The Easiest Path to Digital Transformation

Joseph Maxwell  00:05

Well, it is a pleasure to be with all of you this morning, actually, to show it started, just turned 1030. So we have some awesome stuff to talk about today and I am joined by absolute wonderful friend of mine, Curt Anderson, super smart, very, very knowledgeable about b2b manufacturing and ecommerce kind of the marriage of all these together and we’re just going to chat about some of the things we’ve been talking about recently and I think it’s a pretty important conversation, a massive inhibitor to growth for manufacturers. And so with that being said, Curt, I’m going to turn it over to you he is such an outstanding MC like I pale in comparison as far as how to as far as MC capabilities as him. I’m going to turn it over to him and we’re just going to have an hour of fun time chatting this through, looking at b2b manufacturing and E commerce. Curt, take it away.

Curt Anderson  01:01

Well, Joseph Maxwell, thank you, my friend, what an honor what a privilege to be here on this glorious wonderful spring day and so man we have a ton to cover. So let’s just dive in. So, you know, again, founder of Swift otter in just for the record, how many years have you been in E commerce? I just want the folks to know that.

Joseph Maxwell  01:21

I’ve been doing it for about 15 years now. I started when I was what 15 I wrote a shopping cart platform for a family business. So yeah, it’s been a while. Well,

Curt Anderson  01:31

you’ve been in you know, and then, though it might seem like a short time that’s, you know, an E commerce dog years. That’s, you know, it might not be 100 years, but that’s right. That’s right. Yeah, a ton of changes. And they just don’t stop, unfortunately. And I think the big thing that we want to talk about today is kind of two things is how do we dispel that myth of the overwhelm the intimidation, I can’t do this. Manufacturers absolutely can do this. But most importantly, we want to help them. How do we hit the easy button? How do we help their customers? So you know, we want to make it easy for manufacturers, but most importantly, we got it to be dedicated to make it easy for manufacturers customer to do business with them. So let’s dive in. We got a fun program here. This kind of give everybody nuts and bolts of what we’re going to be talking about here.

Joseph Maxwell  02:18

Yeah, definitely. So we want to look at the inhibitions. As far as what prevents manufacturers and honestly anybody but especially with this focus on manufacturing, from getting into E commerce, like what are the things the reasons that keeps us from going to this place of both. Once we look at the conditions we’re going to destroy those in a in a fairly easy way? I think we’re going to then present a plan and then the details unless you think this is a big massive sales talk. The answer is no. I mean, yes, there is a plan that could involve us at the end, but we’re going to lay this out in a way that puts you at the driver’s seat. You understanding what needs to happen, and we’re going to boil this down to a simple as absolutely possible, just so you can dispel this myth that building an e commerce website when starting out is this really complicated, big massive project. We’re going to help show you that. It’s actually fairly simple.

Curt Anderson  03:18

That’s right. And so Joseph, I think we’ve come up with a new we coined a new term, if you will, right. So E commerce, you know, back in the day, it was electric commerce, right? It is no longer electric commerce. What does? What does e stand for Joseph, could you please enlighten the folks

Joseph Maxwell  03:35

it now stands for easy commerce. So no, we’re not doing the iPhone. You know, the I would those acronyms. E now stands for easy commerce. And the reality is, once you pare back all these, I’m going to use the word assumptions, things that we like to think of as what we end up picking up as far as critical, foundational elements of a project, you say, is that really necessary to kind of challenging the status quo here? We’re going to come back and we’re going to see, you know, it’s actually a little bit easier, in fact, a lot a bit easier than we would take it to be. So for example, right here on the screen, Curt pulled up thank you, Curt. We can think of getting into E commerce as too big of a project. There’s too much that we need to know. There’s too many unknowns. There’s getting everything set seems completely overwhelming seems daunting, and thus this to do list item gets pushed off from 2024 to 2025. And then on to 2026. All the wild knowing that are those that are buying from us continue just the way time works, continue to get younger and will have already adopted this type of technology and start even using this as a differentiator to determine between whether to purchase from you or your competitor. So too big of a project is a massive inhibitor, we think there is so much to do, how in the world are we going to get it done and it gets pushed off.

Curt Anderson  05:01

It does and I think the thing is a lot of times it’s common, like what’s easy, what’s convenient for us. We’re not always dedicated ourselves to think of what’s convenient for the customer. It’s hard to flip that script and put ourselves in the customers shoes. And so again, back to that easy commerce. If we can just dedicate ourselves are we making it easy? Can you know do they have to pick up the phone and call us they have to email us or they send us a purchase order when they can just jump online and not only now is it easier for them? It is easier for you. Let’s keep the party going. Let’s How about how about this one actually?

Joseph Maxwell  05:38

Boy, it’s this is kind of the same idea here. So getting this information together, whether it’s your product database, maybe whether it’s pricing, whether it’s trying to figure out compliance, whether it’s trying to determine all the shipping rates, everything like that. We we as often as organizations tend to look at new ones, which the new ones is that 20% of those business cases that make end up be 80% of the work to do. What we’re talking about here today is looking at that 20% of effort that yields e percent of the results. Wouldn’t you love to have 80% of the improvement that comes with E commerce or digital transformation as opposed to looking at the full piece of the puzzle and saying well we can’t do it because at this point percent nuance that is 80% of the work looking at that 80% That gets us that that takes 20% of the net effort is a massive win. And we can do that by zooming in the scope of what we’re going to be accomplishing. Instead of saying, this is going to be a this massive project. We’re going to say what can we start with and we’re going to you’re gonna hear that as a theme as we continue forward.

Curt Anderson  06:57

Yeah, and phenomenal point here, Joseph because the thing is, you think you know, as you know, manufacture think of your customer service or you’re in sales or owner whatever position you’re in, how many times you answer the same question over and over and over, especially with a new prospect of new lead. You know, what are your shipping times what supply chain look like? What is this quality IPC standards, ISO standard, you know, whatever those questions are, by putting all that on your website and taking these products, putting that information there now you’re doing it one time, you’ve made it easier for you and I know we need to get over that hurdle like well, I have to do it while you’re doing it over and over anyway, why not just do it once, right? That’s right. So I just I love what you’re saying here. How about Joseph let’s dive into this.

Joseph Maxwell  07:42

Yeah, this is this is a difficult one. It’s it’s the type of thing that for many manufacturers that business case isn’t as solid as you want it to be, in order to make a very significant investment. In fact, some cases they can be a safe investment, some such as seven or eight figures. However, that’s if you’re looking generally speaking at this whole solution to accommodate every single type of nuance out there. If we pull this back to that 20% effort solution. The numbers are well within an easy business case, as well as it can even become less through some of the ideas we’re going to discuss here in this conversation as we can go forward. So yes, getting buy in for a brand new venture for that or seven or eight figures for a manufacturer can be a difficult thing to do. However, as you’re able to, as you’re able to understand, does is this really necessary Is this really necessary is this piece really necessary. That pulls back that scope into a bite sized chunk, something that you can start with a good foundation and then build on later as you continue to see success.

Curt Anderson  08:51

Yeah, great point here. How do you reduce that overwhelm intimidation from a budget point and the thing is many small manufacturers when they want it took their toll for the first time unfortunately, they’re comparing themselves to maybe a vendor or supplier it could be a Dupont, you know, it’s a billion dollar company. And they’re looking at a website that you know, is probably, you know, headless and like you’re saying a seven, eight figure, so like, hey, I want to thank Well, let’s take a step back, you know, let’s crawl, let’s walk and then let’s start running. You know, how can we take that phased approach? I love what you’re saying focus on that. 20% Let’s get within our budget. Let’s get within our means because we need to get off the sidelines, get into the game is what is the most important thing so Okay, let’s keep this party rollin CD ROM I use when are you old enough to know what a CD ROM is? I

Joseph Maxwell  09:40

would say I am. I am and I still remember when DVDs came out, so maybe I was just somehow technically, I’m honestly integrated back then. I don’t know.

Curt Anderson  09:50

I’m in but I saw this. I was like, there’s no he’s not old. Enough for this. What are we talking about here?

Joseph Maxwell  09:55

Back they have a CD or CD still floating around here. I used to get when I was back young. I was kind of this nerdy teenager geek. And we used I subscribe to them Microsoft developer, Ms. De Metz, Microsoft developer exchange and they send out CDs every month, a stack of CDs. It was incredible. It was like birthday every month. So here’s the problem with a with a lot of times in E commerce, we often look at this first release is having to be 100% Perfect like I’m talking about eight or 20 or 80% of the functionality plus the final 20% Right 100% of functionality and has to be perfect this first go around, which means we have to do a whole bunch of extra due diligence we have to get all these different departments involved. We have to get sign off from budget we have to get sign up from executive and guess what the project never happens in 2024 it never happens in 2025 etc. Because it’s this process ends up being like a CD ROM has to be shipped perfect day one. And it’s never gonna be changed after that, in reality. It never is shipped perfect on day one. No matter how much everyone tries their hardest. There’s always going to be little tweaks that have to happen. But secondly, this is electronic going back to the old version of this letter. It’s electronic. It can be changed current use the example just a minute ago. Crawl Walk Run right so we can start out in the crawling face you know you look at your kid is your is what 910 months old when they ever they start crawling, and they’re going to grow a massive amount What, what 18 inches tall, up to five, six feet over the next 1314 15 years right so this is a ongoing process. It’s never complete even if you look at the giants in the industry Amazon DuPont they’re still changing their websites and those websites have been around for 20 years. So let’s view our website as a work in progress. Get something a foundation set and with that foundation, we get it set. Then we can continuously iterate on it as time goes on and we succeed as a success.

Curt Anderson  11:57

Well as a dad of three I love your analogy there you know, as well as anybody how that whole crawl, walk, run pass. Right? So that was a great analogy and I’m sure that sunk in with folks. Let’s go in here. I looked you know on the last slide just for a reminder, you know, we talked about getting that five. Okay, now to get the buy in we don’t need to be the wrecking ball. We don’t need to be the bulldozer. When you think of bulldozer, boulders it can be really positive. You know, we’re going to thread clearing the path, we’re going to build something spectacular. I love this analogy that take us here what’s going on with the boat? Exactly.

Joseph Maxwell  12:36

So my goal is this conversation is a bulldozer to these inhibitions we’ve talked about if we can start from the zeros, ground zero, and kind of peel back these layers that get added through conversations with corporate bureaucracy and that sort of thing. And if we can just build a business case, starting with a foundational element, you meet ecommerce, and I think that’s for most every manufacturer. That is a true statement. We need ecommerce we need to allow our products to be purchased in this way. So what is the bare bones the absolute minimum place that we can start and how can we iterate on that? That’s where this bulldozer comes in. If we can wipe away these inhibitions and say, in a in a in a theoretical world, what would it look like to get ecommerce started to get this traction going? And how can we do that? That’s where we’re going here. With this conversation.

Curt Anderson  13:29

Well, I absolutely love it. So we’ve covered the inhibitions. We’re just we’re gonna roll up our sleeves. We’re going to come into this just carelessly. And I think one thing that can’t be understated, overstated, overstated, is manufacturers. You know, with commerce, e commerce is no longer a nice to have. It is mission critical. You know, obviously, you and I are a little bit on the buyer side. So whether somebody does business, you know, whoever they’re doing business with, you really have to get an E commerce. So to get an E commerce you need to have a plan. Let’s dive into you know, you and I you know, we love customer talking about the customer portal, we can dive into that we talked about configurators having actual products that people can drop into a shopping cart. Let’s let’s dive into let’s talk about the plan. Where do you start with folks?

Joseph Maxwell  14:19

I start with the word or the acronym and the p.

Curt Anderson  14:24

Now, Joseph, I have to interrupt real quick now. Yeah, the city how the trials. J seriously, do we have to go to trial? I’m just teasing. What is the MVP in this case here compared to what you might be talking about? The

Joseph Maxwell  14:42

MVP that I’m talking about actually will end up playing off of this slide right here. Most will make you the most valuable player in your organization. Now, but that’s not necessarily the initial intent of what acronym MVP curve. If we go to the next slide. The idea behind MVP is minimum viable product. You’ve probably heard this phrase before. And what this often sets off alarm bells is people saying, well, but this means it’s a unusable product. No, that would be an unusable, non viable product. And that’s not what we’re going for here. But what ends up happening is there’s often a distinction between minimum viable product and unusable product and that distinction is what do your customers want and need. Again, this is where the layers that we can start assigning to these projects leading to this bloat comes from is when we have a we can say well, this is what we need in order to make it functional. But what about what the customer needs minimum viable product? I think she focused on the customer first, and then we can start adding in our layers of needs on top of this. That is that’s the primary point here.

Curt Anderson  15:54

Couldn’t love this enough? I remember probably 10 or 12 years ago, I met a client we’re talking we’re talking about numbers and dedicating ourselves to make it easy for the customer. And you know, again, it was a digital immigrant and you know, no, I don’t mean anything critical here. But I vividly remember they’re saying boy, if we did that, what would Joanne down the hall to, you know, we’re more worried about what’s going to happen internally on the pushback, as opposed to making it easy to do business with our customers. And so that’s what we really, you know, Amazon, I had some love they have a thing that’s called the empty chair and I don’t remember if you and I’ve talked about this before, what we have yet what it is, I did a little research project and Amazon sort of 1015 years ago, and they haven’t been called the empty chair and what it is when they’re sitting around, you know, they have a conference meeting, whatever it is, there that chair is in that chair is the customer it’s a fictitious you know, it’s a it’s an empty chair, but it’s the customer and they’re constantly asking a customer, what can we do to make your buying process easier? What can we do to make your day better? And so I just I love that, you know, we all could take that empty chair concept, but what’s going on here? Let’s dive into each touch

Joseph Maxwell  17:06

point. Exactly. So this is and this is what gets me really excited as we are able to exclusively focus on the customer first and our organizational needs second, we number one need to make sure customers can find products. You could probably insert a second a middle bullet point in here that they get the information that they need on those products. Ideally they their drawings, they get the specifications, we really would like it if possible might not be possible for on one. shipping information as far as what your the timelines look like. Again, it might be very manual for round one and then it can be automated in the future. They get the information they need but then they can make purchases. They’re able to push this process through the benefit though and this third point is both a recall and a requirement but it’s also a feature is that your sales value gets exponentially increased. Because now instead of the sales team being order takers, they are able to develop those customer relationships being pushing people towards e commerce. Be a salesperson actually for E commerce for your customers as opposed to salesperson for those orders. It’s teach a person to fish you’ll or excuse me, give a person a fish. You’ll feed him for a day, teach a person how to fish you’ll feed them for a lifetime. And that’s kind of the idea that we’re going for here is helping your customers find the information that they need on the website being able to push that process through as easily as

Curt Anderson  18:38

possible. Yeah, one of our tag lines is how do you help that ideal customer and you know, maybe it’s under a new a new prospect. This is an ongoing 20 year relationship that you had and you know, let’s not lose that relationship. And what I’d like to see is how can we help that ideal buyer make a buying decision on a Friday night at midnight? Without having to wait for you to open up your doors on Monday morning? How can we just make who knows what somebody’s what timezone they’re in their timeline, they work from home, don’t work from home family, whatever. We don’t know. You know, like, let’s make it easy for them. Love, love love what you’re seeing here and let your salespeople let us sales reps are like, Hey, wait a minute, you know, you know, this is what we do know we’re gonna let’s empower you to be more of a salesperson, not an order taker not playing customer service rep not playing, you know, order information. I don’t need to know what the price of you know some a commodity is in a phone call. Let me just find it on my own. So I just I love that. Let’s, we’re gonna dive in here. Now for folks, I want to I want to I want to bring this, you know, from an SEO standpoint, you know, this can get a little high level or low technical here. So walk through, walk through folks what you’re describing here with shot.my website.com. What’s going on in this slide? Absolutely.

Joseph Maxwell  19:53

So we’re talking about minimum viable product, easy to get going. I’m guessing for most of you who are listening to what we’re saying here, you probably already have a website going I mean, this is the 21st century. I mean, we we all have websites, right? And so the idea of rebuilding your website, trying to capture all that information trying to establish a new website can be daunting. There’s it’s there’s implications to that and is that probably part of phase two. Yes, definitely. Like that’s something you would probably want as far as space just to have a unified experience. But we’re talking about foundation getting going here. So what would it look like if you were to have a subdomain, what’s called a subdomain this shop.my website comm where you can direct people to it’s easy to add links on your current website. It’s easy to add on this shot and on my website, I’m links back to your main website. So it’s, it’s very reciprocal, but this chopped up my website.com is a fairly Vanilla E commerce experience, meaning it doesn’t have any changes made to it, but people can go there, see the product information and purchase here as well. So they’re able to make this as a fully full fledged ecommerce experience sitting here on the side where people can go to find out this information and purchase through that, that opportunity that that path for a benefit here is here to separate it’s easy to get going. It’s easy to set up.

Curt Anderson  21:23

Robert absolutely love it. So you know hopefully I’m hoping this is layman’s terms. And if you have any questions whatsoever, reach out to Joseph he can take this you know in a much deeper dive intimate conversation show you an example with your website. So save you’re already on a platform, hypothetically work on a very common platform. And you’re like well, you know, gee, I want to get into a shopping cart and I’m not sure how this is working. This is a very simple Bible solution that Joseph describing again, we got Joseph will be more than happy to take this conversation deeper. Now. This is a perfect segue is we’re going to dive in you and I Elkin everybody loves to be objective. But we’re going to talk about the Congress for dear friends Norfolk my call after this is with the team at Big commerce. We’re huge proponents I feel they are deeply deeply dedicated to help an industrial b2b and manufacturers with E commerce solutions. What is for folks that are new to big, big commerce kind of walk us through big commerce in particular, what does it mean to be?

Joseph Maxwell  22:24

Absolutely so big commerce is a e commerce platform. Big commerce they all have the word commerce, except for Shopify, they’re the one unique player care but so the word is so big commerce isn’t is this platform basically has all the E commerce features built out almost everything you’d ever need in order to function as a e commerce business. Take orders through the website, show customers products, categorize them on category pages, design elements on like the homepage, put some information on their login as a customer. The administrators can also log in as a customer account to kind of see what they’re seeing. That’s the foundational ecommerce block. It’s a really good product, great value that they have with this a lot of good features out of the box. I’ll just quickly throw this out here. Shopify is often the head to head competitor for big commerce. Big commerce is usually less expensive, it’s easier it’s a better place to get started. With. And their b2b addition is still significantly better than Shopify. So if you’re thinking the elephant in the room, Shopify, I would suggest that you take a look at big commerce. It’s an outstanding platform. And really, they’ve invested heavily on the b2b side so it’s a great fit there. This is a b2b edition is an extra suite of capabilities and it really goes into things that you as a b2b manufacturing partner will likely want it again, our goal is to talk about things that you can literally put on your website for stand up this website that has 80% of what all your customers are going to want out of the box. So for example, in this b2b bundle has the ability to submit items for quote so they can literally assemble a shopping cart worth of products and send that to your sales team. Your sales team can be assigned to company accounts into this b2b bundle addition, and they can negotiate on pricing. Being able to if you have parts that are often or regularly reordered, having those lists of those products easily accessible for the customer, without any development partner, needing to be involved. Right they’re easily available for your customers. Being able to have this set up a specific product catalog for customers so let’s say you have this high volume customer that they order five products from you. They’ve negotiate you’ve negotiated incredible rates with them well not incredible to you like incredible for them rates and but it’s high volume you still make your money there. This thus, they don’t want to be want to share this catalog of products with their distributors or whatever. And they don’t want to necessarily show all the products across your entire catalog where you can deliver a very specific subset of products with those negotiated prices. Specifically for those customers. That’s a huge win. You can also put custom checkout fields in the in the checkout page. Another big win. What when do you want this deliver what day of the week? What time of the day do you want this delivered? The things like that that are from a b2b experience needing a little bit more much involved in placing these orders things that your salespeople would be asking these questions regularly. You can drop those questions right in the checkout as well. Yeah.

Curt Anderson  25:40

Lots of unpack right there. And so you know, if you’re following that closely, man, go back and you catch the replay. The Rewind button on that we just walked through with Joseph just described even create a an extremely powerful intimate solution for your customers dust easy commerce right here. And so you know, again, any questions reach out to us, we happy to walk you through this app and manufacture what I hope what was the takeaway here was allowing my customer to come on in high value, order their products, super easy, super simple. Let’s dive into a couple of examples here, Joe. So what’s going on here?

Joseph Maxwell  26:19

This is this is the page that I was talking about allowing you to give your customers insight as far as what they have ordered from you through the e commerce website. Super plain, plain English, like right there in front of them. This is what they have ordered. They can search it. Very easy to see. This is a quick overview, so I don’t know Kurt you want to bounce to the next slide. Purchased products. This is where your customer can go in and reorder products they can quickly place orders for products so you can enter a SKU number and you can see the products quickly. You’ve ordered in the past, easily placed reorders. For those. You can also add sub users and commerce you have two levels of buyers you have a senior buyer and a junior buyer. Junior buyers can actually place orders with themselves but they can create a list of products and have a senior buyer purchase that for them. So very powerful in keeping track of this, these permissions so that you do you can delegate the work to these junior buyers and then just have the senior buyer make a couple clicks and the order is placed. So the thing that one of the massive benefits with big commerce is I’m going to say you can probably have most people are not ecommerce experts. You can have your website up and going in 16 hours of your time. super basic like there’s going to be very minimal changes you’re gonna have a product catalog up there, but 16 hours have a fully featured ecommerce experience is it going to be perfectly tuned to your branding? Is it going to have all the bells and whistles that you’d ever liked to have? No, but the idea is that a minimum viable within a few hours of even your effort your time there’s this is a foundation this is minimum viable product. There is manifolds time some more features and functionality of looks that would be added to the website. But let’s get something off the ground get you running, then you can add to that.

Curt Anderson  28:22

Yeah, fantastic point here and again, just kind of recap here what we’re talking about we hear the word SAS right software as a service that’s exactly what this is. So as a manufacturer when you’re looking at competitors, you’re like man, look at my my competitors doing this or my vendors doing this suppliers doing that. What big commerce offers is a it’s off the shelf part of the package. So you know it’s not cut when you when if you’re talking to one designer out there, they start talking headless, or cut when you say the word custom, just that equates money, right. And so the nice thing is here, a lot of these things are coming right part of the package. That’s part of your monthly service that you provide. I have no skin in the game. I have no financial relationship with commerce. Just a huge fan of the solution or the powerful solution that they offer for manufacturers. So lots to unpack lots of cover. And again, you know, I want to be mindful of everybody’s time we’ll keep the party rolling. But if you want to take a deeper dive conversation, reach out to Joseph reach out to myself on LinkedIn. But Joseph so we just we really bold those those inhibitions we got through that we covered, you know, it’s much, much bigger, but in about 1015 minutes or so we dove into a plan. Let’s write we’re not going to do a super deep dive because we’ve covered a lot we don’t want to overwhelm anybody, but let’s scratch the surface on the details. Let’s get into some of the details here. What’s going on here.

Joseph Maxwell  29:43

There are four elements of this and like Curt said, I am more than happy to dive in to each one of these a little bit more detail. If you have questions about this. There are four items that really have to be determined to get this website functional. And even in this there are still even layers of nuance there that we can even feel back. Number one is pricing. You have to have a list of products and you have to have prices for those products. Now, remember, you don’t have to list every one of your products. Some of those products might be incredibly complex. You don’t have to list some of those there. Might even be wasted then simplify those complex products. It’s likely that people on the website won’t need all this layers of complexity. You can put a link in the description saying Call us if you want this this or this changed we can keep the products usually simple pricing as well. You could you can theoretically upload every product customers pricing up into the website, that’s going to take time. Instead, what you should do is consider having a retail price, have a discounted pricing for your wholesalers. And maybe as you’re in wanting to incentivize a couple of your bigger buyer groups maybe upload one start with one of their pricing tables and work past that. That is super, super simple. Maybe you don’t even motivate your your existing base to buy worry. You just start by focusing on other customers trying to get people who are coming to the website. There’s a couple of commerce, things to think about there. But keep it simple, get something launched, get traction and go from there products and pricing. Keep that simple.

Curt Anderson  31:21

And let me throw my SEO hat because for our contract manufacturers that they filled up out of the E commerce party. You know, and others just hit the super quick. Every contract manufacturer has a proprietary process. Your proprietary process of Joseph has been preaching that 2080 rule. You know there is an opportunity a proprietary process can incredible. It can be your ecommerce opportunity. When you put when you convert your process you know I CNC I manufacture circuit boards where you convert that into a product per se. Now you’ve got really like these were juicy, you get juicy SEO opportunities, and we could geek out much much better. I love diving into that with clients and with manufacturers. So again, there’s another takeaway here. Ecommerce brings powerful SEO opportunities for you and your company. Joseph, Let’s get the party rolling shipping. Obviously we’ve got it. We’re gonna make our product we’ve got it what are some shipping solutions for

Joseph Maxwell  32:25

big commerce enterprise includes a product called shipper HQ shipper HQ is probably going to take care of every every piece of your shipping calculations. So basically is showing your customer live shipping rates. This is what is legitimately going to cost to get this product, our doorstep to your doorstep. One thing to consider in this is our thinking about free shipping and Amazon all that stuff. Put a comment in there there are some places you can drops texts on Bigcommerce on places for the big commerce websites. They look for shipping is not is a misnomer there is no such thing as free shipping, we are charged what we pay to the shipping provider. That’s it and people understand that they understand that there is no such thing as free shipping. So free ship shipping is generally very simple. Keep it simple. Start out at a basic level you possibly can. Yeah,

Curt Anderson  33:20

and for even our friends out there that are shipping pallet loads containers, you know there you can there are incredibly sophisticated yet simple solutions. And a lot of times as a manufacturer, we feel like we’re alone. We’re the only one that has this problem. Guess what? Millions of manufacturers who don’t have the same problems, you know, millions of folks have the same challenges in there are a lot of solutions. So I would encourage you, you know, don’t make any assumptions that that your problem is more complicated than anybody else’s, or that there’s not a solution. Let’s at least ask something about someone with Joseph and lining yourself with an E commerce expert strategist is because they paved the path, right? What’s the famous famous proverb the best way to to you don’t have to do is talk to the people on the way back right. So let’s keep it going payment obviously we’d love shipping product. More importantly, we need to be paid for our product. Joseph, what else do

Joseph Maxwell  34:16

we have here? Yeah, so payments can is often a big hiccup that we see big, big road bump. And the reason for that is manufacturers might be using a outdated ERP using an outdated payment provider and then okay, well guess what this payment provider doesn’t exist on E commerce and it’s a real nightmare. However, and other options would literally start with PayPal. PayPal is incredibly sophisticated. Like you’ll be probably eBay days where it was kind of a peg got a bad rap, PayPal, super simple to set up. Maybe open a new bank account, drop the PayPal funds in there implement technical term and counting. Use journal entries to pull that over. Is that going to be as simple and on the ledger every single transaction? No, but do we really need it to be that case? No. And keep it simple. Those integrations are not always necessary. There’s even way further that we could discuss this. I don’t want to bore you with the details but keep payments simple as well. Well, I

Curt Anderson  35:19

love it. I’m glad you mentioned PayPal I personally use PayPal to breezy my client I find that use Pay Pal super easy through exactly what you described. And I just finished reading Peter Till’s book, the founder of PayPal, zero to one phenomenal, incredible book for anybody out there. And so you know, great option there. Let’s take it home for folks that are going to be selling if they’re going to convert to direct to consumer for restocking sales tax that can be very incredibly overwhelming intimidating and when those inhibitions of like hey, I’m not going to do this. Let’s dispel that myth.

Joseph Maxwell  35:53

Taxes as complicated and seemingly unnecessary, although they are unnecessary as they are. There is a very easy solution out there and that is with a third party software product either for tax jars when we recommend TechStars a lot cheaper, have Alerus. Install one of those apps. It takes care of all your tax needs all calculation for anywhere in the United States. Done. There’s nothing more to do there. Perfect. Okay,

Curt Anderson  36:21

so we’re dispelling all sorts of fun myths. Let’s take it home. How about ERP for folks that are out there that are worried about how would that integration?

Joseph Maxwell  36:31

Exactly and now these are things that will sync project again. These are these entities or ambitions but from a more practical or technical level. My proposal is if you don’t already have E commerce, to be really honest, you’re not going to get 100 orders on your first day of launching your e commerce website. This is going to be a process this is a foundation we’re building on this foundation. So the European integration is easy to be argued we don’t need that from day one. Six months down the road when you’re getting a steady stream of orders and it’s actually becoming a burden on accounting or customer service to be entering these orders into your ERP 100%. Now we have a business case but until then, just focus on getting this website up getting that traction there and focus on one bottleneck at a time your ERP integration will be a bottleneck eventually as you obtain success here, but start simple. Then website design we can start we can get into this thing where and this is where if the e commerce website isn’t a replacement for our current website, which down the road is a really good and important thing to do. We can we can kind of get the cart in front of the horse and say well, we just need to do that phase one. Well, the cost goes up and now we have more difficulty getting buy in on the project. Start simple shopped up my website.com Keep it segregated. And eventually in phase two, pull all this together as your official website for place.

Curt Anderson  37:58

I could love that DLP I bet that was a drop the mic right there. So again, you know hit that replay rewind button. You know if you’re listening to if you’re thinking like can’t do this because of ERP, Joseph just gave a wonderful powerful solution. And you know what, you get that 100 orders the first day God bless you and then we’ll we’ll figure it out from there. Right. Joseph, DIY or partner with an agency. What are your thoughts here?

Joseph Maxwell  38:27

That is the million dollar question. Not quite that much. But in reality, what I presented here today is a DIY solution. You can do it yourself now. There is a case to be made that maybe you don’t have the time to do it. Maybe you just don’t feel like once I have the expertise to do what I’m I’m showing here today that the expertise required to get the most basic, just something there is incredibly minimal. The value that an agency brings is a lot of experience. So especially as the project gets more complicated, that’s where an agency is really going to shine. They’re going to walk you through a process. We we bring our expertise to the table, we help the SEO employee so comes along in these types of conversations. He has a lot of SEO experience. Building a website, especially as a website replacement, not something that’s sitting along the site but a website. That’s where an agency is really going to take time to make you do your best to be able to bring the best features the best experience that table for customers, but if we’re talking about something on the side, shopped at my website.com You want to get something just spun up, get this foundation, absolutely critical. It’s important. We got to get some traction going doped up my website.com this separate experience. It’s absolutely right through DIY and I think two days two business days of working. You should be able to get something like that setup.

Curt Anderson  39:54

Absolutely love it. And so in what we do is we work with a number of MEPs manufacturing ascension partnerships, if you’re not familiar with that, and Google MEP, and we offer a duel with where you know how can we kind of get this through that process. And again reduce the overwhelm. Get off the sidelines, get into the game so there’s so many you know, it’s not like it was 20 years ago when you first started as you said, or you know, I started in 1995 With this I wish I had a Joseph Maxwell in my corner to help me design this pyramid out. You know day by day you know, really building the parachute on the way down. So, you know, there’s no reason you know, whatever direction a manufacturer wants to go. There are all sorts of experts out there a lot of seasoned veterans that have gone through this. And again, reach out to Joseph on here on LinkedIn. I’d love to address any, you know, help anybody out there, Joseph How about how what’s the best way for folks to find you obviously, we’re here live on LinkedIn. What’s the best way to pitch right on?

Joseph Maxwell  40:54

LinkedIn is outstanding for me Josep @Swiftotter.com is my email address. I’m here I’m available. I love helping merchants out just had three questions, no strings attached. As you see we’re putting together this information to equip manufacturers to see them succeed in manufacturing in the United States. I’m all about that. One. You also seem

Curt Anderson  41:16

to love it. And I’m trying to let’s see, we have one more slide. I’m trying to get to it. For some reason it’s not going to pull up. It’s not going so that’s okay. Okay, so we can we can ended here. We can end it here. So Joseph, friends at swift honors is just such an honor privilege of connecting and working with your team. high integrity we’ve been together in person we’ve met we’ve had chicken wings and hockey games together. So just my respect to what you’re doing. helping entrepreneurs kind of get through this overwhelming, intimidating thing. And you know, when you think about it, you know, it’s the city for the first time just as cashier. It’s almost like a little bit of a startup. You know, you can be a manufacturer that’s been around for 3040 50 years. That’s right. It’s a little website thing can really like it’s almost like you’re starting your own little tech startup. And so just really encourage folks, you know, align yourself, do your knowledge in line with experts out there and there’s no reason to go on your own through that.

Joseph Maxwell  42:16

That’s awesome. I appreciate it. Curt, thanks for coming on helping out here with this conversation. Curt@b2b tail.com outstanding have been very much in the industry very connected. He mentioned this manufacturing extension partners. He is incredibly connected into that network and can help get you in touch with your local MEP, MEP czar outstanding references people that have in this industry they support you they want to see you succeed as well. But Kurt, very knowledgeable SEO content and all that stuff. So with that, we’ll take it away. Take care