Latest / Talk Commerce / Why B2B E-commerce Needs Friction with Aaron Sheehan from Oro Commerce

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Why B2B E-commerce Needs Friction with Aaron Sheehan from Oro Commerce · Talk Commerce

• Brent Peterson (00:02.156) Welcome to this special gold episode of Talk Commerce. Today I have Aaron Sheehan. is with Auro Commerce. Aaron is the marketing director and head of strategic alliances, I think, Aaron. Aaron, go ahead. I think I got some of that right, but do an intro. Tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions. Aaron Sheehan (00:17.471) You're 100 % right. 100 % right. Aaron Sheehan (00:24.021) Good job. No, you got it exactly right. So I am the head of product marketing at OroCommerce. That is a term that encompasses a lot of different things that we won't go into. I'm also head of our, basically our partners, our technology and SI partners worldwide at Oro, which is kind of a recent pickup for me. So I have at least two hats and maybe more depending on how big or small you want the hats to be. And when you're bald, Brent, as you know, a hat is important. Brent Peterson (00:50.199) Yeah, yeah, it's very important. And I now live in Hawaii, so it's even more important. If you get out in the middle of the day, you suddenly realize that that sun is very intense near the equator. Aaron Sheehan (00:58.623) Congratulations. Aaron Sheehan (01:05.863) It really is. Congratulations on moving from a much colder place in Minnesota to a much warmer place in Hawaii. That's what we call an upgrade. Brent Peterson (01:13.453) Yeah, that is an upgrade. Yes. Yeah. And we'll be in Minnesota for part of the summer. So we get to enjoy some of the one, you know, that month out of the year that summer happens. Um, anyways, before we get into content and talking about oral and maybe a little bit of Adobe and whatever else we talked about today, I have to tell you joke. And then all you have to do is give me a rating eight through 13. So I think I have a fun one today and I should have picked a bold joke because we're two bold guys, but I I'm going to Aaron Sheehan (01:36.885) Okay. Brent Peterson (01:43.245) Nevertheless, I'll just tell you a joke. Here we go. A man goes to a funeral and asks the widow, mind if I say a word? She says, please do. The man clears his throat and says, bargain. The widow replies, thanks, that means a great deal. Aaron Sheehan (02:02.123) Mmm, I'll give that a good 11. Brent Peterson (02:05.165) Alright, thanks. You know, part of it is the anticipation of it being funny and then you're just like, what? You got to think about it for a second and then it's just like, Alright. Aaron Sheehan (02:07.317) Certainly. Aaron Sheehan (02:16.667) Wow. No, that's what dad jokes are all about. And as a dad, I do this all the time to my daughter. Brent Peterson (02:24.765) Good. right. Good. Let's start out with oral commerce. Tell us a little bit about Tell us a little bit about the background of oral commerce how it came to be and then What it you know kind of initiative niche it field that fits right now Aaron Sheehan (02:41.557) Sure, absolutely happy to do so. So, well, I think a lot of your audience, if I'm not mistaken, are like me and like you, and they are Magento old heads who were doing Magento back in the Magento one days, let's say, which is a wide, wide berth of time. But the original founders of Magento, right? Joav Roy, and then the technical architect, Dima Soroka, Jari Carter, who was brought on as chief revenue officer. Right. Those folks after the eBay acquisition, because I think people sometimes forget that Magento has been bought a few times. So originally it was PayPal slash eBay back in the day when the original founders exited, they wanted to keep working together. they formed Ouro. Ouro originally was another open source e-commerce platform. Actually, even before it was an e-commerce platform, it was a CRM. So the thought was, hey, we all liked working together and forming Ouro. Let's... Brent Peterson (03:17.579) Yeah. Brent Peterson (03:35.22) Yes. Aaron Sheehan (03:41.195) keep working together, not with eBay email addresses, but with our own email addresses. And they also wanted to serve the B2B community specifically, because at the time, Magento, of course, was built to serve a B2C, like XCart, like Zincart, right? If we're going back in time. And pretty quickly, know I found, you found, lot of people in the Magento, a lot of developers in the Magento space found that B2B businesses were wanting to get on Magento as well. And there was always a lift. There was always a lot of like weird stuff that was specific to selling B2B, where how customer data is tracked and how buyer interactions work and there's approvals and there's workflows, right? There's all kinds of data that gets appended to the long sales process, what is often the case in the B2B sale that just doesn't exist in a normal sort of direct consumer model. So they founded Oro Commerce to start that. So originally the first part of the product was a CRM. They were still under non-compete with eBay at the time, so they couldn't go all the way to commerce because that'd be competitive with Magento and they'd signed an agreement. So they started with a CRM and then moved into the rest of the e-commerce and also then eventually marketplace spaces as well. So today there is one company, one product called Oro Commerce. Within it, it contains modules. We like talking about modules now because we're everybody's... We're modules, modules for CRM, modules for Marketplace. Really, it's modules all the way down in a lot of ways, just like Magento was. But it's one application that is provisioned as a single-tenant SaaS application or on-premise application that contains all of those pieces within it. And that was 13 years ago, so we are still going. I was not here at the beginning. I was not there for the origin story of Oreo. I've been here a year and a half. But fun fact, my first agency that I worked at, Brent Peterson (05:25.663) Well then. Aaron Sheehan (05:34.283) Classy Llama was one of the first Oro CRM partners. And on my first day of work at Classy Llama, they like, hey, new guy, we just signed this partnership agreement with this Oro CRM thing. We don't know what it is. Can you go figure it out? And that was my first day at a Magento agency in 2014, 2015, something like that. So you could say that even though I've only been here a year and a half, in my heart, I've been here a lot longer. Brent Peterson (05:49.535) Yeah. Brent Peterson (05:59.523) Yeah, yeah, and I we were we also did our Oro CRM in the very beginning and set up our own CRM on Oro CRM. And so that was one of my jobs as at Wajento was I did I did that as well. So we we certainly share a lot of shared memories. I would not I you know, and I guess I would I didn't put two and two together that it's been around so long. That's amazing. That's that's fantastic. Aaron Sheehan (06:19.807) That's true. Brent Peterson (06:29.642) So the move to, and again, the marketplace space and the B2B space are so specialized. And I think a lot of companies, and I'm gonna use the name Shopify that says they'll do everything. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about that niche down and how important it is. then, you know, the... Aaron Sheehan (06:44.319) You've got green walls behind you, so I'm assuming they've gotten to you, Brent. Brent Peterson (06:58.325) Companies that say they can do everything. Is it the best that they say they can and sometimes they can't? Aaron Sheehan (07:08.421) there's a lot, there's, there's, there's kind of a lot packed into that question. want to, I'll start with the, the, the niche remark that you made. there are a lot of e-commerce platforms out there that are niching into specific verticals or specific parts of the supply chain, like B2B or specific selling modes. And so, or, people serving manufacturers, people serving the firearms industry, people serving the automotive industry, people serving the fashion industry. Right. And so I think that there is. Brent Peterson (07:11.187) Yeah, I know. Aaron Sheehan (07:38.307) a lot of value in serving a specifically a B2B audience because there are unique challenges and I kind of alluded to those before. Sales just work different. What a customer is, is different in B2B. In B2B, people are buying for their job. They're buying because they have to buy from you, right? And so the, I'm going to run some meta ads and drive people to a landing page and they're going to buy one of the three SKUs that I sell and check out immediately and My goal as a platform provider is to remove as much friction as I possibly can from the buying process. That has been the mantra for Shopify and Magento and many others over the years, remove friction. Let's make it. I want the click from ad or SEO to check out to be a water slide greased with Crisco. Let's not give them anything else to look at. We want them to go right down that thing and I want their money. Brent Peterson (08:35.913) Yeah, that is gonna be the title of the episode, by the way. It's gonna be waterslide greased with Crisco. But keep going, I'm sorry. Aaron Sheehan (08:36.479) B2B's different. Aaron Sheehan (08:43.243) And we're not done. I can come up with lots of lots more witty sayings. so in B2B, it's a bit different there because friction is actually not only expected, but required to make sure that the products that are being purchased are being purchased at the right price, in the right quantities or case packs delivered to the right ship to addresses paid for with the right payment methods and approved by the right approvers. There's usually What I would say is B2C commerce is one person buying for one person, and B2B commerce is a team of people buying from a team of people. These are often complex chains, and yet buyer expectations on the B2B commerce side are increasingly informed by the kinds of experiences that we all have as individuals buying for ourselves. You know, I think I'm supposed to talk about Amazon here because that's the, that's, that's where this chestnut goes. Like inevitably when you're in the, when you're, you know, hearing the, the, the hashtag thought leaders talking about it. But I think that's fairly true actually is that buyers are getting younger and they are bringing expectations for let's say mobile accessibility. People are even B2B buying is starting to happen on phones and tablets, right? Five years ago. Not really the case. Everyone was on IE 6 on their Windows 95 desktop because their IT wouldn't let them upgrade. And that's changing. And so you're seeing more device portability. But at the same time, behind the scenes, there's still a lot of the workflows, approvals, quality control steps and checks along the way. Maybe the engineer needs to check out a CAD file for the part that they're going to buy from you and so that's a, is that e-commerce? I send an email asking, hey, I had this application, will this particular part fit this application? Okay, great, I need 300 of them, when can I get them? And then eventually if what happens is an email link gets sent to a buyer with a sort of like a full bill of materials on it and a price and then someone clicks buy and what happens is, Aaron Sheehan (11:08.043) A debit is made in a financial record on an ERP and simultaneously several pallets of products are put on a truck to ship. Have I done e-commerce? I don't know, Brent. Is that e-commerce? Brent Peterson (11:21.614) I mean, that's a great question. I think that we're all getting, everything's getting mushed into one big huge bucket nowadays, right? Where they're trying to say that e-commerce is one thing, which I think you've already illustrated that it's many things and it can be in many different formats. And the more flexibility you have to customize it, the better you are as a platform. I think the more you can lean one way or the other, if you're leaning just towards that, mom and pop entrepreneur who wants to build a store and get it launched. in a day, there's a platform for that, right? There's a great platform for that. But if you have a complex structure and flow that has to happen, and even different payment methods and things like that, then there's a different platform for that. One of the things that I remember in both Ekenio and Oro, which I think they kind of share a little bit of the same underpinnings or, yeah, their beginnings are kind of intertwined and is the fact that you can do a lot of this without coding. There is some flows built in and there's some admin-based workflows that help you create rules and things like that. Talk about the importance of that and not always having to have a developer there to do something. Aaron Sheehan (12:27.019) Mm-hmm. Aaron Sheehan (12:42.353) Really critical. And I think this matters a lot, especially in manufacturing and distribution, where a lot of these companies are less likely to have robust IT teams, certainly not web developers. So the IT team in a mid-market distributor, let's say, most of their responsibility is keeping an ERP functioning. They're not really typically allocated to revenue generation. They're allocated to making sure that A Mapex, Bpex or an AS400 or an old SAP S4 instance doesn't fall over and start pumping out smoke. Therefore, it means that the business team needs to be able to make changes to these complex flows without employing a developer because there isn't a developer, there isn't somebody. Even though Oro is built... Obviously on a modern framework and modern stack, and it's pretty easy to find your symphony developers and PHP developers to go in and work on it. There may not be a lot of those folks like on staff. And certainly this has been the mantra of marketing teams, right? Like I don't want to, how many times have we heard this complaint, right? As practitioners ourselves from marketing teams or merchandising teams or e-commerce directors. If I want to do a promotion, I want to do a sale. want to put out a banner. I want to do something. the business can't run at the speed of an IT block. So like if I need to produce a report, for instance, for a compliance reason or for financial reasons, that can't go into the IT hopper. And we'll get to it three sprints from now because we're busy doing applying three patches and like doing other stuff. so Aura was built. a no-code workflow engine in the admin of Aura Commerce that allows a business user to do things like decide how Orders get routed how requests for approval get routed Do I want to bring a pop-up to a storefront user asking them a question take that value put it in an email and route it to a particular box you can do that and because of the CRM is built into it you also have all the tools built in for things like email inbox syncing Pipeline tracking case management. So there's a lot of like imagine having zendesk built into your to your ecommerce platform Right or has all of that and all of that is manageable Aaron Sheehan (15:07.645) in a no code, low code way in the back end without having to bring a developer in, which if I can do a quick digression has been one of the challenges of the composable technologies out there, the commerce tools and fabrics and elastic paths of the world. Because what ends up getting built, and I've heard this complaint many times, is that same e-commerce director, or if you go to look at a B2B sort of use case, that account director or account executive, they want to do something like there's so much plumbing that has to be run and wiring that has to be laid that you need a developer to do something new. The system works, but it's fragile and requires sort of constant development to get it into a point where a back office user who's not a developer can actually run their business. Can I see what's going on with my business and run my business? The answer should be yes, regardless of what the technology is at the end of it. that again has been, Magento worked that way. I think Oro does some things that Magento did not do in that respect, Brent Peterson (16:11.333) Yeah, I remember just like even line items on an order of magento. I think it's better now, but in the past it struggled with large orders that had a lot of line items in it. And I think, you know, there's probably workarounds through all these things, but you as a merchant, you as the manufacturer merchant of record, do you want to go through all that just for the ease of having some kind of a SaaS platform or do you want to? have something that will work on large orders and typically a B2B order could be thousands of lines, right? And I think the regular maybe Shopify, you limit it at 500, which seems like a lot in the retail space, but you're not in this B2B space. And again, I know there's workarounds, but then how many workarounds are you gonna do? Aaron Sheehan (16:47.189) Austin. Aaron Sheehan (16:56.713) Not in the B2B space, it's not. Brent Peterson (17:07.077) I want to just pivot a little bit and talk a little bit about AI because I was at Shop Talk and I was fascinated by this idea of agentic agents, agentic buying agents. And I've been talking to quite a few different B2B platforms. And one of the things that they talked about is, maybe there will be agents that go out to all the different platform or go out to the merchants and then Aaron Sheehan (17:11.092) Of course. Brent Peterson (17:35.244) you know, they'll be approved. You'll approve the agent because then you know it's coming from XYZ Corp. And then the agent's gonna just interact with your agent and come up with an order and then it'll be an approval. Do you see that happening anytime soon where you're just deploying these agents? And I guess, you know, in the B2B world it's a little different because, you know, typically you'd have to be an approved buyer to even get in, right? Aaron Sheehan (18:00.395) That's exactly right, which is a big component of it. So I think there's a trust component to that agent, that agentic model that comes into play for B2B. Certainly, think, you know, Mark Manilov is betting on agentic being the future of commerce, right? That was if you've paid attention to Dreamforce announcements and all the stuff coming from out of Salesforce, you know, or Oracle, right, know, Larry Ellison sort of coming down with the red lights and like announcing that the board are here and they're They're, selling you Oracle agents. Like, I think there's a lot of interest in this. think there's going to be some complications to rolling it out. And those complications are called humans. and, and I think, I think there's two, there's two things that are really going to slow this down. We just talked about trust a little bit. I think that's one of those things. AI still has a tendency to LLMs, I should say generative AI, LLMs have a tendency to hallucinate when confronted with a directive. and incomplete information, or when confronted with a bunch of source material and explicit directions, but pressed for time to generate a quick pat response, they don't actually read the instructions. They try to anticipate what they think you want from the prompt that you gave and tend to kind of ignore the source material a little bit, like a high schooler trying to crap out a paper at two in the morning before it's due. And like, they're licking the Cliff's notes and thinking that they now understand war and peace. And that's one thing if what I'm trying to do is I'm a high schooler trying to write a paper on time. But if I'm a business and I am procuring the products and services that I need to make my business work. And if I don't get the right ones and the right quantities for the right application, I go to business. run out. I don't, I don't complete the job. I'm late on the job. I get sued. I lose a customer to a competitor. The challenges in B2B for that are that I don't think that AI is in a place yet where I would fully trust it in full auto mode to make buying decisions for me. However, I do think that given specific sets of structured information, AI can make a person much more effective at getting through a buying process. An AI agent can comb through an entire product catalog. Brent Peterson (19:54.837) Yes. Aaron Sheehan (20:22.299) and if given very explicit instructions, can parse large data sets and return specific answers about that data set quickly, I can validate those though, and then create an order or request a quote. I think that's something that we have is a storefront agent to enable logged in buyers, right, to interact with the data that they, whatever their user is allowed to see, right, they can see those products, those prices, they can see that order history, they can place that order and set that quote. But in that instance, What generative AI is, is it's a UX layer. It's taking the process of what I would have done by mousing around, clicking here, opening something up, or reading it, copying something, pasting it from a spreadsheet, putting it here. That's all stuff a user would do, and AI is simply a UX layer enabling me to do that faster with text as the medium instead of clicks as the medium. That's where I see generative AI being rolled out immediately. The agentic thing... is a little further out. The other thing I will say that's a barrier to, I think, at commerce, and this is more of a B2C thing, Brent, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. We like shopping, people, humans. We like to shop. We engage in commerce. This is something that, you know, Philip and Brian over at Future Commerce have been talking about for many years is commerce is culture. It's their tagline. I think they're exactly right about that. And the evidence for that is literally all around us. I have an office in downtown, downtown Springfield. There are shops, restaurants, and bars all around me at all time. Are there more efficient ways to get those products to someone's house? Yes. But if efficiency is what we were looking for, e-commerce would be a much higher percentage of spend. But retail still is bigger than e-commerce, even though it is less efficient and has more friction. Why? Because the act of shopping for things is culturally important to people, and we are not going to give that to the robots. It's one of the last places where most of us have agency in our daily life as we decide what to buy. Even if our boss is micromanaging us and... Aaron Sheehan (22:30.739) Our spouse is micromanaging us and our kids are yelling at us and like, our car, like we can at least, we are the masters of our own wallets a little bit. And we're going to exercise that power because we want to. And we also like doing it socially with other people, like, like group buying, walk into a mall. Like there, if you can find one, there's, there's still around. you will find groups of people shopping together. It's a shared experience. And I think it's not that the robot can't do it, Brent. I we don't want the robot to do it because that takes away. a joyous experience for us as people. So I think we're a ways off from agentic coming in and taking everybody's jobs. Brent Peterson (23:03.071) Yeah. Brent Peterson (23:08.116) I mean, listen, you bring up a great point because I love to go to Costco just to walk the aisles and see what's new at Costco. I think that's a yeah, yeah, get free samples. And honestly, in Hawaii, they got a guy there making sushi. And so you get a, you know, the fresh sushi, get a sample anyways. But you're exactly right about that experience, experiential part. I think that experiential buying is being introduced now. Aaron Sheehan (23:15.029) Get the free samples. Brent Peterson (23:35.751) into B2B because B2B used to be you just call up your rep and order more stuff or you send your telex with your list of stuff you need, right? And now I think what we're seeing is this melting between like I think you started off by saying a lot of B2B is expecting retail experience, right? In the process online. And I think we're seeing more and more younger people like ourselves that are expecting that same experience in the B2B buying realm when they're looking to buy their thousand widgets. Aaron Sheehan (24:17.001) Yeah, I think that's true. And I think that where I think you see it is especially in sort of the product selection and product research phase. like even in B2B buying, a startling number of those orders start as Google searches or they start as Amazon searches or they start as... Now what ends up happening is those channels are not necessarily built to complete the transaction or there's additional information that needs to be... gathered or there's a financial component to it in terms of applying for trade credit or being approved supplier or approved buyer. Maybe I'm using PunchOut to do my buying. Ultimately, I may start the buying process on what you might call the public internet, but I have to, for employment reasons and legal reasons and risk mitigation reasons, complete that buying process in a less open system. That's super common. But what it means is that if you aren't present as a, let's say I'm as a supplier, If I'm not present on those open channels for people to start the buying process, I may never actually capture the purchase when it actually gets into the closed system. So you have to kind of be in both places. You have to do things like, I need to show my catalog, but I hide the prices until you're logged in and I can show you your catalog price. That's been a feature in mature e-commerce platforms for a really long time for exactly this reason. Brent Peterson (25:34.132) Yeah, I think that being present is that's such a great point because I remember, you know, some of them, we actually launched a B2B Magento site before it was released. And I remember the client saying that they're worried that their salespeople are not going to get credit or they're not going to be part of the buying it. It actually was flipped around and gave them more opportunities to engage with the client rather than less. And then, and I think that being present part is Yes, somebody can create an order at midnight, but the next day the salesperson can still come in and just like they picked up the facts off the desk from now they pick up the order that's come in or the questions like you said, the back and forth that happens in that approval or quoting process that would happen there. That the salespeople are involved in maybe even more involved than they were in the past. Would you agree with that? Aaron Sheehan (26:27.051) Oh, 100%. I mean, and that's the goal. I mean, this has been an ongoing conversation for many years inside the B2B community about e-commerce threatening the jobs of sales reps. And I think what it's done is it shifted it and made sales reps more valuable rather than less because at end of the day, if I'm driving my sample case around, visiting current clients, potential clients, and I'm writing everybody's order down and I spend all day in the field doing that, and then I drive back to the office late that night, And I go to the mainframe or I go to my big desktop client and I pull up the ERP and I start 10 keying. It's eight o'clock at night and it's time for me to like begin on my third scotch and start 10 keying the orders in out of my briefcase that I've collected all day. Then is that one, is that an effective use of my time? And two, that's a pretty error prone process because people don't always transcribe from one medium to another medium. Brent Peterson (27:16.669) Alright. Aaron Sheehan (27:24.501) flawlessly all of the time. Then there's an oopsie. Well, an oopsie in a B2B order can be tens of thousands of dollars in losses as a result of that. And so I think there's two things. think one is that most companies, I think, have cotton to the idea that their sales team needs to be compensated on e-commerce orders. I remember my earlier point, Brent, that whole scenario around like, I'm going to send an email and I'm going to get an emailed link to approve a quote and I'm going to transact. Brent Peterson (27:25.695) Mmm. Brent Peterson (27:32.499) Yeah. Aaron Sheehan (27:53.727) Like is that e-commerce? These are all questions that need to be worked out. But by and large, I think the received wisdom in the B2B world is yes, compensate your sales team no matter how the order comes in. Because that account, I go back to the CRM point, the total lifetime value of that account, the account, the amount of orders, the amount of AR that is on that account, that is the metric that matters. How it came into us matters, but it matters less to the sales team. The sales team will take that order however they can get it. Was it EDI? Was it PunchOut? Was it counter sales, field sales, e-commerce, portal, whatever, right? I just want the order. Now, I have different cost bases for processing all those orders, and I have different cost bases for invoicing on all those orders. And sometimes, in some companies, one piece of paper changes hands 10 times for me to actually get paid, and that's really inefficient. But on an order that's... That one piece of paper represents $50,000 in revenue. It's okay. can pay 10 people to touch that paper on its way. Now, would I prefer to have that fully automated and digitized? Yeah, but it's not necessary. I just want the order. And so I think you've got to comp your sales team. The other thing I'll say is one of the nice things about e-commerce as a channel in B2B is that it makes upsells and cross-sells much, much easier. Because I've had the conversation with lots of people over last 10 or so years where they will complain on the B2B side and say, We have a catalog of 500,000 SKUs. My customer just buys the same 10 every month. Right? Because they call the rep and they say, me the same as I had last time. Done. Okay. Where was that rep's ability to sort of like upsell and cross-sell? Just because it was a phone call doesn't mean it was a more sort of consultative selling process. One of the great things about the web is that it surfaces entire categories, entire subdivisions, potentially of products. Brent Peterson (29:28.799) Right. Brent Peterson (29:41.246) Mmm. Yeah. Aaron Sheehan (29:51.807) and you can start doing cool stuff with it. Like people who bought this also bought this, a feature that we've had in B2C e-commerce for a very long time, but that is like revolutionary in B2B because it's like that would require a person doing it like in an offline scale. And e-commerce can simply do it to everybody at scale based on their purchasing history and the purchasing history of like a cohort of buyers who look like them. What a crazy idea. And so what I have seen in B2B e-commerce is that typically revenue Brent Peterson (30:07.198) Yeah. Aaron Sheehan (30:21.097) may not move very much at all at first, but AOV starts going up because that same buyer instead of buying the same 10 things, give me the same as last month. Now they can see, you sell that? well, I was going to buy it from this supplier, but if I can get it from you, I can save myself time because if you go back to what B2B buying is, people are doing B2B buying because it's their job, because they have to do it. They're buying because it's their freaking job to do. Brent Peterson (30:36.114) Mm. Aaron Sheehan (30:47.185) If you can make it easier for them to buy more stuff from you in one transaction than having to split their job and visit three or four different suppliers, they're going to do it. So bring that full assortment to bear on your customer base and you will make more money out of them. Especially if your competitors are still mailing paper catalogs and calling people and driving up with a briefcase full of samples. Like you can out-compete them by bringing a bigger catalog right when it matters, when they are ready to buy to them at that moment. And as long as the salesperson gets copped, they're actually pretty happy about that because their commission just went up. Brent Peterson (31:23.624) Yeah, that's such a great point. And I really love that idea of the person, it could be a lady or a man, sitting there talking on the phone, thinking about the bush light that they're gonna have in an hour because they wanna get off work. And maybe I don't wanna get into an hour conversation with my client about all the different shower rings that we stock that you could get. bring back a reference to planes, trains, and automobiles that you could get instead of just being online and having that opportunity to cross-sell. And even in low, higher low inventory items, you have a chance to push things in, into the front of those people that are buying to say, by the way, have you seen this? And I think agentic, or not agentic, but I think that AI is gonna help to better understand what buyers may or may not want, right? So maybe we could kind of finish this. Aaron Sheehan (31:54.123) Yeah. Brent Peterson (32:19.623) conversation about B2B about the buyer's intent and how important buyer's intent is in B2B even maybe more than B2C because you know your buyer is so specific and would love to know what else they would want to buy like in that example you said did you know we sell this no I never knew you sold that Aaron Sheehan (32:40.533) How would I have known, right? You didn't tell me and I didn't think to ask because I didn't know to ask, right? That buyer intent is a big piece. also want to say, I want to defend the of beleaguered sales rep here who he or she takes a lot of grief, it is a fact that, Gartner did a study on this a couple of years ago, that regret, post-purchase regret in B2B sales is higher for PurePlay e-commerce, a pure e-commerce transaction than it is for a hybrid rep-assisted e-commerce transaction. Meaning that at some point along the way, that buyer may actually want to pick up the phone and talk to someone. It may not be at the beginning of the buying journey. It may not be at the end of the buying journey, but probably somewhere in the middle, they're going to, hey, I'm about to spend $50,000 of my employer's money on this. Let me just make sure. Do you really have it in stock? I really going to get it shipped to this location in the quantity I need on this specific date? I want to call someone so that way if it doesn't happen and my boss yells at me, I can say, I talked to Bob and Bob told me it was fine. It's that trust piece. This is again why I think Agentic has some hoops to jump through. So if you bring digital tools together between a sales rep and a buyer, where the buyer can have that experience where whenever they have the intent, they can easily reach out through chat, through an email, through a box on a screen or a phone call and say, let me ask you this. Can you see my screen? This is what I have. I've got it pulled up right now. Can you see what I'm seeing? Client telling, we call it in the retail space. That client telling, co-sell experience is super valuable in B2B because the stakes are so high. What is that rep doing? That rep is an important part of establishing the trust necessary to complete the transaction. So there's a place for both. I don't think e-commerce ever completely disintermediates people, sellers, product experts, at manufacturers and distributors doing their job. But the buyer intent may be over here. But for them to get all the way to a transaction, they're going to have to speak to someone. And the harder you make that to do, Aaron Sheehan (35:04.757) the more likely they are just to bounce and not come back. so you need to have, B2B eCommerce really needs to be the control center for everything about your business in an accessible way to the buyer. One of one of the end here on this topic, but the way we talk about it at Oro is that Oro commerce is the front end to your ERP. It is the front end that, that It is the experience of dealing with your ERP in a way that customers actually can use and that your sales team can actually use. By the way, we don't charge per seat licenses like your ERP does, right? So there's a great benefit to that because the more information you can centralize, the more workflows and information you can bring upfront to those buyers when they need it, the happier they will be with their interactions and the more efficient your team will be at responding to their intent. Okay. Brent Peterson (35:57.317) Do you mean me as a NetSuite user can now just connect to NetSuite with Auro and have dozens of salespeople instead of having to buy a license for every single one of them? That sounds revolutionary. Aaron Sheehan (36:08.242) In fact, I I have so many customers on NetSuite, doing exactly this and they're doing things that they could never do before. Like sample requests, right? Requesting a sample, super common workflow, right? Like what if you brought that online, integrated it with NetSuite so that when someone went through that process, we sent them the right sample. We logged it. We logged it. What is Oro? It's a CRM. Hey, if somebody requests a sample, I bet that person is a lead. Whoa, what an idea. It's all tied together in one place. Brent Peterson (36:19.279) Yeah. Brent Peterson (36:36.923) That's amazing. let's very short time switch gears to Hufe, because I know we wanted to just kind of talk about that and how I do, you know, I read the book, How the Irish Saved Self Civilization. And I do remember, I probably, I'm sure I made a post about how Hufe saved Magento. But there's some parallels in there. And we were in the green room, we were talking about how that Aaron Sheehan (36:37.685) like Aaron Sheehan (36:44.286) OODA Aaron Sheehan (36:52.373) Good book, good book. Brent Peterson (37:06.884) how they've sort of single-handedly revived what's happening in the magento space. So I don't know if you have something, like what is your view on that? Aaron Sheehan (37:19.157) Sure. Yeah, first off, you're always in the green room, it appears. I don't think you ever leave the green room. And I know it's not fake because I just saw a Jack Russell walk behind you. So I know that's a real place, not virtual. No, I've been out of the Magento or the Adobe Commerce game for a few years here for a variety of reasons that I won't go into maybe necessarily here. But when I was getting out of it... Brent Peterson (37:24.058) Yeah. Brent Peterson (37:29.786) Yeah. Aaron Sheehan (37:47.839) Willem and Vinay were just getting started really with with Huba at the time. I remember being an early adopter for an agency that I was at and then starting to put customers on it. I watched with great admiration what they've done and having seen the way Adobe has frankly handled their community management and the engagement with the install base, I agree with you that I think Huba has actually saved Magento as a platform and really more importantly has saved it for hundreds of thousands of merchants around the world who are still relying and dependent on Magento to be healthy. And for that to work, there has to be an ecosystem of developers and extension providers and service providers servicing that install base. For that to happen, the product still has to be commercially viable for enough people for someone to continue building their business on it. And Hoover to me has become the axle around which all of that's the hub around which all of that spins. Because I think if you pull Hoover out, Frankly, the front end of Magento was, can I swear on this? I don't know. It was dog shit. It was dog shit for years. was, it was, was really bad. Luma was not good, not a good product when it shipped and it did not get better with neglect. PWA went nowhere, unfortunately. so, Hoover really was the way if you wanted a modern performant Magento site, because Adobe was doing absolutely nothing for you for a good five years. Brent Peterson (38:50.295) Yeah, yeah, go for it. Brent Peterson (39:04.633) Ha Aaron Sheehan (39:13.123) arguably longer. I don't know. I've been out of the space, so I'm not as plugged into things. this is, think I had seen something that you had posted today about Hoover. We were talking about it and I just wanted to give love and appreciation to that team that even though it has nothing to do with my day to day, I really do have a lot of genuine appreciation for what they've done to keep a big portion of that ecosystem viable, which matters to me and my heart. Brent Peterson (39:16.023) Right. Brent Peterson (39:37.869) Yeah, let's close out on this core feature thing, how everybody is building core features because clients expect core features, right? And as platforms mature, you hope that your core features are gonna be in there more and more. Like whatever's happening in today's world is gonna be more part of whatever feature you get out of that, right? Aaron Sheehan (39:49.877) Mm-hmm. Brent Peterson (40:08.792) So I'll just say Adobe Commerce SaaS, right, is going to be, it's a snapshot of Magento 2 in 2018. Is that a fair assessment, do you think? Aaron Sheehan (40:23.259) I think if I'm picking up what you're putting down, Brent, what you're saying is that Adobe commerce has not evolved as a product since Adobe bought Magento, which I read release notes, guys. I agree with that statement. It's one of the reasons I got out of the Adobe system because it felt very neglected as an SI. Look, they're running a strategy that is an enterprise strategy to cross-sell commerce. Brent Peterson (40:33.525) Absolutely. Aaron Sheehan (40:49.309) lowercase C commerce into a big install base of AEM and analytics and campaign customers and all the rest of it. That is their product. If they bought the company, they can do what they want to. And if they see that that is financially viable, that is a, I'm not crapping on them for having a strategy to make money in the way that they see fit, but it does leave a big vacuum right where they were because that was not the strategy eight years ago. And so I think what you're saying is that if I take a platform that has not been innovated on, Brent Peterson (40:58.645) Mm-hmm. Aaron Sheehan (41:18.427) and I build a wall around it so that I can no longer modify the code base and source code and access the file system myself, I have to go through a paid middleware to do any kind of customization to it. But I'm building a paid middleware around something that is already old. Have I delivered value to the ecosystem? I'm not going to answer that, but I think you can probably tell how I feel about it. Brent Peterson (41:43.0) Yeah, we'll let our listeners answer that question. I am mildly excited about the Adobe SaaS launch that's happening this month in June of 2025. And it does give them another tool to have absolutely no maintenance on the product. However, if you talk about complexity, you are going to have to have a front end that isn't completely tooled yet. So that is a question mark that's out there, right? Aaron Sheehan (42:17.269) There are a lot of question marks out there in the future. And I think the, regardless of how it goes, we both live to the Magento one to Magento two migration. We both know there are still people on Magento one out there in the wild. And I think the same is true about Magento two. Look at the end of the day, they can't forcibly, a lot of people will just downgrade to open source or move to on-prem and continue going about their merry way. And there are forks out there again, I think, right. Brent Peterson (42:19.136) Hahaha Aaron Sheehan (42:44.715) of the Magento source code. I think people will still be happily running on a perfectly valuable Magento code base, merchants of all sizes for a very long time. People will continue to run their Oro storefronts for a very long time. We're not moving to pure SaaS either, right? So you can't force people into an annual SaaS contract if you have open source at the heart of it. And I think... trying to do that is a long, long journey for Adobe to undertake. And I think people like Hoover, we'll bring it back there, are going to continue to make it viable for merchants to stay on the magenta that's actually good and not have to go to the magenta that's not. Brent Peterson (43:28.961) Yeah, you know, I know I will close it out with this, but I do talk a little bit about the fact that you own your data, you own your code when you're on Auro or on Magento. And with Shopify, you are really renting everything and theoretically, they're also using your data to make everybody else's data better. So if you're small, that's good, but if you're big, that's bad because... Aaron Sheehan (43:50.603) And they'll give you a payday loan too to buy inventory. like you really are renting from them in some cases. You're getting wooden nickels to use at the company store. Brent Peterson (43:53.675) Yeah. Absolutely. But you do bring up a great point. How many 15 year old Shopify stores are out there? Because, let's just say that they go out of business, I mean, I there's OS commerce and whatever It happened before then. If it goes out of business, you can still run your business, right? You're not, and maybe it's good that you get forced to do something new, but hey, look, you have a ton of technical debt and it works great. There's people on Magenta One where it works great. They don't know, absolutely no interest in moving. So, you know, think there's a lot of value in owning your data and owning your code. Aaron Sheehan (44:41.513) No, that's exactly right. Aaron Sheehan (44:47.627) 100%. Brent Peterson (44:49.599) All right, well, I'm gonna close it out there, Aaron. As I close out, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they like. Aaron, what would you like to plug today? Aaron Sheehan (44:59.123) Well, I think I feel obligated to plug Oral Commerce. think that anybody watching that's interested in B2B commerce, if you're an SI partner, of course, give me a DM on LinkedIn or shoot me an email. If we can throw my contact information into the show notes here, Brent, that would be helpful. But we are rapidly growing. There's a lot. You'll see a lot of announcements from us this year. We've already made some cool product announcements, stuff around AI, stuff around... payments, you'll see more around those topics, you'll see other cool announcements from Oro coming later this year. It really feels like we are growing very rapidly because everything we said about B2B e-commerce, we've been talking about it for years. I genuinely believe that there is finally a wave breaking in B2B e-commerce that we've been building and building and building for years. But the conversations that we are having now at Oro are very different from the conversations we were having two or three years ago with companies. in our ICP, we're not having to sort of like prove the value of e-commerce to companies as much anymore. It's a given. It's assumed that there's value in digital, there's value in CRM, CPQ and digitization. So I think as long as those things continue to be true, is going to continue to grow and being niched and being very focused at one particular industry lets us be really great at one thing and not trying to serve every possible model of selling out there in the world. Brent Peterson (46:23.7) Absolutely. Aaron Sheehan, the marketing director and strategic alliance director. I'll let you sort of, I got it right in the beginning, but you know. All right, yeah. Aaron Sheehan with Oral Commerce. Thank you so much for being here today. Aaron Sheehan (46:34.955) You got it right the first time. Just look at your notes. It'll be good. Aaron Sheehan (46:43.359) Thank you, Brandon. It's been a pleasure.