about the people that we work with. And today and the trust that we earn, you know, along that way. And so what I’m amazed about is, you know, we’ve earned that trust of about 60,000 merchants today, and 9000 of those merchants are enterprise that tune, you know, up to about, I think $100 billion in revenue. Which is amazing to me, you know, that’s an enormous amount of trust. And it’s, you know, we’re motivated, actually, I think, you know, the quadrants that we sit in today are challengers. And that motivates us, you know, to do even better.

Curt Anderson  08:19

Well, I absolutely love it. And you’re relatively new to the company, what specifically, you know, again, like, you know, longtime career serial entrepreneur, what sparked and inspired you to join this wonderful big commerce team?

Paul Dabrowski  08:33

Yeah, I think I had the unique advantage to be plugged into a number of the eCommerce platforms from, you know, the startups, essentially, in a space and pre COVID, by the way, to the big players, you know, that the names you might more recognized like the commerce. And I got to look at it from the lens of b2b and say, Okay, who’s going to be relevant and around, you know, the next 10 years 20 3050 100, right. And that’s how I like to look at something sometimes that far out. But essentially, it came down to who had the ability and the desire to actually solve these b2b complexities that existed today for businesses. And I wanted to serve those merchants every single day, wake up, and go take on those challenges with the experience that I had had, so that they didn’t have to make those same mistakes, you know, or that they could achieve what they were trying to do in a shorter period of time, in a costly way. And so they commerce stood out, and you know, they were focused in b2b, they had a great product I had known John McCain now for essentially two years and Lance I got to know him and Fiona and some of the team members and their amazing team doing amazing things, you know, for companies. It was a fantastic product. So I I’m gravitated towards that, and wanted to be a part of that, you know, movement and the momentum they’re building. Yep. And so I got to part of it. But through that kind of event lens, I got to see what was going on, you know, other companies, and they were going after growth. And at the same time, ecommerce was more, you know, being cautious in that and going through profitability. And they were trying to do that and serve their customers that way, too, with a real customer success focus. And that’s why I’m, I’m here, essentially, you know, because of that team, and our focus in b2b

Curt Anderson  10:37

about the mission, man, I love it very inspiring. Hey, you know, we’re gonna dive into a little presentation here. And so I want to I want to pull up. Before we go there, Paul, we’ve got a question from Marcus, I want to I want to chime in real quick and hit that. And let’s see, can I get it pulled up here? I’d be interested know how AI and social media playing a part in your business I’d like to be, I’d be interested to know how AI and social media is playing a part in your business. And you want to take a stab at that one, Paul, and how, you know, whether it’s for BigCommerce or for your clients? Yeah,

Paul Dabrowski  11:07

I think AI is probably top of mind, for a lot of folks. The reality is, it’s been relevant. And in the background, for many years, it’s been a part of this decade of emerging tech that we’ve seen, it’s been actually there since mobile. It’s been there since pre cloud. And it’s simply ml AI in general, came about with, you know, that mobile and that cloud. So I would say that it’s trendy, you know, you know about it now, probably through chat bots and things like that. But I think it’s a transformative technology that’s actually more in grains than people understand today. And it’s in our ERP systems, it’s in our CRM, it’s technology that exists in search, and it is going to continue to get better. Yep. But actually, is playing a big role today, in terms of marketing and social media. Like the ML side of things, the models, you know, are quite interesting. And those big language models that exist today are built off of connecting with the generative side of things. So when you type in something for search, you know, on a website, and it returns the correct, you know, product to you, that’s actually being done today by AI and ML. And it’s only going to get better. And it’s a sense that they’re going to start maybe solving these problems more as assistants, you know, to humans, and then there’s a second side of this, that probably happens, and that’s where machine to machine, you know, we have maybe not essentially, we’re just serving humans, but you know, AI will be serving machines. And that gets really interesting, too. So I think that there’s a big role. And there’s large investments already happening. And that and in the form of like the commerce, we have some functionality that’s rolling out. Already, they’ve launched an app where you can go ahead and do product descriptions, you know, with AI and tune up your product descriptions. So there’s some like, front facing technology today. accessible to you. Yeah, I love the question. Well, love.

Curt Anderson  13:38

Thank you. And Marcus, thank you for the question again, guys. You know, welcome Happy Friday. We’ve got Paul I’m, we’re going Pauly D for short. Right? We’ve got Polly Deena house, from big commerce. We’ve got another comment here blessing Friday, bliss at Friday to you, my friend. So Paulie, let’s go here. I think you have a little presentation in the house for here. For our crowd here. Let’s go to the presentation. And let’s learn more about b2b eCommerce and what’s going on at BigCommerce, you have a really exciting case study that we’re going to dig into, do I have that correct? Yeah,

Paul Dabrowski  14:08

we’ve got a case study that I’ve prepared around Mkn. And their digital transformation. If you guys want, you can scan those codes there as well, if you want to connect with us on LinkedIn. So that’s there for you guys to do. But yeah, jumping into it, essentially, we’d like to go through and frame like some of the key trends because we get asked this a lot actually. And for those of you who are on the call, maybe you have to go justify budget, you know, and you’re trying to have those conversations around, you know, unlocking maybe digital investment place within the manufacturing space or wholesaler or distributor within the company that you’re in. And it’s good to just maybe have a high level view, you know, hey, you know, what is going on in b2b online sales, right? So we try to try to paint that picture here for you. So the first slide actually is kind of showing you that The digital shift and b2b that’s happening. And to be honest, it’s happening. When you talk about in terms of online, it’s happening b2b, but also b2c. And so for me, I think it’d be better if we just maybe shifted to commerce in general. But yeah, essentially, as an essential growth driver, b2b eCommerce is, you know, leading and the way the numbers look like to be online sales today account for 17% of all b2b sales. And they’re expected to outpace offline traditional sales channels over the next five to 10 years. So, you know, by 2030, I think is projected that we’ll see b2b online sales actually reach almost 40% of that pie. And that means that you know, the online b2b sales are projected to grow at 20% CAGR. And that’s what you see on the left chart there. And the offline b2b sales are trailing at 2.5% CAGR. So like, you know, b2c, essentially, online sales is advancing at 12.62% CAGR. And the offline for b2b or b2c sales is at 1.5. So offline sales are real, stagnant, slow, over the next, you know, 510 years. So if you’re looking to unlock budget, you know, you need to know that it’s a viable investment. And these projections show you that not only today is, you know, b2b kind of, you know, becoming mainstream. But over the next couple of years, it’s rapidly changing, you know, where that growth rate is outpacing offline sales. And then the second side, that’s really exciting, and you probably hear about a lot is the shift in buyer preferences. You this, this trends, you know, was already happening, essentially, before the pandemic, but you know, the pandemic accelerated the shift towards digital. And so the way that this looks like, is that more b2b buyers are utilizing online platforms for every stage of the buying journey. That’s what we see. And so b2b buyers are identifying new suppliers more than they’re going online, more, how much more from what we can see, essentially, today, 87%, you know, identify new suppliers online that’s up from 78% pre pandemic, where those PW buyers are placing orders online 79% up from 70% pre pandemic, right, reordering 77% more in line up from 72 and evaluating new suppliers, you know, 74%, up from 60% prefer dynamic, I mean, yeah, the numbers speak for himself. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. No, that’s

Curt Anderson  17:51

powerful information right there. And I think the one the one thing that stands out to me identifying new suppliers that 87% The question is, what are the other 13% doing? Right? Like if you’re, if you’re not looking online, like, I’m curious what those folks are doing maybe at a trade show, or what have you, but very powerful numbers. And when you look at the growth you like, I never want to be the smartest guy in the room. But man, just follow the money. I mean, like, it’s just showing you right there. So I love that, you know, and I love how you’re separating and b2b and b2c, and like some of these acronyms, just, you know, for our friends and folks out there, maybe we’re like, Hey, what are some of these acronyms? So we’re just talking b2b, you know, business to business transactions compared to business to consumer. So, you know, a lot of the manufacturers that we’re working with, they might be a custom manufacturer, or they’re making Oh, you still there?

Paul Dabrowski  18:39

I’m still here.

Curt Anderson  18:40

Okay, man, I, my, my, my I just lost you guys. Okay. Um, you know, so just staying online. But anyway, keep let’s keep the party rolling again, guys, if you have any questions whatsoever, we have Paul here from big commerce, keep those questions coming for us.

Paul Dabrowski  18:56

Yeah, and so, you know, I kind of paint this picture of now, you know, what’s going on b2b online sales, and then the buyer, you know, preferences, how that’s shifting. It’s like, looks like all this great opportunity, right, drowning an opportunity. But, you know, as businesses adapt, they need to also validate and communicate the ROI of the E commerce investment. And that’s paramount. Like, there’s the cost opportunity perspective here. Right. And this seems to be a challenge internally, we see to overcome, you know, and unlock the budget for digital investments. And to be honest, like, It’s true, though, because not all growth is the same. And the pandemic taught a lot of companies especially manufacturing, that, you know, growth wasn’t everything right. I mean, that put us in perspective so there’s unhealthy growth, you know, as your as your gaining more sales and new scaling, maybe your margins are shrinking, because the cost to ship the product, you know, is impacting the business. So, yeah, you want to the goal would be, you know, profitable growth. And that’s where we really, you know, help our clients and merchants and tech partners, you know, is to help these companies through digital transformation in a profitable way. It’s not just like, you know, looking at the tech, but the digital maturity as organization. So, yeah, the challenges, though, that present themselves, from companies who come to the commerce and are looking to migrate, kind of like, culminate up into these three main challenges that we see businesses face before migration, and their operational inefficiencies, website performance issues, and poor customer experience. And legacy tech is the growth blocker. I mean, it’s an ROI killer. And these legacy systems are not just like, inefficient, they’re kind of detrimental in these cases, to overcome these barriers, and achieve strategic growth, businesses, you know, have to essentially combat that, you know, Legacy tech in the form that legacy tech, when I talk about it, maybe might be good to know that that looks like, you know, outdated technology that the businesses operating on, whether it’s, you know, seven to 10 year old, ERP CRMs, that are disconnected traditional SAS platforms, maybe pre cloud monolithic, you know, custom bolt on solutions, you’re like, Yeah, this thing doesn’t work. And then to add fuel to the fire, a lot of those systems are changing themselves. And now moving into, you know, a modern tech stack, you’re faced with like, Okay, well, what eCommerce platform should I go with to, you know, marry up to my new eCommerce, my new ERP system? So yeah, that this is super interesting, because essentially, this kind of leads to the strategic investment side of things. And so businesses want to combat operational efficiencies. And we see that that contributes to about 30%, operational losses, right. So on one side, we have, you know, these, we have cost savings for the business we talked about and revenue gains. And so you could think if you get rid of something that’s, you know, 30% operational loss across the org, it’s quite impactful. So when we do talk about legacy tech in sunsetting, one piece of legacy Tech, we see that, like, essentially, you can gain about like, 20% cost savings in the org by sunsetting. One piece, and typically, that ends up paying for the E commerce platform, you know, project in itself. But if you’re not there, you know, maybe we’re bringing on, you know, new ecommerce platform, it still cost savings. And that comes in the form of, you know, resolving website performance issues that are caused by the outdated systems, that comes in the biggest form, though, of elevating the customer experience, to gain a competitive edge. And that’s what we see that actually, companies that manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors who are doing digital plays, they focus on the customer experience. And that’s the number one driver for the investment, very customer centric. And it’s, it’s actually amazing to me that when they when the company has to deliver this customer experience, they build a moat around that customer experience. And now laggers in the space that didn’t do digital, or were sitting on it too long, or couldn’t achieve it, because they wanted to maybe they shot for the moon and they tripped on their shoe laces. Usually, they ended up not being able to gain growth or new customers, because they can’t achieve that customer experience that exists from that competitor. So it’s very impactful, actually. Enormous.

Curt Anderson  24:22

Well, I love and I love the analogy that you just laid with, like, you know, putting the moat around the customer experience. And, you know, you’re so the folks that are ignoring this, you know, doing nothing is your biggest enemy right now. Right? Doing nothing is your biggest enemy as far as like eCommerce goes. So I mean, you’re just making some phenomenal points here. You have, let’s keep it going. Paul, what do you got next on your

Paul Dabrowski  24:46

slides? Yes, I just ran this out by saying that, like a lot of folks didn’t ask us what are the trends of open SAS commerce right. And essentially, nobody knows. I mean, big commerce is an open SAS model. Were essentially simplify this. But, you know, 99% of our API’s are exposed for you to use to build, you know, your own solutions to. But that’s not essentially how all of our deployments are done. It’s not custom. In fact, there’s the b2b edition out of the box plays here, where you can just get up and running quickly, you know, through some deployments, but essentially that open SAS eCommerce, you know, it’s not like a trend, it’s becoming a standard. And the flexibility it offers and integrating like the various systems, the scalability to grow with the business needs, is what’s Paramount there. And we’re seeing like businesses leverage open SAS to create more personalized and efficient customer journeys, which is crucial in today’s like, highly competitive market. So, yeah, the ability to quickly adapt to market changes, especially like in these kind of, you know, economic climates that we’re in, challenging, we seek success. And there’s this ability to adapt to not only the market change, but to the customer preferences. And that seems to be the key advantage to the open SAS platforms at the moment. mkm is interesting. This is the case study that will go into who is actually probably now there’s only one or two companies in the world that’s ever now achieved the MOQ. Alliance. org and I implore you, if you haven’t been learned about what MOQ is that you do, you know, go discover that. But mkm is the case study that I’ll get to talk about, and essentially, they’re wholesaler here. So I like this because we, I see that there’s all this talk normally around the b2c experience, and that you hear like manufacturers do what I call D to D direct to business, you know, and then on the b2c side, you have direct to consumer. So the DTC play well, in business in business world that’s direct to business play. But what’s really funny, when we look at the trends, if I were to show you actually another trend here, so probably should do one day. But if I were to show you the share of online e commerce, by deployment, you know, you would see that the indirect channels like wholesalers distributors, right? They are 50% of deployments today, where’s like, manufacturers are 40%. And then there’s about 10%, that’s being done through these kind of like, customer buyer, you know, deployments. And that’s what’s really interesting that, although, like, it’s interesting to talk about b2b And the reality, though, is like the offline b2b world, for manufacturers is done through indirect channels, their wholesalers, you know, your indirect channels. And so it’s a hybrid model that we see companies be most successful at. And this is a great example here of a wholesaler, you know, working with manufacturers to be successful, and to what I like to say, expand the category rather than to have that channel conflict, that a lot of businesses, you know, have a mind when they’re just thinking, direct to business as maybe their only digital play. And it’s not, you know, the reality is, you can bring your indirect channels online, in fact, they probably already are, and you can have that synergy. So zero conflict, you know, but introducing you to NPM building supplies is exciting, actually, for me, because, essentially, the UK is fastest growing builders, merchants, they leverage big commerce, essentially, in this use case, and have won that best b2b Lock Alliance award to achieve, you know, winning out against 150 Other entrants in that they were founded. They’re essentially founded in 1995. And I’ll show you the founder in a second. But do they get 2500 employees, they have 123 branches that are doing $1 billion in revenue today. And essentially mkm, though, came to us at a time where they had under 100 branches, and they were 600 million in sales. And they were growing, though rapidly and today, they can’t say that they are now the largest, the fastest growing but the largest merchant, builders merchant in all of UK, so essentially, yeah, David Kilburn was there founder, you guys. And he was 50 years old when he founded the company. No kidding. Yeah, yeah. And I love this, I absolutely love this about him. And he actually founded a company on like one principle, like, our product is actually the service we give. So he was just so customer centric from the gecko. And this is what I love about mkm, they had this in store customer excellence, where you would walk into any one of their branches. And, you know, you would get the best customer experience ever. And if you’re having a tough time, like, who is their core customer base for second. They’re the tradesmen, they’re the guys that were like, you know, on the job doing builds for customers, you know, and they relied on having, you know, this, these products, you know, when they needed it. But the big problem was mkm was essentially grappling with 11 year old online storefront, it’s ended, it was end of life, they had this historical reliance on branches, you know, that had led like the core customers, essentially, to being directed away from using the website. So if you did walk in, you can imagine you walking into a store, and then being told like not to use the website. So their core customer base when they came to us, never used the website, and we’re being told not to write. And this was so problematic, actually, because they had done a survey, through NPS scoring found out they were very difficult to do business with online, right. And not only that, but over the next five years, 45% of their core customer base was retiring. A new buyer was was in front of them. Yeah. And if you ever hear Andy, so the Andy’s down in the corner there, I’m sorry, because there’s some animations that overtake it, but Lance’s head is in front of Andy’s head. But he just talked about this legacy tech system as like a shackle, they felt shackled, they never want to be in that position again. You know, and they couldn’t, like achieve this great customer experience they needed to online, so they had to do something about it, right. And it was so massive at scale with 100 branches, they were serving 197,000 customers, and they had 1.8 billion customer product price combinations, this system was so so the challenge areas, they had slow page load times navigation issues, SKU management troubles, you know, stemming from the outdated systems. So they had these technical, you know, deficiency issues, operational capacity, managing the extensive product range, you know, became significant challenge training resources, you know, this was very costly for them, actually. So the platform costs to and to manage it very high cost of ownership and ability to provide localized personalized shopping experiences, you know, to so it was just were limited customer experience, that at least technical inefficiencies led to the decline of their online market share, and customer satisfaction. Their their 45% Basic customers were going to change on him, they had to do something, you know, so they had this strategic just direction, essentially, you know, they these unique business model rapid growth, and they wanted to have that strong digital strategy. So what to do, and essentially, they did their transformation, you know, with the commerce, and they had no dev team. And so they needed to go to a partnership. And then, in our space, we have these tech partners, we have agency partners. And and if you have no dev team in your company, you can build amazing products with us through our system integrators. And so that’s what happened here with them, can they bow to dev team mkm joined forces with, in this case, Barry bison, one of our system integrators, and then the tech providers, you know, were chosen to rebuild the website with a headless architecture, focusing on five main components and the five main components are listed here in the architecture diagram. And big commerce essentially, we powered the commerce engine, so and then we also powered the PCI compliance. So the checkout and view storefront was used for the front end, like the headless front end, anything like the customer surfaced with, you know, any surface they were on. And so they they manage everything up to checkout and then essentially be commerce manage everything fast checkout and then bloomreach was used as well. And as for CMS, and personalized search and merge, you know, that was the content, you know, essentially being served up, that was powering search. And then we had phenomics, you know, in there actually taking all this, you know, 1.8 billion price product combinations and serving it to a feed to aggregate it to other marketplaces, you know, for discovery. And so,

Curt Anderson  35:32

a pod broke. I want to chime in real quick, a couple of things. I’d love for you to clarify, just for folks up there a couple of terms that they didn’t pick up on. Just can you explain PCI compliance real quick for everybody?

Paul Dabrowski  35:44

I mean, it’s a privacy and also a security mechanism in securities of payments, you know, so, yeah, if

Curt Anderson  35:55

anybody going out anybody out there getting the eCommerce, you absolutely need to be familiar with PCI compliance. And then I just, if you could just take a minute, just explain to folks headless, like, if that’s a new term, or foreign language of people out there, can you just explain headless real quick?

Paul Dabrowski  36:11

Yeah, it just means that you’re able to decouple your front end, you know, website, from your back end services. So if you were to look at the diagram here, it allows, you know, that the front ends over here, view storefront? I don’t know, I can’t point to it. I’m sorry, you guys should see it there. Yep. And yeah, all these essentially, by decoupling, you know, the front end, from the back end, you can achieve some really amazing, custom, personalized experiences, you’re the customer. But then you have this kind of streamlined backends for services that like your customer centers get to interact with. And that’s, that’s the power of it. And then in the middle, you have micro services, like where you have this middleware layer that’s working for you. And all that gets, you know, basically connected up to ERP or CRM to PIMS. And so the decoupling is actually its Mark, Mark, is a acronym. And I’m not going to go into but headless as a part of that acronym. One component. Yeah.

Curt Anderson  37:35

In anybody out there that’s interested in big commerce, you know, go to the big commerce website, or just connect with Paul. And we can take this conversation much deeper. If we got a comment from my co host. Damon’s in the house here. So Damon had a conflict today, he can be with us. So Damon, hello, everyone stopping by kind of strange looking at this way. So Damon, we miss your brother, we’re having a great conversation. He’s big E commerce dude, Paul. So we were going to bring Paul back so you can connect with Daymond. But Paul, I know, I want to be mindful and respectful of your time. What do you what do you want out? So we want to cover her for everybody. Now,

Paul Dabrowski  38:08

I think we were highly ambitious and covering this. So I think, you know, there’s huge impacts, honestly, from the solution. And MK I’m essentially, it’s just a standout, you know, use case, I would say that this is something that we love doing for our merchants, for our tech partners, or agencies. And if you’re a business that you know, is, in this process of trying to figure out your investments, or how to do digital and get, you know, go through that digital maturity journey, then, you know, come and talk with us. And if you’re wanting to learn more, essentially, around the larger impacts that we have, we have this total economic impact report that you can get access to, I didn’t get the chance to cover it here. But mkm was one of the six aggregate companies that was used to compile this data that showed the proven impacts of you know, big commerce essentially isness they’re one of the bigger ones, they took companies from our aggregate that were 50 million in revenue to a billion um, can being one of the billion and that has a focus in manufacturing, distribution and in wholesale, and so I would say that, definitely go check it out. And you can scan this link to actually go see it, but I’d love an opportunity to come back and maybe answer some of the questions that are raised here and to finish out, you know, any of this kind of conversation but if it’s interesting that people

Curt Anderson  39:52

absolutely so I guess so you want to connect with Paul on LinkedIn stopped by big commerce, you want to learn more, scan the barcode Hear, Paul, as we wind down any more parting thoughts, words of wisdom that you want to share with everybody as far as like how, you know, for anybody out there, who’s starting off their b2b eCommerce journey, any last words of wisdom that you want to share?

Paul Dabrowski  40:15

Yeah, I would say, you know, kind of take this approach of crawl, walk, run. And yet, really, the mantra is, you know, start small, show success and grow it profitably. But definitely, don’t wait too long, you guys, because the reality is that b2b commerce, you know, online is, yeah, it’s mainstream, you know, and there’s an accelerant here. And that’s where the growth is happening. That’s where your customers are. And honestly, the secret to all of this is that happy, loyal customers drive growth. You know?

Curt Anderson  41:06

Drop the mic there, right. Happy, loyal customers. I love it. So, alright, guys, we’ll wind down and we thank you for everybody joining us. And if you boy, if you’ve enjoyed this as much as I have about you give a little round of applause for Pauly D for just knocking the ball out of the park. Speaking of not going to but I have one last question for you, Paul. You ready? You sit down for this one? You’re ready. I’m ready. Are you Paul? You baseball fan by any chance? Yeah,

Paul Dabrowski  41:32

I am. Yes. Who’s your team? Oh, man. Okay, so Baltimore Orioles? Had a great season this year. Yeah. My wife is from Baltimore. So.

Curt Anderson  41:44

Alright, so I have a little question for you. You ready? Okay. Bye. Baltimore Orioles are playing a game. They’re playing the Yankees is matter of fact. And it’s a bottom of the ninth. Two outs. There’s a guy on second base. Okay. Baltimore Yankees by tonight guy on second base. Two outs. They need a single just like they’ve got to put this game away. Right. The manager turns down the bench and looks down and says Hey, Paulie. D to get up there in hitting the winning run. I want to get out of here. Right? You grab your back. You walk up to the plate to hit in that winning run. As you’re walking up to the play. What’s your walk up song?

Paul Dabrowski  42:26

What’s my walk? Upset song?

Curt Anderson  42:28

What’s your walk up song?

Paul Dabrowski  42:30

Oh, man, I have the tiger.

Curt Anderson  42:32

i The Tiger. Hey, that’s your quick. I like it. Either Tiger. Love it. So, Polly, thank you for playing my little walk up. trivia game. I love it. So, guys, thank you for joining us today. We appreciate you. We send you greetings for an amazing, incredible weekend. Keep going out there crushing it. Connect with Paul, stop by big commerce and boy for your eCommerce journey. There’s no better solution than big commerce. Paul, we appreciate you brother. Thank you for joining us. We’re going to have you back. I want Damon here and we’re going to do a deep dive in just take this to a whole new level. So guys, have a great weekend and we will see you next week.

Paul Dabrowski  43:09

Thank you