Latest / Talk Commerce / Maximizing Agility and Control in B2B Commerce with Shopware | Jason Nyhus
Transcript
- Brent Peterson (00:03.384) Welcome to this special episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Jason Nyhus from Shopware. Jason, go ahead, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions in life. Jason Nyhus (00:16.019) Okay. Well, I feel like all I do is talk commerce. So it's a pleasure to be on the pod again. I think this might be my third or fourth time. good episode for people to skip. but anyway, no. Thrilled, thrilled to be here as always. I'm Jason Nyhus general manager at Shopware, which is the fastest growing e com platform that solves the complex commerce use case, which is largely B2B, or some, you know, mid to upper size B2C complex use cases. Brent Peterson (00:47.074) That's perfect. and outside of being passionate about e commerce, what else do you got going? Jason Nyhus (00:53.592) Ha you know, nothing that interesting if I'm being honest. I don't run like you. We have the same barber. That's about it. Brent Peterson (01:01.242) Yeah, that's it. All right, just Jason, before we get into content, we're gonna talk about we've got a new B2B report that came out yesterday. Super excited to talk about that. And there's some news about a lot of people having to decide where to go on their shop because somebody just gonna shut off pretty soon. And I wanted to talk to you about the risk of being somewhere where somebody can just turn off the plug or pull the plug at any time. but first I I do have this thing called the Free Joke Project. I tell you a joke, you just give me a rating eight through thirteen. So here we go. A hippopotamus was giving his son a hard time for making the exact same mistakes he made when he was young. It seems like a hippocritical problem to me. Jason Nyhus (01:51.88) all right, I'll give it what the lowest score is eight. I'll give I'll give you a nine. I don't like being such a crit critic. Brent Peterson (01:54.307) Yeah. you know, that could have been a seven. Yeah, it was it was pretty bad. I I admit that was even bad on my scale. So all right, so let's let's start off with this B2B report. And I'm really excited because I you know, I co-authored it. so I'll be that's my shameless plug in advance, but you know, it really wasn't it it it isn't anything about any platform, it's about the state of B2B. But g so give us give us some of the thoughts on that. Jason Nyhus (02:00.067) Yeah. Jason Nyhus (02:25.356) Yeah. Well, first of all, you know, the fast the largest and fastest growing market is B2B e-commerce. and so what you're gonna have is a bunch of companies who are trying to still continue to grow platforms really try to put themselves in the position to be a B2B provider. And the reality of it is you probably shouldn't believe anything a software salesperson tells you, including from my team. you should really rely on on people you trust in the industry. and from our perspective, that really is the the agencies or the system integrators who live it day-to-day and have to fulfill the promises made through the sales cycle. And so when we first had the idea with you, Brent, on what this report should be, it's really you taking a look at the market and really analyzing the needs of the merchant, but doing it through the lens of those who deliver the project. And C's are some of the the the some of amazing agencies, dare I say some of our best that work with us who really cater and serve this market really well. Companies like Harris Digital and Altus Nova, impaqX Codal, AcroCommerce, American Eagle, and even Dopple who provides unbelievable next generation shopping experience, buying experiences as well. So those are the contributors. Brent Peterson (03:50.892) Yeah, I mean I think and it i I I like the way it's framed too. And, you know, but I didn't do I didn't come up with all the concept. I have a co-writer, Isaac, who's a fantastic writer, and it's written in a way that is readable. It's not well, it's not AI generated slop, right? It's it's written by an actual person, and and it's a storyteller person. But I like the I like that we framed it in a way that it talks about some of the segments. We have data readiness and A of course we have agentic, and then maybe the future of what the Biden experiences look like. w what was your take on some of those and did you have a favorite chapter? Jason Nyhus (04:29.506) Well, of course I mean, absolutely I did. And and it's the agentic AI agentic one. But the the reality of it is these are some of the biggest themes that we hear and things people are struggling with on the merchant side every single day. you know, a lot of people know they need to make changes and adopt digital and do things differently, but they're not ready. And so this is around the data readiness and a and stuff like that. a lot of them have investors from private equity. And the expectations have changed. the the you know, the hey, you're you're we're gonna invest in you, but we then expect a return, and the only way to get that is to grow revenue faster and/or cut expenses. and so you kind of go through each one of these chapters and hopefully you find something you resonate with as a merchant and you get the point of view from people who've solved this many, many times over and have kind of really worked with merchants to to gonna get to those results. So, in my mind, each depending on who you are. We hope there's a chapter of your research that sings you know, your story. Brent Peterson (05:30.38) Yeah, you know, I had a lot of experience with PE when I when I exited Wagento. And it was for me, it was an sort of eye-opening, and it's different than having a founder-led company where there's different expectations and even different spending habits, but also maybe a more how should I say, like the underpinning and all the operating systems. They want to have pretty standard, right? So may talk about the the portion in PE and the preter the pressure to modernize and and you know how how maybe how shopware fits into that. Jason Nyhus (06:13.708) Well, it's it's a very complicated topic and and different PEs have different views. one of the classic things we see is that They're looking for as much standardization wherever it's possible. And they're looking to continue to preserve areas of differentiation. Okay. And so what do I mean by that? It means that either they're going to force people to use all the same ERP or they're going to abstract a layer of logic, some sort of middleware that allows whatever ERP you want to work with to just plug into it. we've seen both strategies. But more moreover, we're seeing PEs have a stronger point of view around how technology and specifically AI will deliver next generations of efficiency. And efficiency is a fancy word for cost less, do more with less. And so there's many routes to the same goal, but it's almost always the same goal. How do we do more with less? Some sometimes, let me let me double-click. Sorry, Brent. sometimes that means like, Brent Peterson (07:18.52) Yeah, no go. Jason Nyhus (07:21.496) How they pay for the software, they have a strong point of view. Maybe they wanna be very capitalized in the way that they approach it as opposed to OpEx. We fit very nicely there. Sometimes you want a system that you have to you wanna put in your own data center and you wanna control how you deal with expenses. We fit very nicely there. sometimes you want a system that you buy once and you can use it on the unlimited numbers of channels. and again, shopware fits that as well. So there's a number of places that our product aligns beautifully with the mission of a private equity business. but ultimately our goal is to really serve the needs of the merchant who are ultimately serving the needs of their their ownership. Brent Peterson (08:06.11) there there's a whole chapter on on regulated commerce. and we did we talked a lot to Ryan Bloms about the the regulated business. And it was interesting as we're as we're releasing the report, there's some news from from governments that like imported Chinese vapes have been banned right across the country. And the reaction to some of other the other s larger platforms now is just a ban about everything. You can't sell everything. anything on that, which means if you have legal products, you can't sell them at all. Talk a little bit about the risk in in the regulated industry and and the risk of suddenly having your store turned off. Jason Nyhus (08:49.752) Well, the first thing I want to talk a little bit about is what is a regulated industry. there are laws that govern, you know, every jurisdiction. And those, it's black or white, you you you have to play by the laws. Regulations are a little more tricky. it's not that you don't have to follow them, you do, but they can change really quickly. hyperlocal jurisdiction by jurisdiction. So in the Los Angeles County, You can't ship certain products directly to a consumer. You have to ship them to a dealer, or they're not available to purchase with other products. There's all sorts of rules that these regulated, these companies serving the regulated industry have to play by that others don't. Regulated industries, the classic ones are alcohol, tobacco, firearms, but there are others that are also under that same category, like healthcare and fintech. That just simply have to play by different rules that others don't. and so the reason that regulated industries are so complicated from a technology perspective is you've got to have the business agility built into the product so that when a rule changes tomorrow or a regulation, the people who run the store and the shop can modify the product to take advantage of those rules and regulations to stay compliant. If If it requires a code release and it requires weeks or months of work and energy, a lot of times businesses aren't willing to take that business risk to be out of compliant for a period of time, which prevents them from being online. Okay, so if you're a business and you're in the regulated industry and you're trying to serve a market and you don't have business agility as part of your operating system, it prevents you from participating. So that's kind of point one. From a platform perspective, and let's be explicit. Shopify, who's an amazing company, we compete with them daily and we really appreciate who they are and what they do, has publicly said we're going to get out of the vape category. And I only speculate that it's because it's really difficult for them to know who the good guys and bad guys are and what's being imported from China versus what's not, and it's easier just to ban it. But moreover, when you double-click, the reality of it is. Jason Nyhus (11:13.026) Shopify makes three out of every $4 they make on their app store and specifically through payments. Okay? Three out of every four. Some ballpark. And what that means, if you're not able to accept payments on a regulated item because they have different rules, the monetization model for Shopify is out the window. So the profit motive is gone, the complexity is high, the regulation risk is high. It's sometimes easier just to walk away from that vertical. Okay, so that's in my mind kind of why they they've done that. Now, there are three places if you're a business and regulated that you have risk. The first is the payment provider. Payment providers, there are specialty payment engines that dedicate themselves to regulated industries. They've got processes, they've got higher risk profiles, they've got special underriders, and they accept payments. Okay. Those are not your standard classic payment providers. The second and if you Are in a high risk category, you will get shut down and you have business continuity risk. The second is your hosting providers. Think cloud providers, GCP, AWS, Azure, others. If those providers decide that they just simply don't want to be in the business, they can also shut you off. and the third is your commerce platform. Again, if you are in the business of monetizing either hosting or payments in a meaningful way as part of your go to market, you then become less attractive to serve the regulated industry. So that's where Shopware does a really nice job. We we do not need to be involved in the payment flow. We do not need to to to host, although we can. And we have an acceptable use policy which says if it's legal to sell, you can sell it with Shopware, but you are accepting the liability for doing so. And that has been a kind of very politically neutral approach and it's and it's lended ourselves all it's it's yielded some really great results. Brent Peterson (13:14.662) this is all about B2B and and B2B is complicated. And as you grow, you get more complicated. And I know that you know having multiple warehouses and having multiple points of of channels of sales and even retail and and and regular B2B talk about and I had a great so I had a great conversation with Brendan Cameron from AmericanEagle dot com and he Jason Nyhus (13:19.65) Yeah, yeah. Jason Nyhus (13:41.355) yeah. Brent Peterson (13:43.875) vi you know, is very explicit about how how well they're working with shopware and how they're employing a lot of these complicated things that their clients bring to them into the solutions. Talk a little bit about making your business fit the platform rather than your platform fitting the business. Jason Nyhus (14:08.214) Yeah, great question. So we love American Eagle. We think Brendan is one of the smartest guys in that we work with. He's he's tremendous. And one of the jobs of the agency is to really create that fork in the road moment that says, Hey, given the size and complexity and what you're trying to accomplish, would you be better off fitting in a box? Essentially, are you willing to modify your business practices to fit inside of a solution? And if that's the case, there's a lot of great platforms, Shopify, BigCommerce, Salesforce, et cetera. And it works the way it works. And if that's good enough for you, awesome. but there are other on the fork in the road, there's other people that say, nope, these business practices are highly differentiating. They may be unique and different from the way others do it, but our customers love it. It leads to more wins, and it's why we exist. And you need the platform itself. To conform and change and modify to fit your core business use case. If that's the case, that's the shopware merchant. Highly flexible, highly customizable, highly extendable, that's the merchant who would need what Shopware can provide. And Brendan is really highly equipped to help make that assessment and the trade-off conversation around which path a merchant should follow. Brent Peterson (15:32.08) I I've had a lot of conversations with with people, especially on LinkedIn, both productive and not productive about this this very topic. And there's pundits out there that insist on one way will work and and you know when you actually try to make it work, yes, you know, it's ac Platform X is going to be able to get there, but you're gonna have to do so many apps around that to make it work. Your your your risk of having one of those apps go away increases, especially how important they are. Co Shopware has apps, but it has extensions and you can actually wire in directly the code you want. So you could, you know, three different levels we'll talk about integrations. Talk a little bit about the risk of cobbling together something versus building something that's lasting. Jason Nyhus (16:27.212) Yeah, I think it's a it's a bit of a philosophical conversation, but this is this is why finding a trusted agency or integrator that you trust is so important. the reality of it is if you are a merchant and you buy software product XYZ with a highly qualified agency, they will get you to launch. I'm fairly certain of it. There's a profit motive aligned to do so. And it almost doesn't matter which platform you pick. But the harsh reality of it is it's six months or a year later where your data is flowing to many, many different systems, whether you like it or not. you have you've built custom things that you have to host and manage that run beside it. and you've got a bunch of of kind of tech debt that's been built into a brand new system that you only start to feel in six, nine months down the road. So the overarching guidance is really twofold. Number one, find a trusted advisor agency who works with multiple platforms so they can give you an honest assessment as to where you fit based on your needs. And the second is related to let me think for a second. I lost my train of thought. the first is around the agency. Yeah, what what was I gonna say the second one? I can't remember. I don't know. Brent Peterson (17:51.662) I'm marking the spot so we can edit this. we were we were talking about cobbling together apps. Jason Nyhus (17:54.594) Yeah, let me s yeah, please. Jason Nyhus (17:59.375) Cobbling together apps. Jason Nyhus (18:05.71) Let me just rift for a second. So I gotta I I gotta think about what my answer was. It was a good one too. Jason Nyhus (18:21.42) Yeah, I don't know. Lost it. Brent Peterson (18:23.628) That's all right. We can go on. We can move on. so yeah, we'll come back to it. you know, one of the interesting one of the interesting things that I learned talking to all these people, and I talk to people every day on e-commerce, and the trend for B2B seems to be the melting together of B2C and B2B, right? The way people buy. and and talking to Justin Scott. Jason Nyhus (18:26.05) Yeah. Well we can come I we can I can come back to it, but Brent Peterson (18:50.538) was really interesting to learn about what they're doing and how they're integrating that into shopware. And you know, talk shopware has some really unique things that people don't talk enough about. Live shopping, I I'm just gonna call call you out on it. Like talk a little bit about how that process plus what Justin is doing at Dopple is is really pumping the gas on what B2B is doing online. Jason Nyhus (19:18.466) Yeah. Well, the first point I would make is there's been a lot of companies out there, and I'll start with, I am a reformed B2C guy who used to believe in this concept called consumerization of B2B. And what it ultimately was was a bunch of legacy commerce platforms that saw the size of the market and the growth, and they simply invented the narrative that B2C is gonna look or B2B is gonna look like B2C. And it's a it's a story that tries to get them to have the market come to them, not evolve the product to go to B2B. Okay. I no longer believe that to be the case. I believe that the complexities of B2B in the most part exist for a reason. And it's generally speaking, it's around the charter you have to sell, it's around this the distribution rights in certain regions, it's around how you sell and differentiate, it's about how you price. But these practices are in place on purpose. And so the goal should not be to collapse them into a simple website that people can do business with and no longer need salespeople. Okay. So that I think is a fool's errand to try and go and execute. What I do believe is that B2B experiences don't have to suck. They don't have to be ugly and flat and bad to interact with. And this is why Dopple and Justin specifically. They deliver this utility that allows you to do parts explosions and zoom in and zoom out and buy certain certain parts or configure your own. It's this next generation experience that you would you would have if you were in person and you were showing them a mower or a law, you know, a an engine and you were pointing at the parts saying you need this one. that's really the point. It's not the consumerization of B2B, it's making B2B. Elegant and simple and engaging and interesting. So that I think is the future. But again, not the consumerization of B2B. Brent Peterson (21:22.114) Yeah, I like the I mean I I wanna I wanna hone in on what you said about the you wanna have that agent part of that experience and how important that is for the the relationship in B2B because it is about relationship, but it's also about making things go faster. maybe we close out today on on how how we're encouraging not just the the Relationships within the B2B transactions with your consumer, but also making it easier for consumers to buy when they don't need to talk to an agent or or their salesperson. Jason Nyhus (22:03.852) Yeah, what's interesting is all these B2B shows I go to and and it's a lot, almost everything in B2B commerce is is focused on that self-service and that automated and that website aspect of it. And you know, even the portals that you that you give to your partners that have all your special pricing and catalog and rules built in them. All that's really important. but I actually think the real conversation and the real unlock is in how do we Arm the sales reps with digital to help them create more pipeline, better happy customers, and ultimately make more money. Sales reps inside of these distributors and wholesalers is one of the largest expense lines in the business. And if you talk to those sales reps, what you'll find is that 65 to 70 percent of their time is spent not selling, it's spent following up on customer service questions. chasing down operational issues, spent traveling. It spent time not selling. And so as we think about how do you really unlock the opportunity for B2B, it's not by taking a bigger slice of the pizza. It's about making the pizza bigger. How do we enable digital for the sales reps so that they can make more money? And that's why we have things like sales agent, digital sales rooms, and a whole bunch of other utility, because that's the ultimate unlock. Brent Peterson (23:31.576) That's perfect. Jason, any any hot topics that are up for this n second half of the year? And we are in the second half of the year already, believe it or not. Any anything exciting happening in the shopware world coming up in this next couple of quarters? Jason Nyhus (23:47.695) Absolutely. Well, we just had our Shopware Partner Day and we announced Shopware Intelligence, Shopware Payments, which is 100% optional, but it allows people to go faster and save money with payments. We also have this product called Nexus, which dramatically reduces the cost of integrations and really gives more business agility. And then the last thing I'm really excited about is we have agency partners and merchants vibe coding on top of Shopware. And they're essentially creating plugins and apps that work with Shopware. So Shopware becomes the system of truth, the system you can count on, and you're using Claud Code or other things to custom build these integrations. And it's dramatically reducing the cost. I think it's a big game changer as it relates to how systems evolve. when software writes itself, the world is different. And so we're we're pretty excited about that. Brent Peterson (24:40.469) Yeah. I'll give a I'll I'll tell you my experience with that. I I was at Partner Days and and and I I had a long talk with Vance, with Shopware Vance, who's a fantastic system engineer, by the way. And he he was telling me about an Astro integration with Shopware and how easy it is to integrate. And Astro is a CMS front end. On the plane home from Texas, I was able to stand up a shopware store. put a custom front end on and and give it a brand before I landed. yeah, and it had a few little bugs and I sent it to Jason to have me have me go through it. But within two or three hours, I as a non-seasoned developer was able to make something that was somewhat cool looking, even, right? And I think that's some of the complaints that people would have on vibe coding is there's no thought to it. But if you have a human putting a lot of thought into it, you have a creative agency that's there to help steer you. And you have a technical team that's putting all this into a into a repository so you don't lose it the next time somebody does an update. All these tools together make you know make solutions like Shopware really, really interesting to go and and it makes the time to market very short. Jason Nyhus (26:04.92) Well, in real story, true story, we have a prospect, there's a needed integration, and the number one reason they would or wouldn't buy is they need to have proof of life that that integration that does not exist can work. And that is very common in B2B. Everything results around does can it integrate with the ERP? Can you update prices in real time? Does it show up? Okay. Using using Claud Code and you can use Codex or whatever you want as well. because Shopware has open APIs and great documentation, and we're API first. Literally, we Vance use Cloud Code to build the integration in two and a half hours. And we got the the login from the the customer and we showed a live working integration in less than a day. And that is unheard of. These projects usually are a month or two. so the the the rules of e-commerce are changing and and frankly making things cheaper, faster, and better in a lot of ways. Brent Peterson (27:01.134) That's perfect. Jason, my guest is the general manager for Shopware. Thank you so much for being here today. Jason Nyhus (27:07.298) Thank you, Brent. Great report. Appreciate your your honest take on the market. Brent Peterson (27:11.374) Yeah, and we should say the report is available at contentcucumber.com and we'll put all those in the show notes. Brent Peterson (27:21.42) All right.