Latest / Talk Commerce / Live from Ecom Forum: iPaaS Transforms E-commerce Data Integration for Growing Businesses with Dave Malda
Transcript
- Speaker 2 (00:01.464) All right, welcome to Talk Commerce. We are live at Ecom Forum today. I Dave Malda He is with iPaaS Dave, how are you doing? How's life today? Yeah, doing really well. Great to see you, Brent. And it's good to be here at ECOM Forum. You just came down from Canada South here in Minnesota. Tell us a little bit about, give us a 10,000 foot view of iPaaS. Yeah, iPaaS.com you know, there's a couple of things that... you know, really stand out, I guess, as far as other iPaaS platforms. And, you know, one of those is the architecture. So it's built sort of from the ground up fundamentally different than most connector or point-to-point iPaaS systems. This is more of a hub-and-spoke type of arrangement. So data comes into the hub, and then, of course, it's accessible to any of the other spokes or integrations that are available. So that way, the dialing up, dialing down, Speaker 1 (00:58.938) of things is actually quite easy. Let's back up one step for our listeners, explain what a iPaaS is. Yeah, very good question. I'll go so right back to the beginning. It's an integration platform as a service. And basically what that means is we are a middleware that sits in the cloud and moves data back and forth between systems. A very popular use case in the e-commerce space is say shopware or big commerce or Shopify orders into NetSuite or Dynamics 365. You're eliminating the manual entry of all of that data you're basically automating it and so very simple use case but that's one that's very popular and hopefully that helps describe what it is. Right, so kind of like the central plumbing to send the data where it needs to go, right? Like it's a central place where somebody as a CTO can make sure that they have a, can I call it a dashboard where you can push data where you need it and pull data from where you need it. There's things like web hooks where you're grabbing something and pushing it into another system and it's really an appliance to sit in the middle of everything to make sure everything talks. Speaker 1 (02:12.044) Yes, it's something where if you go to the end result, if you think about when you buy something online, I know for myself, the first thing I look for is that email, okay, the purchase has been made, congratulations. The second thing I look for is where's my tracking number, right? And all of those things with an iPaaS in play will give a really great user experience end to end. When those things are done manually, you may have days between you getting that email because maybe Tim is sick or Jen is sick and they haven't entered in that email or maybe they missed that order right because all of this is a manual process so you know fundamentally for a organization that has multiple systems and has high volume you know let's call that I have seen in my experience over the years that anywhere past 250 orders in a given month which is not a lot, but it's not insignificant. That's typically where these types of systems and like an ipass.com comes in and fits. That's where that pain is felt. Right, and I guess too, you bring a great point about remembering to do something, right? Automating it and making that process automatic relieves anybody from going on vacation and forgetting to do it or whatever has to happen. If it's there that's going to get done automatically, you don't have to remember it anymore and it can just happen. And like you said earlier, it makes sure that the things happen that are going to get pushed to where they wanted to get pushed to. It also increases efficiency within the organization. And it really allows, it removes the bottleneck for growth in a lot of cases. What we've seen with our customers is they may have a retail series of locations and what happens is you have people coming in, buying a Tilly hat, buying a Hawaiian shirt, and they walk out the door and you may never speak to them again. If you don't have this set up right, you don't have the ability to market to them, right? And so a use case that I have seen Speaker 1 (04:23.28) is something where let's say we take the NCR counterpoint data from a point of sale system and we move that into say Clavio. So you've come in, you've bought a shirt, you've left your maybe your cell number and or email and now we're taking that data, we're pushing it up into Clavio so they can start to segment and target different things throughout the year to those clients right and so having something like iPods.com in place just enables you to really take advantage of all those things. Yeah, final topic, I know that with everything going sort of like this idea of headless and composable and so many platforms now that are just SaaS based, this is imperative now. Like as an e-commerce owner, you need to be thinking about this because there isn't the ability on a lot of these platforms to customize your integration within the system itself. You need something out there in the SaaS world to make sure that happens so I would say anybody no matter how big they are start thinking about it now. And I think that... Speaker 1 (05:32.92) You know, if you wind back maybe five, 10 years, people were building in-house custom integrations, of wiring things together, maybe getting things out to spreadsheets, bringing them, importing them in. And while you can do that, you are really putting yourself at a disadvantage, right? You really should go look in the market, find out which platform works for you, make sure it's cost-effective, and make sure that as you grow, system that's going to give you that ability to plug things in and wind things down if you don't use them anymore. I'll let you name a competitor or not, but I know that there's really low cost entry points to the system or to automations and workflows. well, I'll let you speak to your ICP, right? just getting the experience in that connection arena is important, right? Yeah, yeah, I think for us, there's a lot of players in the space. A lot are very good at what they do. I do think, you know, for our sweet spot, let's call it, you know, it's someone that not necessarily has two, I'll call them endpoints, two systems they're looking to integrate. They're looking to have three, four, five, eight, right? We have found that's a real sort of sweet spot and driver for everyone's success right? When it's you know let's call it Shopify to NetSuite you know we can do that obviously but it's when it's Shopify to NetSuite to Pymcor to you know add in the system that's where we really shine so yeah a lot again lots of great players out there lots of people that do really well really well so you've got to do your homework and find out you know what is the what's the platform that's gonna work for me work for my business. Speaker 2 (07:26.338) Perfect, Dave. know we're going to have iPaaS is coming on our podcast virtually. that's right. Yeah, so we'll look forward to a longer conversation. But tell us how do they get a hold of you? So you can reach out to me. I'm always active on LinkedIn. So you can find me there. I'm very active on X as well. So you can certainly DM me. Email works as well. So dave.mulda at ipass.com is probably a traditional, very formal way to get a hold of me. But certainly any of those will work. Perfect, Dave Malda with iPaaS.com, thanks for being at the e-commerce forum. Thank you, Brent. Thank you so much for having me.